Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Interview

When Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is released this summer, it’ll be the most hardcore, realistic military FPS ever made, at least on console. That’s something Codemasters’ internal development team is currently beavering away to make a reality. During a trip to the great British publisher’s cavernous Warwickshire complex, we sat down for a lengthy chat with lead AI designer Clive Lindop to get the inside story on the game’s development, criticism over “target renders”, and that Bohemia Interactive press release.

VideoGamer.com: The game is being developed in-house. Who is actually developing it? Is it being developed here at Codemasters?

Clive Lindop: Yeah, it’s on site. The team was actually upstairs, above you (during previous game demonstration).

VideoGamer.com: It’s a first-person shooter from Codemasters. What are the team’s credentials in that genre?

CL: The original team, and I was one of the first people to start, so I’ve been here almost four years, almost every single team member is a new recruit, was a new recruit. They came from loads of different studios, in the UK industry and the American industry. There’s a good hundred and something people from all over the world, all from different studios. They went out and found people, they went out and just went, right we need guys with experience with this, this and this, and pulled that expertise in-house, which is the only smart way of doing it. It’s proven to be the right choice, because not only do you need people who have some experience in that genre, but it’s a relatively unique technological situation as well. You’re effectively developing technology at the same time. A developer can go through his entire career and only ever work on a complete middleware engine, never have to deal with any new technology development or new system writing. That was a pretty tough call because you’ve got to find people that are not only willing to take on just about the most complex FPS you can build, but build it on an evolving technology. That was pretty interesting. We got a fantastic mix of guys in the team, with a lot of different experience. Guys who are specialists in vehicle physics and mechanics, guys who are specialists in AI and all that kind of stuff. It’s a good team of people. Hard working as well!

VideoGamer.com: The game strikes me as something that’s pulling away in a completely different direction to current trends, in that it sticks a finger up at casual gamers and accessible gaming.

CL: Well I don’t think casual gamers exist. They are a marketing demographic. There are players, and players like different types of games. There is a place for that kind of casual gameplay. I love Team Fortress 2. TF2 to me is one of the pinnacles of pick up and play gaming. It’s fast, furious, and extremely entertaining. Left 4 Dead does it very well as well. What there should be is a spectrum. If I’m feeling in a hardcore mood I might settle down for a good six hour session of Empire: Total War knowing that I’m going to get some hardcore gameplay. But I might come home and just want to blow crap up and get into TF2. It’s that range that people want. In television people have different tastes in different programs, and in music. So when we were looking at the marketplace OFP is entering, actually this is a fantastic opportunity because it feels like a lot of FPSs are going that way. They’re all heading towards this relatively casual, immersive experience. There’s some great storytelling, some great narrative and effects and cinematic experiences, but you’re finding guys completing their £40 FPS in a weekend. That was great, I loved that, but it’s over. You look at adventure games, GTA IV or Fallout 3, and they give you loads of hours of gameplay. You know when you buy one of those you’re in for lots of value for money, it’s going to keep going. FPSs have a tendency over the last few years to heavily rely on their multiplayer…

VideoGamer.com: The Call of Duty model…

CL: Yeah. When you look at things like Battlefield and Call of Duty they’re unapologetically: this is a multiplayer experience, whereas OFP says, we’ve got a really big focus on co-op and great multiplayer, but the game is difficult. The game is going to have a difficult learning curve. So there has to be a good single-player component to allow you to develop the skills so that when you enter the multiplayer you’re good at fighting. We’re expecting there to be guys who are good with the helicopter, guys who are good with the snipers, people who will develop their skills in particular directions. We also think that, especially with the console guys who may not be used to this kind of gameplay experience, reintroducing the idea that was back in the 90s and 2000s fairly standard, which was FPSs were tough, reintroducing that idea, rebooting if you like, will draw people in to that gameplay experience. They will go: this is quite refreshing, this game is a hard game, but there’s a reward for developing a genuine skill at the game. We think there’s a lot of enjoyment from that, there’s a lot of reward. I’ve completed that mission, that mission was tough, I completed that mission because I’m good at the game, I fought my arse off and I was lucky on a few occasions. There’s an adrenaline rush, that survival thing.

