There is violence in Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway.

The weapons that were used in 1944; that are featured in our game, were horrible things. They can tear a body apart. If a bullet hits a head it will break the skull into pieces. It’s terrifying.

As game-makers we wanted to find a way to show the physical effect these weapons could have on people, but also the emotional effect they had on soldiers.

When we were doing our research we spent a lot of time with WWII veterans. One of the things that came up frequently, from the guys who lived through it all, is a paradoxical reaction to all that violence.

One veteran told us a story about how his buddy was hit and killed next to him. His own weapon had failed mechanically and, trying to survive, he grabbed his dead comrade’s gun. It too wouldn’t work, because brain-matter and bone tissue from his buddy was in the reach of the weapon. He had to clean that out.

When he’s telling us this story you begin to glimpse how grim it must have been. You see it in his face as he tells the story.

But later, describing the death of people at greater distances, perhaps the enemy, his tone and his inflection changes. These are less personal stories because it’s something that happened to someone who is not his brother in the foxhole next to him. And although they have similar graphics the feeling changes. There’s almost like an awe or impressiveness of what is going on, of the effects of the weapons and of the situation they’re in.

Humans are put into these incredibly stressful situations, and this is how they deal with them. When we see extreme violence on one level we know we’re messed up by it but on another strange level it has a horrifying and gross power that is outside our normal experience.

Our mission when we made the game is to show that war is a serious business.

When we first approached veterans to get their input on the game, it was tough. When we first told them we wanted to make a game they said, ‘yeah we’ve seen what people are doing with war in videogames and we hate it and it’s embarrassing and it’s not helping’.

We explained that we wanted to do it right. We were asking for their help. When they saw what we were trying to do, they got behind us and I can’t tell you how important their input has been in our approach to the game’s story and to how we deal with issues like the extreme violence of war.

There’s a feature in the game - an action camera that’s a cinematic technique that we borrowed from the sort of films that want to make sure that the impact of whatever they’re capturing reaches you.

So, for example, if you order your Bazooka Team to take out a sandbag emplacement and it hits just right, the camera will push in slightly and you’ll see the damage and sometimes the carnage that you’ve caused.

(I want to stress here that this option can be switched off, because it’s not for everyone.)

Some people will feel the realism of it, the impact that we wanted to convey; others will enjoy the stickiness of it, and some others will not like it, and will want to switch it off,  because this is meaningful stuff, a simulation of what happened out there.

Questions about how we, as game makers and games players, deal with situations and feelings like these are not going to get easier, they’re going to get harder. We’re going to discover things that test us - how do I feel about this? How should I feel about this?

That’s going to be something that each of us, when we perceive it, will have to deal with in our own way.  This is an interactive experience and it’s going to affect us.

 Monsters Wake Up

Brothers in Arms is a game. One of the things those veterans appreciated is that it isn’t just another Quake dressed in a World War II skin. It’s a tactical shooter using actual military tactics —suppress the enemy, find a flank, pin them down, reduce your own risk. It’s about using your mind and not just your aiming skill.

We didn’t want to create a game in which you walk into the room and all the monsters wake up and start running around. WWII is a world of humans who care about their own lives. Using the other soldiers around you, your squad, is absolutely central to survival in combat situations and it is central to the game.

Sometimes I’ll play the game and will find myself alone, and it drives home how much I need to be around the squad. Whenever I’m the only one responsible for killing the enemy it just feels mundane, it feels like that boring shooter that I’ve played a million times that everybody else is making. The tactical elements of the game are what make it most interesting.

People enjoy Brothers in Arms for the immersive story, for the promise of squad combat, for authenticity and for the re-creation of this brotherhood between soldiers.

It’s this idea that when you’re in it, when you’re being tested, how do you survive and how do you kill the enemy? It’s not about duty or honor or country or all that; it’s about the guy next to you and it’s about passing the test.

The storytelling and the gameplay works with those emotional ideas that came to us from the veterans.

In one case we were with a guy from the 101st Airborne in Market Garden as well as a Fallschirmsjäger, a German paratrooper who was on the opposite side in Market Garden. The two of them and some of us walked the battlefields where, more than 50 years ago, they’d been trying to kill each other.

Working with those guys has been an incredible and enriching experience. I hope we’ve done them justice in our game.