In November of 2005, several GhostRecon.net staff visited Red Storm Entertainment studios in North Carolina. The following interview transcript is the result of hours spent talking to RSE. The answers given are from a particular slice of time within the development cycle (close to beta). Keep in mind that game features and details may have changed since then, and RSE’s statements shouldn’t be taken as descriptions of the final product, but rather as a ‘snapshot’ of GR:AW MP for 360 during that period of game development.

• Christian Allen (CA) – lead MP designer for GR:AW
• Brian Tate (BT) – overall lead artist for GR:AW MP
• Pete Sekula (PS) – co lead artist for GR:AW MP
• Robbie Edwards (RE) – producer
• Travis Getz (TG) – authenticity coordinator
• Hatchetforce (HF) – GR.net Staff
• ZJJ – GR.net Staff

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MULTIPLAYER

HF – What are the terrains we are looking at for the MP map?

PS – All kinds, we have an urban map, two urban maps, two very large urban maps. Actually they seem very large. There are just massive and massive amounts of detail. There is Desert Gulch, which you’ve already seen. There is a scrap yard, which is supposed be in the middle of the desert. There is another type of abandon desert map. There is also a map, which may or may not have seen, which is actually two ships at night, where it’s rainy and really nice and moody.

RE - Kind of like night docks in GR1. Christian has told us is a favorite from GR1.

CA – Yeah, I get lot of email on that.

PS – There is a lot of variety, the full gamut from urban to wilderness.

HF – And weather and time of day?

PS – Weather and time of day vary from map to map. We are not doing snow this outing just because of the choice of setting we’re in, basically in Central America. Snow, they don’t see much over there. Which is almost unfortunate because we nailed the snow down before we picked the location. So we’ve got awesome snow, but we are not using it. Variety has always been one of the hallmarks of this series and that is not changing. We’re not going to change that, we’re sticking to our guns.

RE – What’s funny is the one that got everyone excited the most was the over/under one.

PS - The seashore?

CA - Yeah, the village on the sea, multiple levels, piers. Picture Island Village with docks going out into the ocean with multiple levels and buildings on stilts and going up and down and underneath docks with people up above you.

BT – You can hear people moving around.

HF – In GR1, you can go into buildings.

Devs – (Agreement)

HF - and in GR2

Devs – (Agreement)

HF - and GR3 MP coop?

BT - In a limited way.

CA – In a limited way. We’re still more limited than GR1, but a little bit more open than GR2. There are more buildings.

BT – It basically comes down to wanting to have the best experience for player vs. AI and we could focus on doing some with tactics and fighting indoors. We can focus on fighting outdoors and the kind of tactics the AI can use. We could spread ourselves really thin and try and do it all. We just made a choice, basically a business decision. We can do one thing, and do it really well. If we do two …

RE – We made a choice.

BT – Yes.

RE – We are reconsidering that choice.

BT – Well, now that we are figuring things out, we have more options for the future, but basically our primary focus is the outdoor combat experience. It’s a key element of the franchise. There are a lot of shooters where you fight indoors. There are not a lot of cool shooters for fighting outdoors and Ghost Recon has always done that well so we made it our focus and that is what we try to do really, really well.

TG – And we already have Rainbow Six under the Clancy umbrella that does the indoor combat.

HF – We talked about the game types earlier. Can you go ahead and re-quote those figures? I mean those were pretty impressive.

