In an interview with Gamasutra, the multiplayer design lead for THQ's upcoming team shooter Homefront explained the team's part of the approach to PC support.
I mean obviously an extreme example of structuring shooter development is Medal of Honor, where DICE did the multiplayer and the single player game was done at EA LA. How did you organize your development in terms of structure?
ED: Kaos is doing both multiplayer and single player, the only thing that we're outsourcing is the PC platform. We have Digital Extremes off in Ontario working on that, and that's really so that that platform can really hit on the key parts of the experience that are important to the PC audience. And we're supporting things like dedicated servers hosted by users on PC, we're supporting things like server browsers -- things that the PC player really wants. In terms of single player and multiplayer, we really share all the base technology and all the assets, all that is the same stuff. As the player goes through the single player experience, they're really learning how to use all these weapons and getting familiar with the controls, and then they can jump right into multiplayer.
More snippets from the interview:
When you approach it from a design perspective, do you draw inspiration from other sources?
ED: We absolutely look at the competitive landscape, and what other people are doing. We also try and find some new things that we can bring to our game. We've shown off the battle point system, which is a new innovation we're trying to do. It allows players to make strategic choices on the fly -- while they're on the battlefields. Part of our philosophy is we want to keep you in the action, we want to keep the pace of the game really high. We don't want you to sit around, waiting for a vehicle to spawn, we don't want you to have to run really long distances, we want to get you into the action quickly.
It sounds like your approach is somewhere in between more hardcore titles like Battlefield and something more casual, as if you are trying to ride that line between the two.
ED: Absolutely. Yeah, we want to hit a real mainstream audience, and make sure the players can jump in the game and start having fun right away. This is not the kind of game where you're going to have to spend hours learning how to fly a helicopter. This is the kind of game where you jump in, you can use the controls immediately and you start having fun right away. And then as you start playing the game you kind of start to encounter those second level systems to get more depth out of a vehicle or mechanic.
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