Brevity
05-09-2003, 02:40 PM
Source: C&VG
Having found success with third-person action game Conflict: Desert Storm, UK-based Pivotal Games is now in the process of developing the sequel. Conflict: Desert Storm 2, as it's imaginatively called, will initially ship for PC, PS2 and Xbox around September, with the GameCube version following slightly later. As you might guess, the title will find us caught up in the Gulf War once more.
Conflict: Desert Storm 2 will be bigger, better and bolder than its predecessor, Pivotal Games promising significant improvement across the board. Mission- and objective-orientated, the title will find gamers in control of a Delta Force or SAS squad and battling the Iraqi war machine in numerous environments. Sand will be a big feature.
The sequel will come with Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme difficulty levels (the latter, unlockable level being for the true soldiers amongst us), each of which will offer between 15 and 20 hours gameplay.
So how, precisely, is Pivotal Games improving on the original with Conflict: Desert Storm 2? We caught up with the developer's games programmer Seb Grinke to find out.
Can you give us a brief overview of Conflict: Desert Storm 2?
Grinke: The game is obviously the sequel to Conflict: Desert Storm and it's set once again in the Gulf War, around the same time as the first title. There are 10 new missions and four new training missions. The missions are set further behind enemy lines, so expect things to be a little more dangerous than first time around. And there are new objectives in missions, of course.
We also have a brand new storyline for the sequel, but we're not sure yet whether we'll be using the same characters from the original game or whether we'll actually introduce players to new characters. That's currently under evaluation, so I can't go into that in too much depth at the moment.
This time, there's a story that runs through the game. In the first title we had individual missions, but this time there'll be more of a follow-through as you complete objectives.
So what's the plotline and what types of missions/objectives are you including?
Grinke: Well, we don't want to give too much away at this point, but in the first part of the game you find yourself in Al-Hadar, which is a town in northern Iraq. Some helicopters containing Delta Force guys crash-land there, and you have to go in a jeep and rescue those guys.
They're under attack, and you have to go in and help them defeat that attack. Once that's completed, you join up with the Delta Force unit and aid them in completing their objective, which in this case is to blow up some radar masts. This lasts over three missions, so it gives you some idea of the follow-through that we're talking about.
Obviously the missions become more and more difficult the further you get into the game - but I'm not going to reveal what happens at the end [laughs].
In Conflict: Desert Storm players could choose to play as four-man Delta Force or SAS squads. Any changes here for the sequel?
Grinke: You'll be able to play as SAS or Delta Force four-man teams again. All the characters look different to their representations in the first game. They have new uniforms, benefit from higher detail and generally look more visually impressive. We've also spent time improving the controls, the main addition here being that when you go prone you can now role left and right.
But in general the controls are much improved over the first game. I think people are really going to notice that this is an area that we've put a lot of effort into. Things like the inventory, for example, which is much easier to use now and we've got shortcuts to grenades and things like that so it's an awful lot easier to select grenades or any items that you want to use.
In the first game you included an experience system with character skills, such as aiming ability, which improved as play progressed. Will this feature appear in the sequel and have you made any alterations to this gameplay mechanic?
Grinke: The experience system works in much the same way in Conflict: Desert Storm 2 as it did in the original, your characters improving as you progress through the game. One major difference though is that if you lose a character in the sequel - that is, if they bleed to death and you haven't healed them in time - you don't get a replacement character. That is a "mission failed" now.
The reason we've done that is that we want to build up the characters in this game and use them as part of the franchise.
So what we don't want is for new characters to come in as you're playing the game. The four player-characters that you start the game with will be the same characters that you finish the game with, so there's more characterisation there, which helps with telling the story.
One of the criticisms levelled at Conflict: Desert Storm was that is wasn't tailored to specific platforms. How are you addressing this issue the second time around?
Grinke: We have an Extreme Difficulty mode, which is unlocked when you finish the game on Hard. That's a kind of PC level of difficulty, so you're looking at almost one-hit kills; and you get very few medi-kits to heal people with.
One of the big differences between this and a more hardcore PC game of this type is the medi-kit aspect of things - when someone's shot you can heal them. In Extreme Mode you get hardly any medi-kits, making the game much more difficult.
But in general it is mostly a console game and it is mostly accessible.
Are you including any other unlockable features?
Grinke: That's under evaluation and is something that we might do in the future. Our big focus at the moment is getting the majority of the content done and we're heading towards beta in a few weeks time. Once we've done that, any extra time we get will obviously be spent putting in as much as we can.
So can we expect any major differences between the four versions of the game?
Grinke: There may be differences, but this is mainly up to the programmers working on the individual platforms, and again this is under evaluation as we go on. What happens is that, as we get toward the end of the game's development, they'll have more time to do things on their specific platform.
So it's quite possible that there will be things that crop up in the future that are different on individual platforms.
One obvious major difference is the co-operative play, which is four-player on Xbox and GameCube and two-player on PS2 and not there at all on PC.
Co-operative play worked really well in Conflict: Desert Storm, but have you any plans to expand multiplayer?
Grinke: We are just sticking with co-operative, but what we've done with Conflict: Desert Storm 2 is make it so that you can play through the entire game with four players.
Whereas in the first game you had to skip some missions if you wanted to play four-player co-operative, you won't need to do that in the sequel. You can start the game with all four player-characters and go all the way through with them.
I think co-operative play is really our big pull, especially on the consoles, and that's something we're really trying to push. I think that the co-op mode was the thing that people really liked the most in the first game.
cont in reply...
