How the Brothers in Arms Team Created a New Kind of Gameplay

I often hear it said that there isn't enough innovation in the game industry. On the whole I have to agree. One of the reasons that innovation is such a rare and precious thing is that for game development companies, innovation is hard. Really hard.

 

It takes courage for a team to strike out on its own and do something different from what other developers are doing. It takes perseverance, because whenever you try new things, they often don't work out the first time. It takes artistic honesty, because often an idea you think might be good really isn't all that good, and facing up to that fact is hard.

 

Finally, it takes teamwork. No great modern game is created by a "lone genius" who spews creativity while the rest of the team executes his or her ideas. Great games must be imagined and built by a team of people working together, supporting each other, working off each others' ideas and complementing each others' talents and abilities. By working together, a team with courage, perseverance, and honesty can create something much greater than any one of the members could make on their own.

That is exactly what happened with Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30.

Grand Goals

When we began development on Brothers in Arms, the team at Gearbox established some ambitious goals for ourselves. We said we would make an intense, accessible first person action game that existing FPS players would be able to pick up and love. But we didn't want to make "just another FPS". We wanted this game to be authentic and true to the real men who fought in World War II. And along with that, we wanted to give the player (and ourselves!) the opportunity to experience what it was really like to lead a squad.

 

This meant we had to do something no game had ever really succeeded in doing. We had to find a way to give the player command over a squad without a complicated command interface. Right away, we said No! to menus, No! to complicated button combinations, No! to having to select from a variety of options every time you wanted to issue a command. We set ourselves an ambitious goal; Make a game where you can command a squad, but where commanding is as immediate and accessible as the first person shooter experience that surrounds it.

 

 

The BiA Interface you know and love

 

 

At first we had no idea how we were going to pull this off. But the Gearbox team had done some pretty amazing things before, and we were confident we would find a solution. Given enough courage, perseverance, and honesty, creativity always wins the day.

 

As it turned out, it took nearly a year of discussion, prototyping, player feedback, and experimentation to find the right design. It took almost two more years of implementing the interface and AI, filling in the details, and refining the "fun factor" - along with production of all the art, audio, programming, and levels that goes into a major AAA title-before the game was ready to launch. I won't lie: it was a long and difficult process and it tested the mettle of everyone on the team more than once. But the results - rave reviews, appreciative customers, and outstanding sales - have made it absolutely worthwhile.

 

Founded in Fact

Early in the process of making Brothers in Arms, Gearbox made contact with Col. John Antal who was at that time the G3 of III Corp in the US Army. Over the course of several months, John educated us on soldiering, history, and military tactics.

 

One of the things that struck us early on was that squad leadership and tactics are really not all that complicated. When all is said and done, squad tactics essentially come down to the two-fisted approach of "Suppress and Flank." The leader directs one of his teams to suppress the enemy by laying down heavy fire. This causes the enemy to take cover and get their heads down. The leader then commands his other team to move quickly to the enemies' flank and from there to destroy the enemy. General George S. Patton described the tactic like this: "We're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're gonna kick him in the ass."

 

As we began to realize how simple it really is, it made us wonder why previous games with command systems had always been so complicated. And it began to suggest a new approach to giving the player the power to command.

 

In the fall of 2002, Col. Antal led the Gearbox team on a weekend field training exercise we call the FTX. Here, we got a taste of what it's like to be a soldier. For a day, we trained in squad maneuvers and basic soldiering. Then, on the second day we took part in a series of paintball battles staged to resemble real World War II encounters. We were divided into squads, each with its own leaders, and physically carried out the Suppress and Flank tactics we had previously learned about.

 

It was an eye-opening experience. And afterward we crawled back to the Gearbox offices tired, bruised, and sore, but full of new ideas about how to make a fun, accessible squad command system.

 

Detours and Dead Ends

Our quest to design a powerful, accessible command solution led us down quite a few alleyways and back roads. All of these ideas started out with great promise but ultimately fell short and had to be abandoned.

 

 

Whiteboard scribbles from an early design meeting

 

 

An interesting solution we began considering fairly early in the process was a design we called the Rail system. In this design, the player would have two teams. His primary team would remain always with the player - he could not command them at all. The secondary team would follow a "rail" through the level. The rail was an invisible, pre-scripted path that the secondary team would always stay on, which would be set up by the level designer. The player could command the secondary team to "move up" or "fall back" along the rail, but could not issue any other orders.

 

In hindsight this sounds artificial and simplistic, but it actually does accomplish the goals of providing squad leadership and tactics with a very simple interface. The player can use his secondary team as a base of fire against the enemy while he takes his primary team around to attack the enemy's flank. In this rudimentary way, the Rail system supported Suppress and Flank tactics. In a way, the solution made the player's command task more accessible by giving the level designer part of the responsibility for commanding the secondary team. But in the end, we found an even better solution that is more authentic, allows the player more control, and yet is at least as accessible as the Rail system.