CA – Yeah. With the customizable game mode system, you’ll have around about 1,100 different game mode combinations. The actual number can go higher than that depending on how you count different options. The game will ship with presets for all your favorite GR2 game modes, and GR1, so you can just go in and pick siege, but then you can modify those presets or you can build your own game modes through a range of options. They are broken into three types of games. Elimination games, which is all based on scoring by killing people so like in solo you have things like bounty hunter, thief, and things like that or just plain sharpshooter. Then there is territory games, which is all about controlling zones. That’s where your domination, your siege type games come in. Then you have objective based games, which are all about flags or capturing officers, like search and rescue. And then in your coop maps you have things like recon and things like that go into that. So, for example, if you really liked recon; you want to play coop recon from GR2, but one of the things you didn’t like was that you can just kill everybody on the map. Well, now you can go in and say, well I have to have an alarm on so that if people see me and I don’t take them out in a short amount of time, I lose, but if you really don’t like that you can turn it off. If you want a recon 1 zone, you can recon 1 zone. If you want to recon 5 zones, you can recon 5 zones. If you want to defend 5 zones, and you’re crazy, you can. Same with siege, one of the things we ran in to with GR 2 is we made siege. People said we really like siege, but we want random bases. So we are like, ok, um, well we’ll do double siege. Now we have two bases. They are like yeah we like double siege, but we want it like this. [We are like] ugh, we can’t make everybody happy. You know what, we’ll design a system that will let you do that and then we don’t have to do it anymore. So, if you want to play random base siege or hamburger hill with a zone that moves or 5-zone domination. Whatever you want to do you just set it up yourself. It’s a really easy to use system. We focused a lot on UI and the lobby screen making sure everything is really easy to use and really fast to go through. We spent a lot of time on that because that was one of the biggest complaints in GR2, and GR1 actually.

BT - On the UI stuff, basically one the things we basically set as a goal for ourselves, we said, if you couldn’t do it on the fly, in the lobby, while I’m hosting a game, like if it were so complicated or the UI was so cumbersome that I would have to go do it in some offline menu then it’s not worth doing. We really focused on UI so that somebody hosting a game could set up one of those custom games or make a kit restriction or whatever while everybody is waiting and they are not going to be waiting more than a few seconds so all those menus got drilled on really, really, really hard until we got it down to just a few button presses to go make your own custom game rules or whatever. So, if you are hosting a game on Xbox Live, if you’re playing siege and everybody goes we want those bases moved or whatever you can go do it in five seconds, but now you are playing with those alternate rules.

HF – But your kit you pick. Say, I always use this kit when I’m playing MP because anytime I play this map I always use this kit. You were talking earlier about the ability to save that kit.

BT – There is the host that creates the kit restrictions, basically defines the rules about what weapons are or are not allowed on a game. And the host can save out his favorite set of restrictions or rules for players. Now the players also have the ability to save their own favorite kit. Now when they get in the game and they select their equipment there is basically a button right there on screen, they press X. I’m playing as a rifleman class right now, this is my new favorite rifleman kit, I press X. Every time I play as a rifleman that’s the kit that I’m going to default to. So, we avoid the whole race condition of people trying to get through the menus really quick to get in the game. That’s not a fun mechanic it’s just memorization of menus and nobody likes that.

HF – You stated earlier that that kit is tied into your Xbox Live gamer tag.

BT – Yes, it is stored with your Xbox live account data. So if you like to play with your buddies at another house, you can play split screen, or whatever, or you go play at an internet café or something, all those settings will go with you, when you go log on Xbox live on some other Xbox 360 your settings will be pulled down and everything will be remembered. You don’t have to set up everything again.

HF – Down to the player specifics in multi-player. How many weapons is the player looking at for his choices in multi-player levels? With no restrictions? I’m talking about the factory defaults.

CA – I don’t think we’ve announced the total number.

RE - It’s 30+ or something, with grenades and smoke grenades and all that stuff.

HF - Are they listed still underneath the basic kits, such as Rifleman, and Sharpshooter?

CA – We’ve got a Rifleman, Grenadier, Automatic Rifleman, and Marksman. We changed Gunner in GR2 to Automatic Rifleman, one, because it’s more realistic, and two, because Gunner and Grenadier have the same letter. And Automatic Rifleman is more real anyway.

Yeah, so they’re broken up under class, and how it’ll work with the classes is, and I explained it a little bit earlier, you get bonuses based on the class you are playing on. But it’s not a restriction, so you can still pick any weapon, but if you’re a Marksman you get bonuses for single-shot. If you’re a gunner, you get bonuses for long, sustained, automatic fire. So whether you’re using an M-60 or an MP5, the Gunner will be better firing full-auto than the Marksman. The Marksman is better at single shot.