The weird thing about that is all this stuff came from one simple objective when we started. We wanted the game to be about: what is it like to be an infantryman in modern combat? What’s that feel like? We knew that nothing can replace a real world experience, but we wanted to get as close to it as possible. What’s it like when a 7.62mm round passes by your head? What does it sound like? What is that feeling you get in your chest? Now, if you’re fundamentally bullet proof, and you can hide behind a rock and regen your health and then run out again, you’re never going to get that feeling. It’s a theme park effect. We went, well, there has to be lethality. The game has to be lethal. There has to be a sense of mortality. If a 50 calibre round hits your shoulder it’s blowing your arm off. So there is that adrenaline rush, that feeling of fear, survival instincts.

A really good example is the suppression system. One of the most important things in modern combat is the idea of suppression. You put lots of bullets in the air, it makes the enemy go to cover and it stops them firing at you. The weight of fire coming at you trails off and you’re able to move: fire and manoeuvre. How do you suppress the player? How do you get him to be suppressed? The AI wants to suppress him. It has to be a two-way street. The player has to feel there’s an equal playing ground, because that’s what gives you the fear, the AI is as tough as you are, it’s going to take you out if it can. So, do we have an artificial mechanic that says when X number of calibre rounds pass through the sphere around you, you force the player to lie down? We didn’t take the idea seriously. But through good audio visual stuff, like with the artillery strike, like with bullets and tracers, we found watching other people playing the game, you naturally go to ground. You want to find cover. You want to crawl around. And you do that because you know if you get hit you’re going to die.

You begin to appreciate why, when you’re watching television and you see guys in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting the way they fight, why they do it. Why do you stand off from this village for 10 minutes just firing loads of bullets into it? Well to be quite honest you are not going to want to go into that village and open every front door to see if there’s a bad guy in there if you can get killed instantly, when you can just fill every building full of 50 calibre rounds and then count the body parts. You begin to understand why they fire rounds of ammunition off at muzzle flashes in the distance. You do things like fire by recon: you fire where you think where the enemy is to see if he fires back so you can pinpoint his position.

Certainly my own personal experience is, you talk to these guys, they come back from Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve interviewed a few of them just to get some idea of what their experience has been like, and you play a game where you have that kind of mortality and you go, if I was in that environment in real life, I’d dig a hole and stay in it. The idea of forcing yourself to run near the enemy to get closer to them… these guys are incredible. FPSs have a funny way of giving you a false impression of what combat’s like, that you can run around like a lunatic, that you can charge the enemy down. You’re faced with the fact that that can get you killed very quickly, and randomly sometimes. When there are a lot of bullets in the air, you may not necessarily be the person they were firing at, you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We think the sense of reward from that experience is quite enormous. When you come out the other end of it you feel like you’ve been put through the wringer, your nerves are frayed and you’re like, wow. There’s a few classic games that have delivered that kind of immersive experience, where at the end you’re like, that was genuinely intense. We really want OFP to be one of those.

VideoGamer.com: There’s been some controversy over the screenshots that have been released for the game. The accusation is that they’re target renders, and too good to accurately represent what the game will deliver. Can you clear that up?