HERE (http://www.thedirtydozenclan.com/index.php?act=ST&f=23&t=1262)
Having found success with third-person action game Conflict: Desert Storm, UK-based Pivotal Games is now in the process of developing the sequel. Conflict: Desert Storm 2, as it's imaginatively called, will initially ship for PC, PS2 and Xbox around September, with the GameCube version following slightly later. As you might guess, the title will find us caught up in the Gulf War once more.
Conflict: Desert Storm 2 will be bigger, better and bolder than its predecessor, Pivotal Games promising significant improvement across the board. Mission- and objective-orientated, the title will find gamers in control of a Delta Force or SAS squad and battling the Iraqi war machine in numerous environments. Sand will be a big feature.
The sequel will come with Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme difficulty levels (the latter, unlockable level being for the true soldiers amongst us), each of which will offer between 15 and 20 hours gameplay.
So how, precisely, is Pivotal Games improving on the original with Conflict: Desert Storm 2? We caught up with the developer's games programmer Seb Grinke to find out.
Can you give us a brief overview of Conflict: Desert Storm 2?
Grinke: The game is obviously the sequel to Conflict: Desert Storm and it's set once again in the Gulf War, around the same time as the first title. There are 10 new missions and four new training missions. The missions are set further behind enemy lines, so expect things to be a little more dangerous than first time around. And there are new objectives in missions, of course.
We also have a brand new storyline for the sequel, but we're not sure yet whether we'll be using the same characters from the original game or whether we'll actually introduce players to new characters. That's currently under evaluation, so I can't go into that in too much depth at the moment.
This time, there's a story that runs through the game. In the first title we had individual missions, but this time there'll be more of a follow-through as you complete objectives.
So what's the plotline and what types of missions/objectives are you including?
Grinke: Well, we don't want to give too much away at this point, but in the first part of the game you find yourself in Al-Hadar, which is a town in northern Iraq. Some helicopters containing Delta Force guys crash-land there, and you have to go in a jeep and rescue those guys.
They're under attack, and you have to go in and help them defeat that attack. Once that's completed, you join up with the Delta Force unit and aid them in completing their objective, which in this case is to blow up some radar masts. This lasts over three missions, so it gives you some idea of the follow-through that we're talking about.
Obviously the missions become more and more difficult the further you get into the game - but I'm not going to reveal what happens at the end [laughs].
In Conflict: Desert Storm players could choose to play as four-man Delta Force or SAS squads. Any changes here for the sequel?
Grinke: You'll be able to play as SAS or Delta Force four-man teams again. All the characters look different to their representations in the first game. They have new uniforms, benefit from higher detail and generally look more visually impressive. We've also spent time improving the controls, the main addition here being that when you go prone you can now role left and right.
But in general the controls are much improved over the first game. I think people are really going to notice that this is an area that we've put a lot of effort into. Things like the inventory, for example, which is much easier to use now and we've got shortcuts to grenades and things like that so it's an awful lot easier to select grenades or any items that you want to use.
In the first game you included an experience system with character skills, such as aiming ability, which improved as play progressed. Will this feature appear in the sequel and have you made any alterations to this gameplay mechanic?
Grinke: The experience system works in much the same way in Conflict: Desert Storm 2 as it did in the original, your characters improving as you progress through the game. One major difference though is that if you lose a character in the sequel - that is, if they bleed to death and you haven't healed them in time - you don't get a replacement character. That is a "mission failed" now.
The reason we've done that is that we want to build up the characters in this game and use them as part of the franchise.
So what we don't want is for new characters to come in as you're playing the game. The four player-characters that you start the game with will be the same characters that you finish the game with, so there's more characterisation there, which helps with telling the story.
One of the criticisms levelled at Conflict: Desert Storm was that is wasn't tailored to specific platforms. How are you addressing this issue the second time around?
Grinke: We have an Extreme Difficulty mode, which is unlocked when you finish the game on Hard. That's a kind of PC level of difficulty, so you're looking at almost one-hit kills; and you get very few medi-kits to heal people with.
One of the big differences between this and a more hardcore PC game of this type is the medi-kit aspect of things - when someone's shot you can heal them. In Extreme Mode you get hardly any medi-kits, making the game much more difficult.
But in general it is mostly a console game and it is mostly accessible.
Are you including any other unlockable features?
Grinke: That's under evaluation and is something that we might do in the future. Our big focus at the moment is getting the majority of the content done and we're heading towards beta in a few weeks time. Once we've done that, any extra time we get will obviously be spent putting in as much as we can.
So can we expect any major differences between the four versions of the game?
Grinke: There may be differences, but this is mainly up to the programmers working on the individual platforms, and again this is under evaluation as we go on. What happens is that, as we get toward the end of the game's development, they'll have more time to do things on their specific platform.
So it's quite possible that there will be things that crop up in the future that are different on individual platforms.
One obvious major difference is the co-operative play, which is four-player on Xbox and GameCube and two-player on PS2 and not there at all on PC.
Co-operative play worked really well in Conflict: Desert Storm, but have you any plans to expand multiplayer?
Grinke: We are just sticking with co-operative, but what we've done with Conflict: Desert Storm 2 is make it so that you can play through the entire game with four players.
Whereas in the first game you had to skip some missions if you wanted to play four-player co-operative, you won't need to do that in the sequel. You can start the game with all four player-characters and go all the way through with them.
I think co-operative play is really our big pull, especially on the consoles, and that's something we're really trying to push. I think that the co-op mode was the thing that people really liked the most in the first game.
cont in reply...
HERE (http://www.thedirtydozenclan.com/index.php?act=ST&f=23&t=1262)