Another solution we experimented with was Tactical Decision Mode. TDM, as we called it, was a precursor to the Situational Awareness View that actually did end up in the game.

 

The metaphor behind Tactical Decision Mode was that of a football game. Video football games are tactical games in a way. The player has a team full of athletes that he must command to "fix" and "flank" the enemy. Football games give the player control by allowing him to choose from a variety of plays, which his AI characters then act out when the action begins.

 

So we took that metaphor and tried to apply it to a WWII squad combat game. When the player began an encounter, we paused the game, brought the camera out of the player's head and up to an aerial view of the battlefield. There, we presented the player with tactical information about the battle to come: the position of known enemy troops, landmine fields, obstacles, enemy armor, and so forth. Then we offered the player a selection of different "plays" that his squad might execute. Once he chose one, the camera would return to his head, the action would resume, and his squad would carry out the play he had selected.

 

For example, in one situation, the player might be offered these options.

• The player takes his team around to the left which is clear of mines.
• The player takes his team up the middle in an immediate charge.
• The player takes his team around to the right where there are mines but the enemy is not well-protected.

If the player's attack failed he could start the encounter over and choose a different tactical option.

 

 

The abandoned Tactical Decision Mode interface

 

 

Again, this design was driven by the desire for a simple, accessible command system that did not slow down or disrupt the intense first person shooter action we wanted to deliver. But the design was haunted by an underlying question that we never could quite answer: How does the player know what "play" is best?

 

In the end, it turns out that a solution we had rejected early in the design process proved to be the best of the lot. After we had tried several other solutions, we brought this one out, brushed off the dust, and prototyped it. We knew as soon as we tried it that this was it. This is what we, as gamers, had always wanted to play.

 

Situational Awareness Mode

 

Command at the Touch of a Trigger

The solution we settled on was what we called at the time the "FireCommand" system. The metaphor here was that just as your right trigger (on the Xbox and PS2) fires your gun, your left trigger fires your squad.

 

At any given moment, the player's squad consists of two fire teams of up to four soldiers each. Each fire team can be commanded separately. The player chooses which fire team to command with the Team Selection button - which varies depending on what platform you're playing on. Then, the player issues a command to that team by pressing the FireCommand Trigger and then releasing it.

 

The FireCommand Trigger causes the player's Command Ring to appear in the world where the player is looking, for as long as the button is held down. While the Ring is visible, the player can move it through the world. This allows the player to choose as carefully or quickly as he likes where to direct his men.

 

There are three different orders that the player can issue and choosing between them is so intuitive, most players are barely conscious they're doing it. When the FireCommand button is released, if the Command Ring is on the ground a Move order is issued. If it's over an enemy a Suppress order is issued. And if the player presses the Fire button while the Command Ring is over an enemy, an Assault order is issued.

 

 

Squad Command in Action

 

 

Simple? Yes. And yet this command system is also very authentic. With these three, simple commands a player can lead his squad through authentic military tactics.

 

The Move order tells the fire team to take up a combat position near the location the player indicates. Part of what makes Brothers in Arms play so well is that these AI soldiers are smart and professional. They don't need to be told exactly where to place their feet as the AI characters in many previous games have required. In Brothers in Arms, your soldiers know what to do. It's just up to you to tell them when and where to do it.

 

The Suppress order tells the fire team to lay down a heavy barrage of fire on an enemy position. This causes the enemy to get their heads down. Once the enemy is suppressed, the player can use his dominance of the battlefield to maneuver his squad or mount an assault.

 

The Assault order is the killing blow. This directs the fire team to charge the enemy with grenades flying and guns blazing. The smart leader makes sure the enemy is suppressed before issuing this command because charging an alert, responsive enemy means death. He also makes sure that his assaulting team approaches from the enemy's flank - that is, from his side or to his rear. That's important for many reasons, not least of which is that it offers the chance to surprise the enemy and circumvent his cover.

The FireCommand Trigger design was just what we had been searching for. It was easy for players to use and didn't break the flow of the action. And yet it gave the player tremendous power to direct his squad in authentic military maneuvers.

 

Risk and Reward

Of course, everything is easy in hindsight. Now the world knows that Gearbox succeeded in delivering a new kind of gameplay when we launched Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 earlier this year.

But when we started, we had no idea how to do it or whether we could pull it off. There were thousands of potential design options to consider and a million things that could have gone wrong. We faced those challenges because we were driven to breathe fresh life into the first person shooter genre, which often seems so stale. We did it because we are avid gamers ourselves and we wanted something new to play. And we did it because we knew - or hoped we knew - that players would love it too.

 

There were several occasions when we really wondered whether we would ever make it to the finish line. Our courage was tested. Sometimes we wondered whether we shouldn't just throw in the towel. Our perseverance was tested. And sometimes we got discouraged when an idea we thought was great turned out not to be good enough. Our artistic honesty was tested.

But we stuck with it, and the gamble paid off. For the Brothers in Arms team, taking the risk to be creative and innovative was worth it.