Army of Two Interview

In EA’s luxurious Chertsey HQ, I managed to get some time to chat with Chris Ferreira, the game’s senior designer. After his enthusiastic presentation of the game and a little hands-on time with a release based on the adventures of privately contracted soldiers (PMCs), we chatted over the game’s features, and its bonds with media as diverse as headline news and Lethal Weapon.

Pro-G: Hi Chris. First off I wanted to ask you how difficult it was to juggle lengthy development times with Army of Two’s focus on real world headlines. How did you keep the game topical when development time starting long before current news?

Chris Ferreira: I mean, the news is something that exists and is always moving forward, and it isn’t any thing that is going to be abolished any time soon, and especially in terms of the privatised military. The stuff these guys are involved in; well, it’s not going to be resolved anytime soon. Insofar as the places from the world in the game go, we have Somalia, we have Afghanistan, we have Beijing, so plenty of hotspots from around the world. Also I think, though the characters are hyper-realistic, we don’t totally stick to reality.

Pro-G: With all the hotspots, and things like suicide bombers, are you concerned how some people might react to the game?

CF: You know, it’s not like a game that is violent for violence sake. It’s all real-world stuff. You turn on the news and it’s what you’re seeing. So we’re just giving you that in an interactive form, so you can experience it from the character’s point of view. It’s not like we’re glorifying it; these guys aren’t heroes. They are just guys working for a contract, making money, and through that we can expose what we see as our problems with that, which some people may not want to hear.

Pro-G: And the incredibly violent life these contracted killers live really exists in the real world?

CF: We actually have a guy who comes in called Richard Woody Lister, and he was a PMC. He came in for us and told us ‘this is what it was like, this is what I did’. He showed us a bunch pictures with blurred out faces and explained some of the ops he went on and told us some crazy stories.

Pro-G: So it really is a game rooted in a great deal of realism?

CF: Oh yeah.

Pro-G: Moving onto the actual gameplay, there are a lot of really exciting cooperative mechanics. How have you addressed including all these mechanics without making things too complicated?

CF: It still proves to be a challenge today. I feel as if we’re creating a new genre, which is the co-op game, and we just happen to be creating a co-op game that is a shooter. We really need to teach the player that you have to work together, and the biggest thing is that if a player just runs forward and dies, we need to teach them that it is not the game that got you killed, but that ‘you need to be running as a pair’. We’ve established this in a tutorial as you move through.

Pro-G: So how guided is the experience? Are the pair left to work it out for themselves or are their pointers?

CF: Well in the first mission of the game the guys are actually still special forces, and you’re working with your boss who explains the two-man tactics, and then there is the optional tutorial, as well as stuff that appears as a mandatory part of the game. The mandatory stuff is the stuff you won’t have seen in other games before.

Pro-G: Something I’ve heard said many times before about Army of Two is that primarily it is a co-op game, and only secondarily is it a shooter. What is meant by this?

CF: I feel that the shooter genre has been capped. You know, people say at E3 ‘What’s a great game? Well, Call of Duty 4 right?’ and yeah, it’s taken the shooter and dialled it down to what it needs to be, but then you ask people what is new about it and they say ‘nothing’. So what we did is think ‘where can we innovate?’ So the real thing for us is in the co-op. Just bringing in the ‘aggro’ thing, and letting the player manipulate the AI is completely different from anything anyone has ever played before in a shooter. It’s just so new. We feel like that’s an area where we can innovate, so we’d rather put a big focus there, and leave the shooter stuff to what people know.

Pro-G: The banter between the two players looks great too, and you mentioned in the presentation ‘buddy movies’ like Lethal Weapon. What other influences have there been on the personalities in the game?

CF: We found that we needed to interject humour, to carry such a serious political storyline through, and we discovered that people enjoy messing with each other. So we looked at other genres beside shooters, so we looked at MySpace and Facebook, and we looked at MMOs. Sot that’s the sort of stuff we really focussed on to bring the experience forward, but as far as movie influences go, we looked at Bad Boys and stuff like that, and just saw that we could have this high action experience, and have this kind of banter between the two that isn’t totally overbearing. I mean, there’s always something you’re referencing, whether it’s camera tricks or the buddy cop stuff.

Pro-G: So the game has come from EA Montreal, and you’ve also worked on Boogie for the Wii. That’s quite a contrast. What is the studio about?

CF: We’re just trying to do things a little different, and give gamers what they really deserve.

Pro-G: Thanks Chris.