Brothers In Arms Hell’s Highway Interview

Randy Pitchford is the enthusiastic lead heading up the team behind Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway in every press conference I have seen him conduct. In fact, enthusiastic is something of an understatement. He is exuberant and impassioned, and he believes that Hell’s Highway is an absolutely brilliant game with such conviction and fervour that he could convince even the most jaded gamers. For that reason we made time to speak to him alone to try and discover the reality behind his impressive presentation of the game.

Videogamer.com: We saw the game at Ubidays earlier in the year. Since then have there been any major steps forward?

Randy Pitchford: Well. We’re not doing press demos. Now the game is together so we have ‘the game’. As for some things that have emerged? We’re starting to talk about multiplayer. The multiplayer game is getting polished up. We’ve never shown it. We’re not even showing it today, but I can talk about it a little bit. One of the reasons why I was hesitant to talk about it was because we have a feature in Hell’s Highway that’s very important to the gameplay, the destructible cover. We made the decision in the multiplayer game that we wanted to support 20 players online on the 360, when Halo 3 only supports 16. We wanted some big battles and some big skirmishes. On top of the 20-players we wanted to make sure destructible cover worked online. We’ve succeeded on both those points and now I’m able to promise both of those things.

Videogamer.com: Any truth behind the problems with Unreal Engine 3?

RP: Gearbox? We love Unreal Engine. It’s an outstanding piece of technology. Where we’ve used it as it’s come, it’s been solid and secure for us. It’s great multiplatform technology, so we can run on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. I’ve seen some of the stuff on the internet about the problems and I don’t know if these developers are maybe new, or not used to using other people’s technology or if they’ve gotten too many inexperienced developers or they’re just cry-babies. I just don’t know. I think it’s wonderful; it’s just amazing technology. If I were going to do that technology myself I’d have to spend another two years on my game and spend a lot more time and money, and that’s bad, and that’s not good for gamers.

Videogamer.com: And you think it really could make Hell’s Highway look better than Gears of War?

RP: Yeah! The more we spend with the technology on not just software but also hardware, the more things we can do to optimise for the conditions we’re working with. The Epic guys are brilliant. They’ve been optimising the engine, and just what they’ve provided performs better and has new features that Gears of War never did, and then there’s what our engineers have been able to do on top. Some of this allows us to have features you haven’t seen before, and have more visual fidelity and higher performance than you’ve seen before. That’s a nice advantage of what licensees of the technology can have; they can piggyback on what Epic has done and even push it further. I think the Epic guys would be the first to tell you that that’s what great about being a licensee; that you can take what they have and go further.

Videogamer.com: Moving on from the technology, historically accuracy seems hugely important to you, to a level of detail beyond any other WWII game. Why have you focussed so much energy on this accuracy?

RP: Because we’re not just making a first person-shooter; we’re making a first-person-shooter that is hoping to fulfil a promise. That promise is of being a squad leader in WWII. Now, I’ve made a lot of games. I’ve made some of the games of the Half-Life series, I worked on bringing Halo to the PC, a long time ago I worked on Duke Nukem, which is about as far away as you can get from World War II. I’m working on an Aliens game that will come out in a long time. Each game has a particular promise it’s trying to make, and a fantasy that it’s trying to fulfil. In the case of Brothers in Arms, the promise is ‘look; we’re trying to let you be a soldier in World War II’, and so we have a duty to do our homework.

Videogamer.com: There’s been so much talk in the press recently pointing the finger at WWII games claiming that there are too many that use the setting. How does this make you feel when certain popular sci-fi and military themes don’t face the same criticism?

RP: We started developing this game around 2001 or 2002, which was when we first started thinking about it and really getting into it. What made us confident to do it then was because of the success of other games before us. I believe it’s very clear that there is a market which allows us to spend what we’re spending. The most amount of money I’ve ever spent on a video game is on Hell’s Highway, and I feel confident doing that because I know that the customers are there. We’ve been fortunate that everyone whose made one of these games and done it well has made more than what they’ve spent, and if I can do that then I can take the risk and I can spend more, and I don’t have to worry about that at all.

Videogamer.com: But why does the World War II genre get the stick that others don’t?

RP: Well here’s why. For some reason that I can’t explain, World War II is one of these core fantasies. It’s important. I mean Christ, if that went the other way we wouldn’t even have video games. So it’s pretty significant what happened there. But for some reason, it took a while for someone to do a really good job making it as interactive entertainment. In one of the very first video games I was a little space ship shooting at Space Invaders, and we’ve had that same premise behind Halo, that we’ve been playing since the first video games, and they’re established. There have been older military games but it took a while before someone made it immersive from the first person perspective. Once that was successful we were thinking ‘Wow! We can do it now. We can take the risk, we can spend all we need and we can really fulfil that fantasy where we are one of the guys in a squad’.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time Randy.