HF – How are these bonuses applied?

CA– They’re in things like, basically if you’re a Gunner, and you’re firing full-auto, you’re going to get a smaller reticule bloom than the Marksmen, who’s going to get a large reticule bloom. Things like reload time. A gunner has a bonus. He reloads the M60 faster than a Marksman; opposite for a Sniper Rifle. Rifleman is kind of middle of the range. He’s the jack-of-all trades guy. He kind of does everything good. The other thing it does is if you go as a Grenadier, your weapons’ selection defaults to Grenadier weapons. Or Rifleman, it defaults to the carbines, and then you select from there and save the default out.

BT - And your character appearance changes to match your chosen role in a mission. If you choose a Grenadier, you will come out wearing the gear that a Grenadier would in order to carry his load out.

HF – The GR2 character choice was a little bit confusing sometimes.

CA – Yeah, we got rid of that.

HF - You were like, “I picked this skin, why isn’t my skin showing up?” You’d hear that a lot on Xbox Live.

BT – We’ll freely acknowledge that as a weakness. We didn’t do that very well.

CA - Yeah, a lot of it was just because the character models were so high-poly, and high detail, we had to restrict the amount loaded into the map at one time. We could only have 6 different models.

BT - Yeah, I think most of the confusion came in that the player ultimately didn’t have choice over his character appearance. He just expressed variation within the baseline number. I want to be character 1, 2, or 3, and it was up to the host to decide what character model you actually got. That’s where I think we basically made the mistake. It wasn’t the player’s choice. It’s the player’s choice now. So if you saw the Character Appearance Configuration System now, you choose your mission role, it affects what basic look the characters body has, but then you pick your face, you pick your headgear, etc. So you define the look of your character, and your character will look exactly like that. The only thing that you don’t have control over is your team’s camo scheme. The host can assign those. Basically the host can say, “Do we want everybody to blend in, or do we want everybody to stand out?” On any given map, they could give snow camo on a desert map, and they would stand out really well.

CA -Initially we had everyone choosing their camo as well, but when you start out a team with mis-matched camo, people just start blowing each other away, plus they look kind of stupid. They look like Militia members. But if they’re all in matched camo, it’s more like real SF.

HF – A similar effect also we had in GR2, was we had the ability to disable the names in the IFF. Are you able to disable that?

BT – If you’re hardcore enough to want to, you can disable it.

CA - In fact, I think you have a little bit more options, as far as the level, because you can have them show on the map.

BT - Yeah, you can choose.

CA - There’s a little bit more options as far as scale of what you can control.

HF – How did you handle the ballistics modeling for the various weapons?

CA - The ballistics system, the actual firing ballistics system is relatively the same as GR2.
The key thing that has been changed is range effects on weapons. In GR2, the range effect on weapons was a little bit more pronounced than it was in real life, and we made back more towards real life. An example of that is, say an M4 at 100 meters had a lot of drop off in GR2 as far as kill energy. Aside from that, the system is basically the same. So the difference of what you’re going to get, is at range your rounds are going to be more lethal. At close range, it’s pretty much the same.

HF – Now you stated earlier that you’re currently looking to balance penetration effects for ballistics with game play elements.

CA – Yeah. That really comes down to play testing, play balancing. We’re definitely going to have things like penetration on car windows and shooting through lights. It all comes down to the play experience. When it comes down to it, being fun is going to win out. As long as it’s clear and consistent to the player what I can and can’t shoot through is the goal. We don’t want to end up with a case where the one team always wins, because they’re on the side with the concrete walls, and the other team is on the side with the plywood boxes. We have full control over it, and we’re tweaking it for the best play experience.

HF – You were talking about round penetration. You were talking about IGI. Is there any surface penetration?