CL: We had the same problem with GRID. A lot of games publish concept art, or what are called target renders. Fairly early on in your development and midway through your development you want to set the bar for what it is you’re doing. Give some clue to the audience of what it is you’re hoping to achieve. GRID was a beautiful game, stunning visually, and we put out loads of screenshots and people went, never going to happen, Photoshop, blah blah blah. And when finally GRID came out it looked exactly like it. It was bloody stunning. It’s the same thing with OFP. We were expecting that kind of reaction. To be honest you’re never going to have certain sectors of the audience happy until the game is in their hands, or gameplay footage for example. Games are always a work in progress. It’s a mammoth undertaking that takes an enormous amount of effort. But as you get towards the end and you start showing people what the game looks like and they go, bloody hell it really does have X draw distance or that many objects or this many trees or whatever it is you’re telling people it has. Like when we were playing the Special Forces mission and you see the orange sunlight and the mist in the trees and you go right, this is what we wanted, this amount of density so there’s lots of cover around. Ultimately you develop a toughened skin to that kind of thing. You know what a game looks like. You know what the game can do because you’re working on it. You’re communicating that to the audience, making certain promises. Games always change, due to the nature of development, it’s just how things work. Sometimes for gameplay reasons a certain idea didn’t work, or for technology reasons. So there’s always a certain amount of moving the goalposts in any game development. But you’re still trying to deliver that core experience. Once the demo goes out, that’s when you’re effectively throwing open the doors and going, right, there it is.

OFP attracts a lot of that kind of attention. It’s a very hotly debated game. Even within its hardcore fanbase, within its casual fanbase, people who are new to the whole thing, there’s an enormous amount of discussion. It’s a game people want and they want certain features for it. Our wish list is about 10,000 features long, from mini-submarines to fast roping. People have got a lot of things they want to see. So you’re never going to be able to have all of them. You’ve got to deliver that core experience first. One of the great things about OFP is that it was always very community driven. It comes with a tool and there’s a lot of different things you can do with it. To a certain degree, even if obscure feature X isn’t in the game, there’s an opportunity there for the community to put it in. One of the cool things about the game once it’s out is there’s a lot of modding stuff that I want to see. I want to see my Vietnam mod, my WWII mod, my Tiger Tank. But people get very passionate about OFP, and we do read the forums and we’ve got community managers that feed information back to us from it. It’s certainly different from working on a normal game in that way. In a normal game you’re screaming for attention, you want to draw people in. This is the opposite. The moment we started there was this audience waiting, desperate for information. We really want to give it to them! But it’s like cinema trailers, you don’t pump out a cinema trailer that tells you the entire plot. You’ve got to build up to it. They have the same kind of passion that we do. I only wish that OFP as an office was anywhere near as interesting as they think it is! It is just an office!

VideoGamer.com: Do you think that when people get to play the game or the demo, they will see that the target renders have been met?

CL: In some instances they will see they’ve been surpassed. They will see a lot of areas, like villages and forests, where it’s beyond what the target renders had. In other areas they will see it slightly different. The smoke effects, for example. We’ve done a lot of work in modelling those. That’s really tricky to do in a target render because you just see a column of smoke. When you see the JDAM go off, or you see those artillery come in, and you see them animated, they’re very different from the target renders. The target renders were a great milestone. Nothing quite beats seeing it in motion. We’ve got some gameplay videos lined up with the new animation system we have in, and a lot of the tweaks we’ve done from the alpha, those will be out soon. It’s funny. People have a lot of stylistic opinions. I think it looks ace and a lot of people, when you put them in front of it, go bloody hell, especially when you take the Cobra Helicopter up and you show them the island going off into the distance. But there’s always going to be people nitpicking about grass blades or whatever it is. One of the examples we had was, the Chinese have about seven or eight different camouflage patterns. When we started, particularly the airborne unit was using one form of camouflage and then they started using another. There are guys out there, to them that massively matters and you have to respond to it. But there are other people for whom the visual experience is much more driven by tracers and explosions and things like that. It’s a wide audience, so you can’t please all of the people all of the time. The core infantry experience should deliver the magic.

VideoGamer.com: What was your reaction to Bohemia’s press release?

