As a kid, I was nuts about John Milius’ film Red Dawn. In the year of its release, 1984, I was eleven years old and already a veteran of dozens of neighborhood skirmishes between the “commies” and the “Americans.” Our neighborhood was on the edge of a patch of undeveloped land that stood in nicely for a battlefield, and many a long summer afternoon was spent hiding in the brush clutching a plastic Uzi or M-16 waiting for the sound of a passing patrol.
These days, I no longer run around the woods with a toy gun, but I do spend a lot of my free time waging war on my XBOX 360, so when I heard about Homefront, a new first-person shooter from Kaos Studios set in a future America occupied by Korean forces, I had to know more - especially when I learned that Milius was involved in the project. Kaos Studios Creative Director and General Manager David Votypka was happy to tell me a little bit about the world of Homefront and what it’s like to work with one of the entertainment industry’s most enduring talents.
What's Homefront all about?
Homefront is a first-person shooter that is heavily defined by its game world and fictional premise. We began with real world events and extrapolated those into the year 2027, to create a vision of what a partially occupied United States would be like to experience. That is where Homefront begins, and we’ve focused a great deal of effort on crafting that world as deeply as possible to really give the player a sense of it.
The concept sounds reminiscent of John Milius' Red Dawn, which as a kid in the eighties was a huge favorite of mine, and working with Milius, I must have imagined it would be an inspiration. Was it? Also, were there other movies and books that influenced the development of the game?
It most certainly was an inspiration and an unexpected one as well. Red Dawn was a film I watched as a teenager and one that stayed with me over the years. What grabbed me about it was seeing the world’s most powerful country, with its familiar, safe, peaceful and sleepy small town streets now overrun by foreign invaders. Most Westerners are used to the idea of war and occupation only happening to countries overseas, so the concept of invasion happening in the U.S.A. made it that much more of an engaging idea.
We began crafting the concept and early on in the process Danny Bilson joined THQ as the head of the Product Development department. In one of our early meetings Danny said that John Milius was his mentor and writing teacher, and would I like to have him on the game? As you can probably imagine I could hardly believe my ears considering that Red Dawn was one of the initial inspirations. Funny how things in life come full circle sometimes.
As for other films that influenced Homefront, there are bits and pieces of film and documentary here and there, but one influence was certainly Children of Men. The America in Homefront really has trended downward into a dystopian society in many ways, and the environment has also degraded and changed. Children of Men had many great examples of the themes we wanted to convey in the game world, from the overall vibe of the civilians, to analyzing their shanty town and abandonment sets for how people would live and adapt in such a world.
I've been a fan of John Milius for some time, and I can't imagine what it must have been like to work with him. Can you talk a little more about that?
Working with John was something that I can truly say I’ll never forget, and was an invaluable career experience. It began with him coming down to the studio for the day to go over our goals while we worked together to write the game’s storyline. My first impression was being a bit surprised on just how much time we ended up spending listening to him tell us all sorts of stories. His knowledge of military history is astounding, and he would talk at length about various historical situations ranging from Alexander the Great to Vietnam, to his experiences working on various films and with various actors and directors. At first I wondered if we might not be spending enough time speaking about the specifics of the game, but after a while I realized that all the different stories and examples eventually tied together in educating us on what John felt went into the makeup of a civilian guerrilla resistance.
One day meeting with John would produce more ideas than we could possibly use, but whittling it down to the best ones made the game much better, and it had a much more convincing tone to it than it would have had without him. For example, he gave us guidance such as using The Grapes of Wrath as a reference for the small group of characters we had in the game, and the tone of their existence and their motivations in a troubled time. He guided us to simplify the ideas to focus on core, raw, animal, emotions and motivations, because every human stems from those roots.
He was also always absolutely decisive even with the most subjective and creative decisions and his opinions of them. I asked him once what sort of criteria he uses to determine whether an idea or concept is good or not? His reply was that there is no formula, that the best creative people just “know”; they’re either born with it or their not, and that there is only so much that can be taught and learned.
The first-person shooter market is a crowded one, and one that seems dominated by a couple of major franchises - Call of Duty and Halo. How does Homefront set itself apart from the pack?
When designing Homefront, we wanted a game that felt different from the other modern combat military shooters without breaking from the formula that makes these games so successful. We decided early on to push most of our emphasis on our storytelling and fiction, while sticking with tried and tested mechanics and features that our audience already knows and loves. So what really makes this game so different is the emphasis on the civilians, the non-combatants and how they are affected by the war. How real people (not trained soldiers) would behave in combat situations. Much of this is realized via the dialog and character interactions throughout the game. It results in a game that, while familiar in game mechanics, is unlike anything you have ever experienced before in terms of its story and character interactions.
