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Section 8 - Interview Part 1
- Monday, 27 July 2009
The great folks over at Timegate Studios were able to take some time out of their busy schedule and answer some of questions in a very interesting interview.
To those who don't know about Section 8 yet, Timegate and Southpeak Interactive have teamed up to create a new tactical first-person shooter set in the future that plays heavily on armor class, on-the-fly vehicle delivery, and gunplay. Here's our interview with Brett Norton, Lead Designer for Section 8.
- In regards to all the other big FPS games coming out this holiday
season (like ODST), why will Section 8 wipe the floor with them?
Our game, compared to a game like ODST, is about as far on the opposite
spectrum of the shooter genre as two shooters can get. There is a lot
of room for variety and uniqueness in the shooter genre, and we’re out
to prove that with Section 8.
The reality is that ODST is catering to existing Halo fans while we’re
going to inject some energy into the shooter genre at large. We are
doing a lot of features with Section 8 that just don’t exist in the
Halo franchise at all. We have full bot support in our Multiplayer and
Instant Action modes, and we are focusing on larger-scale conflicts, so
we’re going after segment of fans that have been ignored for a long
time. If ODST is considered great vanilla ice cream, Section 8 is like
delicious cookies & cream. Vanilla is tried and true and popular,
but a lot of people crave something different, and that’s what Section
8 will deliver.
Section 8 is going to have some incredible appeal, and gamers won’t go back to vanilla afterwards.
- What makes your game stand out? I mean, the market is already full of
well established titles. What will make gamers choose Section 8 over
them?
Section 8 is still a shooter and that is what you spend a lot of time
doing. But it’s what you’re doing when you’re not shooting, and the
things you can do to change your shooting situation, that make Section
8 special. You feel like you have so much more control over your fate
in Section 8 when compared to any other shooter. You’re never the
victim of a bad spawn location, never forced to fight at a chokepoint
you hate, etc.
One of our core features, burn-in spawning, is a great example. It’s a
true gameplay feature, not just a cinematic, with players hitting the
ground and attacking control points from a number of angles. Then you
have the counter-strategy of using deployable anti-air turrets to try
quarantining portions of the map. So you wind up with this great
back-and-forth for control of the burn-in airspace, and that’s a new
gameplay mechanic that can’t exist in other shooters. It adds a massive
amount of uniqueness and unpredictability to every battle.
Players are going to enjoy the fact that Section 8 really empowers
them. Section 8 isn’t about playing the game or the maps the way the
developers force them to be played; it’s about giving the players a ton
of new, fun tools to play the game they want to play it. Other shooters
just can’t compare to Section 8. We’re doing new features and creating
new gameplay where no other shooter has even tried.
- Could you explain the single player story a bit more, or that still under wraps for the time being?
The story mode that will ship with Section 8 explains some of the
details behind the conflict between the 8th Armored Infantry (nicknamed
“Section 8”) and the Arm of Orion. Section 8 takes place in the future
when humanity has begun colonizing the galaxy. Eventually, a splinter
faction that calls themselves the “Arm of Orion” appears on the
outermost reaches and begins to capture colonies with an unknown
motive. The 8th Armored Infantry, alongside new recruit Alex Corde, who
the player will control, is sent to investigate and quell this
resistance. However, they soon discover the Arm of Orion is
suspiciously much better equipped than first expected. We won’t go into
any further details, so you’ll have to play the story mode to unravel
the remaining mysteries surrounding the Arm of Orion.
- Are there any plans to do a 360 beta?
We are going to do an X360 demo, but we won’t be doing an X360 beta. The demo will be available sometime in the near future.
- What load-out do you personally like best?
I lean toward an odd combination of machine gun, pistol, knife and
repair tool. On top of that, I bulk up my armor passives and often take
some speed-increasing passives. I use this as a close-range fighter,
tearing through enemy armor very quickly and then running away and try
to repair. Plus, hilarious moments tend to happen when you sneak up
behind a group of people attacking a Control Point and knife them all
down.
The pistol also combos well with the machine gun (MG), as the MG’s
reload time is relatively long. So I switch to the pistol to finish off
people when the MG runs dry, unless they are in knife range. Then it’s
stab time.
- What are you trying to do with DCMs?
DCMs (Dynamic Combat Missions for those of you that don’t already
know!) are there to add some spicy variety to our core gametype. The
base gameplay uses a lot of capture-and-hold mechanics, but we didn’t
want that to be the only way to win the game. So we came up with the
DCM concept, which provides a way to really change how a given map
plays out. You have fixed control points, which are easy to memorize
and learn, and then you have your DCMs, which are not actually random,
but vary heavily from game to game.
The DCMs ensure that no two games ever play out in the same fashion.
One game you may get a Convoy escort mission, the next, a VIP
assassination mission. Each DCM has a benefit for completing it; if
you fail to assassinate the VIP, he’ll stick around and help the enemy
team defend their CPs. He is a beast, so it’s definitely in your
interest to take him out before he gets bunkered down inside an enemy
base.
There are a lot of other shooters out now that try to rotate or modify
objectives, but most of the time it’s just some arbitrary gametype
rotation. You’ll get an ‘assassinate’ objective and it will be
completed 2 seconds after it starts because the player you were
supposed to kill was nuked by some random grenade. We spent a lot of
time designing DCMs so stupid things like ‘objective can accidentally
complete itself immediately after starting’ don’t happen. When a DCM is
about to happen, there’s a lot of feedback that gives you a heads up on
where and how it’s about to go down. That, plus DCMs take a bit more
time to play out, so it’s not some instantaneous or trivial event that
you might see in other shooters.