CL: It seemed almost unrelated to what we were actually doing. Their argument seemed to be almost purely about naming, which of course for a dev team hard at work doesn’t really mean a lot. It is Operation Flashpoint, it is all about delivering things that Operation Flashpoint was about. So in actual fact it didn’t really even blip on our radar because it seems like such a minor point. I’m sure for the marketing guys it probably meant a lot more and maybe there was a discussion about that, but to be honest when you’re doing development you tend to get into the habit of judging a game when it’s out and you get it in your hands. We all want to play ArmA II because you want to see what they’ve done. It’s not as if it’s an overcrowded genre. Large landscape open world FPS military games are not exactly falling from the sky! So there was never a sense of immediate competition. I think they’re fundamentally different games. I haven’t seen ArmA II so I don’t know but Bohemia have gone in a much more simulation driven direction, and our focus was always on keeping that simulation core but we wanted to deliver a combat experience: what’s a human experience of being in combat about? I always thought there was a really cool potential for them to be relatively complimentary experiences. The other thing you learn about the games industry as a whole is that a wider team is a lot of different people with different personalities and opinions so you shouldn’t really judge a whole development team by what one person has said.

VideoGamer.com: But Bohemia issued a press release that speaks for the company as a whole.

CL: I don’t know, it just seemed like something they did and for us as a development team we’re coming towards the end of the game, crunching, so you’re pretty damn busy. We looked at it and went, oh that’s a bit odd, and then just get on with your life. The games industry is quite a small industry and everybody knows everybody else in one way or another. It’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. So you’re effectively in a shared experience, the exhilarating but tiring and tough world of reinventing the wheel every five minutes and getting games out to people and hoping they really enjoy them. The wisest way of looking at it for us was to go well, we’ll just view it that way. Everybody’s under a lot of stress, you’re working really hard, everybody’s really eager to get their games out. In the case of ArmA II Flashpoint, we’re just lucky enough to be in a position of being in a particular genre, of which there’s only us in, and it can only be a good thing that there’s two titles in what is a very vacant space, and they’re offering different experiences. That’s my way of looking at it and it’s the way I’m going to continue to look at it, because I don’t know their game. I haven’t seen it, so I’m not judging it. And they haven’t seen ours. That whole thing seemed to be much more to do with corporate level stuff than anything to do with us. So, just walk on by, carry on doing what you’re doing, you know?

VideoGamer.com: This game hasn’t got 2 in the title…

CL: No. That was actually more to do with being cross platform. There wasn’t an OFP1 on the PS1 or PS2, for example. There was an Xbox version called Operation Flashpoint: Elite, but it was almost a decade ago. To suggest it was 2 just seemed to confuse an audience of people who probably in the majority hadn’t played 1. Did you call Star Wars Star Wars 1, 2 and 3 or did you call it Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi? It seemed much more logical that Flashpoint worked better as a name if it was just about specific operations. It was more coincidental than anything else actually. Certainly when you codename a project when you first start it it’s logical to call it OFP2, which is what we did. But it was always the intention from a marketing point of view that it seemed a little bit clearer to just call it Operation Flashpoint. 10 years is a long time.

VideoGamer.com: It had nothing to do with Bohemia then?