CA - What we’re planning is light surface penetration, like cloth and tents and stuff. We actually have the technology to do it on everything. And we can do it full kill energy reduction, like a 50 cal can penetrate almost everything, and a 9mm almost nothing. But we’re still play testing it right now. And it’s really going to come down to cloth and flags.

HF – What about glass windows?

CA – Oh definitely. Things like glass and car windows are definitely going to be. But the amount of stuff we’re going to do in the rest of the game is up in the air. But whether we’re going to have the wood shacks and things like that, probably not.

HF – What about the doors? That still gives you an element without going whole hog on it.

CA – Yeah. We’re still playing with it. We actually do it per surface. Whatever the surface is, whether it’s a light bulb or a wall, we control it manually. So we have full control over it, it’s the extent, because it has to be consistent for the players. They have to be able to learn what they can and can’t shoot through.

HF – Ricochets?

CA – Right now there are deflections. So if you shoot through a windshield, it deflects. If you shoot through 2 car windows, it ends up deflecting at random. Ricochets we don’t have in. We actually play tested ricochets because we have the tech for it, but on a map like Desert Gulch, people would just blow rounds.

HF – What about grenade blasts? How are you handling grenade blasts?

CA – We actually imported the system we developed for GR2 PC, so it’s not the same system as GR2 X-Box where if a grenade blew up say, right here, this geometry could deflect the grenade. It creates an actual globe, based on where it is, and only hard geometry will stop it.

HF – What I’m getting at is, if a grenade goes off, and I drop below elevation?

CA – I don’t think it would hit anything.

BT - The odds of dying from that go down a lot. It tests to 6 representative body parts. The more body parts you have concealed from that, the better your chances are of survival. But there is still a chance that if you drop prone, and a grenade goes off, there’s still a chance it’s going to kill you.

HF – What’s the radius on that?

CA – I want to say 10 meters, 5-10 meters. I know it’s scaled down from what they are in real life. There’s different zones of lethality.

HF – I played some phenomenal titles online, where grenades go off right next to you, that if they don’t kill you, you can’t hear squat for [a long time]. Sometimes I think it fades too rapidly. I know there is a game play element there, and that it needs to be balanced out, but is that something you guys are playing around with or looking at?

RE – We had it in GR2 and everyone told us they thought it was a bug so we tried not to make it sound like a bug. Everyone thought it was fake, that it wasn’t real. I guess they never had a loud thing happen in their ear. So we tweaked it and kept tweaking and kept tweaking it that’s all we were doing. Trying to get it where people understand it’s a feature we were trying to recreate there, but if you think it’s too short, then feel free to tell our sound guys. I’m sure you’ve heard a few of them go off in your time.

CA – A lot of it with that is balancing what it would actually sound like with what people perceive it sounds like.

RE – That’s another important thing, too. We are constantly battling Hollywood and the perceptions that Hollywood has created for people and that’s not the game we want to make. We don’t want to make a big action movie; we want to make a realistic game. At the same time we can’t go so far with realism that it alienates everyone that buys the game because they don’t know any different. The truth is the minority are the former military and those types of people that know this isn’t exactly realistic so we have to find that happy balance.

HF – Are you still going to have 4 kit slots, basically?

CA – We’re still tweaking it, but it’s at 3 right now, but we’re still tweaking it.

HF - I play a lot of GR2 and Summit Strike online, and the pistol’s a weapon that people almost never pull out.

CA – Yeah, and that’s one of the things that we’re looking at addressing.

HF – It seems like there’s an opportunity there for a game play element, but what is it that would make people pull out a pistol?

CA – That’s one of the things we’re working on with the kit system.

BT - About the only time people pull out a pistol is if they have a Sniper weapon, and then get in close, they will often switch to a pistol. The smarter players will because the handling of the Sniper rifle is so bad in close quarters.

HF - Has that choice been tweaked in anyway, because you only have the .45ACp, the 92, and a handful of foreign guns?