That leads to a lot of great moments such as teams setting up traps for
key DCM targets. In our beta, people are using deployable rocket
turrets to ambush convoys as they drive into narrow areas. It turns
into a deadly game of cat-and-also-cat, where you are trying to
outsmart the guys driving the convoy, and they’re trying to predict
your traps and avoid them.
It is great gameplay, it is original, and it is player-driven. People
are going to look at the DCMs in Section 8 and go ‘oh, that’s how you
add variety to a shooter gametype without making it lame and weak.’
- Have you been able to fit all of your ideas into the game? If not, do
you plan to include them into a future Section 8 projects?
Section 8 is full with just about every major concept we wanted to get
in. We are really happy to have so many unique features in like
burn-in spawning, DCMs, jetpack, overdrive, etc. When we stopped and
looked at how much uniqueness Section 8 has compared to the
rinse-and-repeat that plagues the shooter genre nowadays, we were quite
happy with how bold everything turned out.
However, we had ideas for way more content than we could ever get done
in a single game. I think that’s a part of doing a new IP that is so
energizing. You want to shoot for the moon and the stars, but you have
to keep the schedule realistic so the game gets finished, polished and
bug free. You always wind up with a lot of ‘what ifs’ at the end.
Ultimately, we are extremely pleased with the feature set we’ll be
shipping with. As for the future of the franchise, well… that’s for
the future?
- How will patches work? Will it happen automatically?
Depending on your platform, they’re handled in different ways. X-Box
Live obviously handles patching on the X360. For PC, it’ll go through
Games for Windows Live.
- How long does it take to gain access all the content (weapons, vehicles, etc)?
When you level up in Section 8, you earn a new rank every few levels.
However, the game has more of a sandbox mentality, where we expose our
content at the get-go. That way you and your friends can jump in and
have access to the same gear, regardless of how long you’ve been
playing.
This comes from our belief that the fun in Section 8 truly lies in
trying out a lot of different combinations and gear. We don’t have 5
weapons that are all just different assault rifle skins, each weapon
really serves a very different role in combat situations. Couple that
with the selection of different equipment and you have a deep set of
tools available right off the bat.
Trying to squirrel away that content would hurt that goal. We know that
other shooters like to lockdown a lot of the content, parceling it out
through unlocks, or restricting it so it doesn’t show up on a lot of
the maps, but we wanted a really fun jump-in-and-jump out game. You
don’t have to grind levels to get to your favorite gear and you don’t
have to try and jump into a specific gametype or map. We let you run
rampant through our gear and vehicles from the first moment, and we
think gamers will love that freedom.
Section 8’s content pool is so varied that it’s going to take some time
to master it all. We put enough different toys in that it’s really
going to keep people playing for a while before they have a chance to
just try everything out, much less having to worry about grinding up
levels just to get to that gear in the first place. We don’t need to
force replayability through level grinds, because we created it through
deep gameplay instead.
- Do you plan to release new weapons, modules at certain intervals?
It is something we’re definitely looking into. We have a lot of
content ideas but aren’t prepared to make any official announcements on
this yet.
- What is the primary gametype in Section 8?
We went with one core gametype for Section 8, because many of the
gametype rules you see in things like capture-the-flag wind up being
present in our DCMs. We put a lot of variety into the DCMs, and
layered those on top of the core Conquest gameplay, to make something
really special.
As a result, the core gametype winds up being really deep. There is
just so much stuff to try that there is no way you can really tear
through it all in only a couple of hours.
Basically, instead of having 10 different gametypes that you’d spend
maybe 30 minutes playing (each), we have one super-deep gametype that
will keep you enthralled for a long, long time. Many shooter
developers are stuck in the mentality of ‘we need to have at least X
gametypes or we won’t have enough depth’. That’s true if each gametype
is only deep enough to keep you entertained for an hour or so.
With Section 8, you’re not going to even come close to seeing
everything in a single hour. Our sole gametype is deep enough that it
keeps sucking you back in, like a black hole or whirlpool. That was
our goal with Section 8 from the get-go, and we’re sure that we’ve made
a gametype that will stand the test of time.
- If you could choose 1 thing that you liked most about the game, what would it be?
Ouch, tough call. That’s like asking a parent to pick a favorite
child. I’ll say that my favorite thing is something subtle: the
pacing. Section 8’s pacing is amazing, largely in thanks to burn-in
spawning and overdrive. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with the
scope and scale of something like Section 8, where you have big maps
and tons of players running around, but it feels just as intense as a
smaller-scale game.
There’s no real downtime in the game. You’re either on the ground
duking it out, or you’re burning-in over a hotspot, trying to get that
achievement for landing on someone. Even if the fight moves to another
hotspot, you punch in overdrive and head over there quickly, looking
for people to ram the whole way (yea, you can damage people by ramming
them in overdrive). You’re pretty much a weapon in every possible
moment in Section 8, so it keeps you constantly focused on the struggle.
There’s just never any boredom or waiting. It’s a large-scale shooter,
but we’ve avoided the pitfall of large-scale translating into slow,
boring pacing. I’m really, really happy about that.
Be sure to check out the additional parts of our interview with Timegate in the coming weeks!
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I cant wait for game to come out.