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The first person shooter has become very regimented in the fact that all the mechanics work around cover-point.
We really wanted to make a game that was about movement. The fact that the player has to move and has to move in open spaces is a fresh style of gameplay in first person shooters. It’s pretty amazing to me that people don’t do more of this sort of gameplay.
The mythical creatures in the game are coming after the player very aggressively. They’re walking on the walls, the ceilings, they’re making themselves hard targets while they come after the player. That forces the player to move.
It’s how you can break a player out of what first person shooters have become, which is just a forward progression of fifty feet by fifty feet, moving forward, taking a new position of cover, shooting weapons, taking out enemies at cover, moving forward, triggering another new set of enemies at cover…
We watch players go through a learning curve when they first play Legendary. They start to register that they need to worry about what’s at the side of them and what’s behind them because they’re going to have to move back into that space. With Legendary you really develop those new muscles of using the entire game world again and not just moving forward like in other first person shooters.
Engineering Challenges
This style of gameplay posed significant design, AI and engineering challenges. It’s actually a challenge to make a melee creature that is going to give a player sufficient trouble, without completely over-powering him.
In general, most of the time in these games, you get pop up targets. They’ll come straight at the player, maybe they’ll have one or two moves but that’s basically it. There’s just not a lot of effort going into their pathing because they go after the player real quick.
But we really wanted our melee creatures to have an intelligence about them, a real life and personality, and so we give them really strong abilities and pathing.
They can path on the walls and the ceilings and they can jump distances. They also know all the objects of the world so they know they can bash through a wall or they can throw a monitor or a TV.
It gives them the ability to be a challenge to the player and it gives them a real weight and presence in the world which for me is really important.
I get tired of the fact that the player alone feels control and feels like the world is theirs to manipulate. The AIs need to be invested with some of that same ability, which adds to the illusion of life.
If the creatures path around objects that I can move like they’re rooted in space and they don’t even acknowledge them it disconnects them from the world. But if you give them the ability to react to those same objects and use them against you and to change the environment in front of you, it really makes for a fun, alive creature.
Design Challenges
On the design side it is a challenge because you really have to do a lot of play testing to make sure that the player has adequate abilities to compensate for getting backed up by enemies.
That’s why we added the animus pulse, which is a special offensive ability to give the player the chance to knock back these creatures, maybe get out of a corner or buy themselves a crucial second or two to reload a weapon. In play testing we’re always looking for those places that people get hung up on.
Because this is a different kind of FPS experience, we don’t want people to simply think it’s just more difficult. We’ve made sure the player can get out of trouble when those creatures are right in his face, shaking up the camera. We’ve given the player alternatives to just looking for cover.
We’ve also taken a lot of steps to change the focus - the experiencial intensity of the action – to break it up.
We like to mix up the way the action is taking place so that the player gets these respites. It’s how you can really battle player fatigue and get somebody to go from playing a half hour or an hour and having fun but wanting to stop - to going three or four hours and being up until two or three in the morning and going wow, where’d that time go?
The Combat Triangle
Another gameplay element is the combat triangle. You’re having to take on both human enemies (known as The Black Order), as well as the creatures and you’re having to make constant value judgments of which enemy is the better target for me at this moment - when both of them are attacking you and each other.
When the creatures die it allows Decker, the main character, to absorb animus, which is the life force of the creatures. He can use that to heal himself but he can also use that for an offensive animus pulse that allows him to knock those creatures back. He has both the defensive healing mechanism and an offensive.
The catch is that it’s always manual; you’re not just automatically going to get healed. You have to choose to heal yourself because you may want to use that ability offensively.
What this does is creates a really nice dynamic in our combat triangle of you versus creatures versus Black Order that once again reinforces constant value judgment that the player has to make. You get health from creatures and not humans but you get ammo from humans and not creatures so the player is constantly having to decide what’s most important strategically, or just to stay alive.
In Conclusion
We’ve had more time on this game then we’ve had on our other games. We’ve been working on it for three years, and we’ve been playing through the game in its entirety since last September.
That polish time makes a big difference. We’ve also worked on a lot of AI systems - much more then we’ve done before in our games, and it’s allowed us to invest in the behaviors of the creatures.
This is one of those rare times where people really, really believe and fight hard for what they believe in and the arguments and the conflict we’ve had here is really healthy and good conflict because it was everybody fighting to make the game great.
With Legendary we have had a crystal clear direction on that from the very beginning, we focused on the creatures and the actions of the creatures and bringing them to life, and putting ourselves in a unique space in the first person shooter market.
Our game is not about a space marine or a military soldier, it’s a unique environment with unique challenge and we’ve really taken that to heart and gone after it.
Call of Duty: Finest Hour was actually a pretty good game and I’m proud of what we did there. But I know this one is better and I look forward to everyone getting a chance to play it for themselves.