What has the development process been like? How long did it take for this to go from initial concept to final product?
All in, the development of the game spans about three years. The concept of an invaded/occupied America is something that I’ve personally been thinking about as a game since we opened Kaos (almost 6 years ago), but we didn’t get started on crafting that idea until after we shipped Frontlines. There has been a lot of input on the concept from various people, but the core idea was that we wanted to answer the ‘what if’ question of: “what if America was occupied?” What would it be like to experience that future? Creating a piece of speculative fiction based on that question, that then takes familiar America and twists it with the themes of the game, was the core guiding principle from the very beginning.
What will the multiplayer component be like? Any surprises there?
Multiplayer is a huge focus for this product. While single player focuses very much on the story and game world, multiplayer is where we’ve put a great deal of focus on evolving FPS gameplay systems, and bringing some fresh and unique innovations to the table. Large scale warfare is the core tenet of the multiplayer game, meaning a mix of infantry, vehicles, drones, and a large number of players wreaking havoc on dedicated servers.
Some of our key gameplay innovations/surprises are systems like Battle Points and Battle Commander. Battle Points is an in-match economy where essentially everything you do has a value reward to it, and you earn points for your actions. You can then utilize these points to buy infantry weapons and even drones, or save up to spawn into powerful vehicles. The great thing about the system is that it creates a constant spend-or-save decision making loop, or in other words, on-the-fly strategic choices throughout the match. It also makes every action very incentivizing because, for example, capturing an objective will now benefit you directly, and allow you to acquire more powerful gear.
Battle Commander is a second innovation that we are bringing to the table which is an A.I. commander that monitors player actions on the battlefield, and makes both allies and enemies aware of priority threats. For example, if an enemy sniper gets several kills in a row, the enemy commander will flag him as a priority threat to a small number of players on the opposite team. Those players/hunters will have BattlePoints incentives and rewards if they take him out. At the same time, the sniper’s own commander recognizes his value, and will provide various buffs to keep him alive. As the sniper racks up more kills, while being hunted, his threat level will rise. It begins at a one-star threat and increases to a maximum of five. A five-star priority threat player will have the entire enemy team assigned to take him out, but will also be getting great buffs, Battle Point rewards, and a high level of adrenaline and some bragging rights.
In a nutshell, this system does a few things that can get really exciting. First, it takes large scale warfare and makes it personal. In a 32 player match there are now personalized engagements that are created based on various, dynamic events. An individual kill-streak is one, drones get on streaks, and players can even team up in vehicles and have their vehicle become a priority threat that also receives buffs to help the vehicle stay alive. It also extends to making spawn campers a priority threat, and a player that repeatedly kills you becomes your nemesis and provides you a Battle Point reward for taking that player out.
Both of these systems not only work really well together, but they also help make the multiplayer game accessible to a wider range of gamers, while still providing reward and value to the hardcore player as well.
There's already a Homefront novel on shelves. Is it almost expected these days that any game needs to have collateral products like this to be successful? Will there be more?
Danny Bilson drove a lot of this side of things, but in my opinion the idea of a novel and other potential trans-media for Homefront was less of a need, and more of an opportunity. We spent a lot of time and effort on the backstory and the game world, and combined with the core idea of an occupied USA, we ended up with something that is very fertile from a creative standpoint. There are so many interesting ideas to explore and stories to tell that we couldn’t do it all in one FPS, so trans-media is a great opportunity to evolve the depth of the game world that gamers then get to play in and explore.
Will you guys be supporting Homefront with downloadable content?
Yes, absolutely.
I can't help but notice that Homefront is being released at a rather appropriate time: tensions between North and South Korea haven't been this high since the cease fire that halted the Korean War. Now, obviously that wasn't a marketing consideration here, but what is it like to have a title that plays with the idea of a Korean invasion at a time like this?
Well it’s been very ironic how things have played out. The first two times we showed the game to the public, at E3 2009 and E3 2010, North Korea started saber rattling and performing nuclear missile tests, getting themselves into the news. Their timing was really uncanny. More recently there was additional conflict between North and South Korea, and around that time we understandably started receiving questions about the game premise and current events. Ultimately the game is a piece of fiction, loosely based off of a regime in North Korea that has been publicly vehement toward America and the West since the Korean War. All we’ve done is taken the reality of that stance and extrapolated from that for the game. We of course, like everyone, hope for peace on the Korean peninsula.
[gallery link="file"]