CA – It’s probably still going to be limited, at least on release, for pistol selection; mainly because we wanted to focus on the range of primary weapons. It takes the same amount of time to do a pistol, as say an SR25 or something like that.

HF – 5.1 surround sound?

BT – Absolutely.

HF – Do you know how many voices it’s going to have? I mean that’s a requirement of the Xbox 360. Do you know how many voices it can have going at one time in there?

RE – Do you mean over Xbox live?

HF – No. Not over the Xbox live. I’m talking about in the game, game voices and different sounds that can occur?

RE – More than you can ever count. I mean seriously. It’s actually one of the most phenomenal sounds in any game. It’s awesome.

HF – You’re shooting for 16 players, right?

CA – Yeah.

HF – And you don’t see any issues with that right now, because there have been some surprises with the 360, like with CoD2, where it’s a shock not having 16 players is what they’re announcing.

CA – Well, too bad for them.

RE - We should actually have better performance with 16 players than we did on the Xbox.

HF – They said that may change, even though it’s gold? They said there’s background technical issue that may change that once it ships. It may support it, but initially they had said …

RE – We used less bandwidth this time around than we did with the Xbox so we should be in better shape.

BT - The max players is the same, but you will see more actual 16 player games going on because more people will be able to host at that level.

CA - One of the things that we were planning on doing, is defaulting servers to a lower number, like 12, because one of the problems is people will be their really bad connection, and they’ll host 16 players, and they’ll have a terrible experience, and people really don’t get the fact that “hey, I’m on my crappy DSL that I’m sharing with all my friends that are surfing the internet, maybe I shouldn’t try to host a 16 player game.” So if we default it a little bit lower where you can set it up if you know you have a good connection, but for the general populace who doesn’t pay attention to any of that, it defaults it into a state that should work for most people. You are going to see a better experience online.

HF – I’d like to take just a second to talk about one of the big multiplayer features, which is the cross-com. And just give a brief overview, and maybe if there’s anything we don’t know about it, and how that’s working out. How that implementation is going.

CA - The big thing on the cross-com is 2 big uses. It’s a team communications device. And the key visual features are the ability to see through your teammates eyes. Using satellite technology you can see through their eyes, it renders the scene twice in real time. You can also use it to view through a drone view, so you can control a drone; see it top-down, check out enemies where they’re at.

HF – Can the drone be shot down?

CA – Yeah, it can be shot down, or turned off by the server. And you can set up drone respawn times. You control it through your cross coms. So you can have the drones off or you can have them respawn anywhere up to two minutes. The other thing is as a team communications device, because the cross-com was originally implemented as a single player, squad control device, and we said, “Well, that’s great, but we don’t want to just throw it away for multiplayer”. So the big thing on console is everybody has a headset. Everybody can talk to each other. So we said, “Well, we don’t want to put in some kind of order system, where you press a button and it’s yelling out orders to your team mates, because you’re talking to each other anyway.” So basically we came up with a system that allows you to set rally points for your team mates using the cross-com, up and down, real simple easy to use commands, so that you can set a simple rally point, which is a 3D point, where I point at something and it sets a rally point and use it like you would in real-time strategy games. You go “Hey, the guys are coming from over there, or hey, you go there, or hey, there are guys shooting at me from over there.” Then you can set a point where you essentially call for help. You set a rally point on yourself to everybody else on the team. So you can say, “Hey, I’m here. I’m getting shot” or “come over to me,” whatever you want to say.

BT – Or follow me. It’s open-ended. It’s however you want to use it.

CA - Then the third point is you can set one of your team mates as the rally point for yourself. So you can say I want to find where Brian is. I flip to him. You don’t have to go, “Hey where are you?” “I’m in grid E-5”, then I have to go look where grid E-5 is.

HF – I got wasted on Xbox live several times looking at the map.