CL: No. It’s not even set in the same place. I think it would make more sense if it was a follow on to the original story. But it’s not. It’s a completely different scenario. None of the other characters are brought over. It’s a whole new scenario, a whole new setting, new engine, new technology, new AI, it’s all about pushing that barrier out further to what can be done in that genre of game. It’s a tricky balancing act because you’re effectively asking a game engine to do what seem like massively contradictory things. To have lots of fidelity in the environment and detail in the weapon in your hands, but have a massive environment and loads of entities to fight. So I think you’ve got difficulty enough in tackling those requirements than worrying about there being a number two on the end or not. It seems like a relatively silly thing to worry about, which we weren’t. From a game development point of view, sometimes a lot of the stuff that’s happening around a game seems like a storm rattling the windows. That it’s outside the building, you’re inside it. And you can afford to relax because you know the truth of the quality of the game itself, what it’s going to do. Most developers will say to you they know in their heart of hearts whether the game they’re working on is something they would actually play. There’s always a great feeling when you get to your first playable, when the game is first in your hands. You instinctively make a judgement: would I at home on a Saturday go out and buy this? Can I wait for this game if I wasn’t working on it? If you know deep down very early on, despite the placeholder graphic for this or whatever, that fundamentally the gameplay is addictive… we knew that quite quickly. That’s that hurdle crossed. We now know this is a great game. The rest of it is just building all the content and systems. It’s been a long journey. We’re expecting the wind speed outside to get a lot higher as we get towards the end! The eye of the storm is when you release, and there’s a strange quiet period for one or two days, when everybody’s got their teeth into it. And then the wind starts again. If you’ve done your job right they want more. If you’ve done your job wrong, then the roof is being ripped off the building! But you generally know before it goes out the door what you’ve done right. But time will tell. I think we’ve done all right!

VideoGamer.com: What kind of DLC plans do you have?

CL: I can’t give you too much detail but effectively we’ve got a post-release calendar of weapons, vehicles and missions. We’re looking at doing specific military force packs and proper full-on content expansions as well. So there’s a lot of stuff to follow. That’s been a real education process for Codemasters as a business. Originally in OFP that whole community thing afterwards was a surprise. It wasn’t planned. They just put tools on a disc and went, here you go, and then this whole thing happened. Now this time around doing our own content is about supporting the stuff that those guys are going to do. We’re expecting all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff to be done. If it’s of interest to those guys, because I know they like to build as much of their own stuff as they can, the island itself has taken a seriously large amount of artists a very very long time to build. So I’d be really impressed to see anybody, not mod the island but build their own landscape, because that’s a lot of density content. Fences, trees, bushes, grass, telephone wires, buildings, loads of stuff. One of the great things about the island is that in a way it was chosen to be a palette, a canvass for guys to build their own content. So you could easily do a WWII thing on it or whatever it is you want to do.

In terms of our content it’s just a case of more guns, more vehicles, mission sets, more characters. Sometimes they’ll just be one-offs, or packs of firearms, and other times they’ll be packages with their own stories and forces. But the important thing about expansions is they are limited. What I mean by that is an unnamed FPS would release expansion packs that were limited to the missions they were in, so you could only play that gun or that force inside that specific mission. But in OFP that’s not the case. You can go into the mission editor and build any mission you like with that content, put that army in or whatever it is. So there’s a big plan post release to do a lot of support on the game. It’s good for us. We want to build more of these. We want to do another Flashpoint after this, so we want to create that momentum then support it.

VideoGamer.com: Will that then be called Operation Flashpoint 2 or will it be another OFP colon?

CL: Obviously it’s a bit early now! We’ve got to get this one out. But the feeling is, I quite like the idea of Operation Flashpoint colon and then whatever it is, just because the settings are what drive the game. In a narrative structure you can have Rocky I, II, III and IV, because it’s essentially the same characters and the same story going in a linear sequence somewhere. Whereas Flashpoint’s much more about specific conflicts that don’t have to be related to each other, or even connected. In a later game you could have a time frame setting that’s further in the past. We don’t know where we’re going. Once the game’s out what we’re interested to see is what the fan reaction will be and where people want it to go. If the screamingly loud response is that they want it to be a WWII thing, we’ll do that. We like being present day because it has a different edge to it but there’s nothing to say we won’t do something like that as we go along. So in that way numbering them doesn’t necessarily make much sense.

VideoGamer.com: Have you released demo details?

CL: There is one, there will be one, but I don’t know when it’s supposed to be out.

VideoGamer.com: Would you do platform exclusive DLC?

CL: That’s never come up on our horizon. Never. I just don’t think it would make much sense for us. Just because we’re going for simultaneous cross-platform release it would just seem a bit weird, I think.

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC this summer.