Procedural Architecture hopes to communicate this aspect of war to the player in a small way. The game engine will procedurally compile each room in each building, and this will even occur if a player has to try a specific section repeatedly. The goal is to make each encounter feel like a new and unfamiliar one.
We spoke to Peter Tamte and Jaime Griesemer about Six Days in Fallujah for our latest IGN Unfiltered, and they discussed more about this technology and how the team spent it ‘months to years’.
“When we heard about these guys over and over, you never knew what to expect when you walk into a house. When you open a door, you can not expect what will happen on the other side,” said Griesemer. “And in a traditional video game, it’s the first time you play, right? You’re playing through a campaign mission, you kick the door open, it’s an ambush; there’s a guy there, there ‘ a man there.and maybe you do not succeed, maybe they get you, do not you? You return to a checkpoint, you come out the same door again.You have already knocked on the first man before you opened the door , or how?
“It’s not the experience these guys had, isn ‘t it? They got it once. And how are we going to recreate it in a game? We literally spent months developing years of this technology that allows us around whole parts of the City, dynamic.So you not only know what’s going to happen when you kick the door open, but I as a designer, I do not know, not true? I did not go in and play and set up the text work and all the things, it’s generated. ‘
This technology is meant to give players a way to ‘just feel a little bit how it should have been’ to be in this fight. While Griesemer admits that Six Days in Fallujah does not even come close to the experience of the real war, he hopes that it will provide a context of players if they are going to hear one of the enclosed testimonies and hear a Marine talk about how scared he is. was every time he opened. a door.
Another big challenge for Highwire Games was to make it “as easy for you to order your team to do something as to fire your weapon.” Teamwork and coordination are essential for survival in hostile situations, and the team wanted to make sure it was an integral and accessible part of the game.
“How do you create enemies that actually use tactics that require a coordinated team to overwhelm them? And number two, how do we make it so easy for you to command your team to do something other than take down your weapon?” Fundamentally, if we can make it as easy to send your team as it is to fire a weapon, then it becomes a powerful tool for the player like the weapon.And this is where we get the Go- instructed, and that’s that of Jaime, it’s some brilliant thinking on how to do it, ”Tamte explained.
Hand signals are meant to be contextual so as not to confuse players, and they seem to be similar to the ping system in games like Apex Legends. If you point to a place, your team will know to go there, if you point to an enemy, your team will know how to aim at them or put down oppression fire, and so on.
“And if you point to a door, it means you have to pile on that door, because we’re going through it,” Griesemer said. “And if you point to a corner, it means you’re securing that corner, look at that corner, because I’m going this way, but I need someone to look at, it’s a 360 battlefield, I need someone you can not make extensive three-part plans with your AI, but it responds a lot, it happens constantly, while going through a house, you can only manage your team, as you also try to focus on a lot of other things.And then it also extends to the collaborative experience, right? When we play together, I do not just have to describe an extensive plan, I can just give you the right go command and you see it on your screen. You’re like, ‘okay, I understand what we’re doing.’
Six Days in Fallujah will be released on PCs and consoles in 2021, drawing from the real events of the Second World War in Iraq – a controversial project since it was originally announced in 2009. The game was subsequently revived by Victura and Highwire.
We recently spoke with a number of Arab and Iraqi game developers, members of the video game community and a U.S. military veteran about how Six Days in Fallujah is complicated and painful for those involved in the actual events the game is trying to portray.
Do you have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.