CA – Exactly. Now you shouldn’t have to do that anymore. You can just set waypoints, and it’s real fast. You can, unofficially, designate a team leader, because of the amount of time that the waypoint stays up on the map. You don’t want 16 waypoints popping all over the place. They fade out after a short amount of time, unless you have that person selected, so if say Hatchetforce was my team leader, I’d select him on cross-com, then all his waypoint commands would be the dominating ones on my screen. The team that uses something like that, against the team that’s just a bunch of people running around, they’re going to dominate. They’re going to own them. And that’s the thing we really wanted with the cross-com, was to urge team communication, because that is the thing that sets Ghost Recon apart from other shooters.

HF – Is a player tied to a particular location or operation while the drone is running?

CA – No, the player can still move around. He controls the drone just direction through the D pad (up and down).

RE - A point that I’d like to drive home that we kind of touched on. We are really trying to offer the player a lot of choices. Do you want to play in first person, or do you want to play over-the-shoulder? We gave you that choice. Do you want your character to have a hat with sunglasses, or do you want him to have a bandana? We gave you that choice. If you like to play the game with 5 zone defend, we want to give you that choice. It goes along with what Xbox 360 is trying to provide, and that’s choices. We want to give everybody we can what they want to have. So if you want to have that super-realistic, super detailed, intense game play action, that’s what we want to give you. If you want to have just a run and shoot type of game play where you throw grenades everywhere, we want to give you that. We read the forums and we see a lot of things that people write, and that’s something a lot of people say, “I can’t believe they’re doing that.” It’s like no, no, we’re doing that to want to give you the game that you want; we want everyone to have fun playing the game. But at the same time, we have certain limitations, but we’re doing everything we can to make sure that people have a good experience, and feel that their $50.00 is well spent on the game they purchased.

HF – With no Red X of death.

DEVs (laughs)

RE - We changed it to purple. It’s a purple circle.

ZJJ – There is one choice that isn’t in the game that I’ve noticed, and of course you hear that a lot from the female gamers, is that there is no male/female choices.

BT – Yeah. There won’t be any female characters selectable in multiplayer at ship. That’s the official word. But we haven’t forgotten about you. It’s a production choice; it’s not a realism thing. We realize that there are women in the active duty military.

ZJJ – Yeah, but again, the storyline is for Special Forces, so really, you’ve got that argument.

BT – But that’s not why. It’s totally a production issue, and how much time we have to build these really awesome, new characters.

ZJJ – I got all kinds of statistics about the percentage of women playing online games. I’ll need to send them to you.

CA – Well again, AT SHIP, there will be no female choices.

ZJJ – I hear you. What kind of rating are we shooting for? Still “T”?

CA/BT – Yes.

DEV – The blood was working today.

HF – It was actually better than the solitude spray that you see a lot of times. It did exactly what it was supposed to, which is it showed me a lot of times I was hitting the target. Not an egregious display, it was in indication of contact.

ZJJ – Yeah, the blood was working today which is why I was surprised you were still going for the “T” rating, because that is usually an “M.”

BT – We’re not trying to show you the gore factor.

CA - We just want you to know that you hit someone. Unfortunately what happened when we took it out is that you didn’t have any indication that you hit someone. And especially in a multiplayer environment where you didn’t get as many of the wound animations in the AI, the perception was that I shot a hail of bullets and it didn’t do anything. Well, it did, it’s just that he was doing some other animation that overrode the wound, and it didn’t show any blood, and he says “well, I shot him 2 times, but it didn’t do anything.”

HF – I was a limp fan. I liked that. Is that implemented too in any way? I don’t know why people complained about it. I thought you shouldn’t run around totally healthy.

CA – For this one, we’re not going to slow the main characters down on a limp. You get a wounded animation, but it’s not an actual drag limp.

HF – Will it affect your aim?

CA – yeah, oh yeah. Once you take a round, your aim goes down substantially.

HF – Is there multiplayer healing?

CA – No. It still could get in. It may or may not. It’s mainly a game balance issue.

BT – We’re also doing more with animation, by the way. We’re doing new impact animations, new flinches, etc. So you’ll see when an explosive goes off, if it doesn’t kill you, you’ll see the guy reacting from the impact; take a hit, you’ll see the guy react.

HF – In GR2, I would shoot guys in single player or co-op, you’d shoot guys, and they would just keep standing there, and I would be like please, at least just lay down for me. Try to hide behind a tree or something. I wanted them so badly to react like a person, and try to seek cover, or at least drop you know, and return fire.

CA – Yeah.

HF – Are we still going to get the Summit Strike discs?

BT – Yeah. It’s in there.

HF - Use of player names?

CA – As far as use of IFF?

HF – Yeah, you know how you can turn that off it in GR2.

CA – yeah, you will be able to turn it on and off whether it shows on the intel map. The only time enemies will show up on the intel map is when they are in view by your teammates just like in GR1or if the drone sees them and that is a server option that you can control – whether it only shows friendlies (it always shows friendlies).

HF – Is there any type of adjustments on the weapons, as far as being able to pick attachments and things like that?

CA – No. Not on this one. We’re going with pretty much the standard weapons style of GR1 and GR2.

HF – So no PEC2 functionality? You know that’s my pet peeve.

CA – No. They’re there, but there’s no functionality. With this one, a lot of it was just the technology and stuff, and focusing on multiplayer. Of course in the future…

HF – Do you use the side shuffle or the roll innovation when you’re prone?

CA – Roll is now a command, so you’ll side shuffle prone, and then if you want to, you hit the roll. So it’s kind of a combination. We kept the roll in there, because it is cool, but it’s a lot easier to use. A lot of times, people will accidentally roll all the time, when they meant to just side shuffle. So now you do a slow side shuffle, and then you hit a button.

HF – Did you get the rotation bug out of there?

CA – We haven’t even addressed that one yet. We’re still working on that kind of stuff, so…There are a couple of weird bugs that we got fixed.

HF – That one worked well though. You could just keep spinning around and tagging guys, you kept such a low profile, in some of the areas in a match, like on a hill, and they had to crest the hill, and if they didn’t have grenades, they were screwed, because you could just lay there and rotate with an M60 man, and just mow guys down.

HF – Is it the same animation of having to push the weapon down and pull a grenade, and throw it?

CA – Yeah. You have to change positions.

HF – That made pulling grenades a tactical decision, rather than “I’m just going to lob this out there” decision.

CA – Yeah. It’s the same to switch to a grenade; you have to holster your weapon. It’s a little bit faster now to pull your grenade. One of the problems we had was that this animation plus that animation was just really slow. Now the animation of pulling the grenade is a faster motion. You still have to holster your weapon, and pull your grenade out of your grenade pocket, but we’ve sped that up. No animation has been slowed down from what we captured. Things like reloading the M4 we had to slow down. It’s just too fast for the game in real life. The thing where I think it’s called a combat reload, where you reload your weapon before you’re out, and you still have a round in the chamber, is it actually faster than a regular reload.

HF – It should be because all you’re doing is dropping a mag and replacing a mag, you aren’t having to hit the slide release or anything.

CA – There are 2 different states, I’m not sure how they’re activated, but we have 2 different reload states, where you change the mag, hit the forward assist, and then we have the state where you just drop the mag and replace it.

HF – I’ll tell you what I saw that impressed me earlier, I saw one of the characters in the play test dive, and I saw his feet come up in the rear and I was surprised that that amount of detail had been paid to the game. I mean that was something that wasn’t even necessary for you guys to put in, and you did, and I thought, “Wow. I’m impressed.”

BT – I think that dive is going to come in handy.

RE - Yeah, you can dive too now. You can be running and dive.

HF – Well, we watched a guy kill a guy by running up towards him, they were shooting at each other, and he dove and went right past him, and rotated around and shot him. It was a humiliating moment for that guy, too. It was just like, “where the hell did he go?” He looked around and the guy was right down there and (sound of auto rifle), it was over. It was like being knifed in the old Soldier of Fortune games. You know, the humiliation knife kill.

BT – Never challenge those testers.

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