Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 Q&A - Final Thoughts

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is already one of the more anticipated first-person shooters of 2005. Like HBO's acclaimed miniseries Band of Brothers, Brothers in Arms follows the true story of American paratroopers during the Normandy invasion of 1944. But what makes the game so intriguing is that in addition to its attention to historical detail and authenticity it is a completely new kind of shooter, one where your brains are just as important as your reaction times. The Xbox version of Brothers in Arms actually began shipping to stores this week, with the PC and PlayStation 2 versions set to follow next week. So with the game in the process of hitting shelves, we caught up with Randy Pitchford, the president of developer Gearbox Software, as well as the executive producer and director of the game.

Brothers in Arms puts you in the boots of an elite paratrooper, so suck it up and get the job done.

GameSpot: Now that the Xbox version of the game is out, tell us how you think the game turned out. What will Xbox players most enjoy about the game, online and offline?

Randy Pitchford: Brothers in Arms is probably the best game I've ever worked on. There are a few things that make it stand out above all other games like it. First of all, the game is based on a true story, so the authenticity of Brothers in Arms is really unparalleled. The development team rebuilt Normandy as it was in 1944 to the level where you could go to the real places and everything will be familiar. You can recognize the houses, the roads, the battlefields. It's quite remarkable.

Another reason that I think resonates with people are the characters and the story. There's a real brotherhood between soldiers, and Brothers in Arms captures that like no other wargame before it. Other games tend to emphasize duty and honor, and those are important concepts, but when you really spend time with veterans who were in the thick of it and you talk to them about what mattered, they tend to come back to the same kinds of sentiments about how important it was for them to have the respect of the guy next to them, to not let them down. That concept of brotherhood became a really consistent and important theme as we became immersed in this stuff. So, in Brothers in Arms, you really get the sense that you're "one of the guys" in this real squad of 101st Airborne paratroopers. The technology supports this effort when you see the expressions on these soldiers' faces and how their eyes track you when you meet with them or how you can almost see the pain on their face when they see a buddy get hit and go down. The other thing that helps is how much these men have to say about each other and what's going on around them. Their personalities really come through and they become memorable.

Also, the gameplay is very unique in that Brothers in Arms successfully transcends the standard run-and-gun approach most shooting games offer. Brothers in Arms integrates actual fire-and-move tactics with a unique, easy-to-use, and fun squad command system. The system is very natural and very strong, partially because it was created under the guidance of Colonel John Antal, US Army, retired. We've played a couple of the other games that have attempted some kind of squad command, and it's really obvious when you play those games that they were designed and implemented by game makers, without any meaningful influence from real soldiers who know what real squad leadership is all about. Colonel Antal helped us make it authentic and natural, while our game developers were able to make it accessible and functional. It really turned out amazingly, and I'm quite excited to release this new design with the game.

GS: How did focusing the game on tactics and squad artificial intelligence change the development process from a typical, heavily scripted single-player game that relies on triggers and special events? How do you feel this approach--a focus on tactics rather than on being guided through the game--has worked out in practice?

RP: The development process was expensive and time consuming. It took several prototypes and lots of attempts that didn't work out. When we finished them, we had to have the courage to acknowledge that the failed attempts were not good enough so we could throw them away and start again. That is really difficult, not just because of the cost, but because when you start with ideas, you believe in them, and that makes them harder to let go. It took a lot of discipline and experience to keep trying until we got it right.

Of course, we could have pumped out another standard shooter like everyone else is doing. But our objective was to put you in the boots of one of these squad leaders and to make it feel right. We didn't want the experience to feel like taking a ride on "It's a Small World," where you basically are on a rail and all these automatons move and talk around you. I like other World War II shooters, but we all have to acknowledge that they're basically as scripted as a Disneyland ride and not as interactive as we dream about.

You'll enjoy all the sights of Normandy without actually having to go to France.

For Brothers in Arms, we insisted upon having a dynamic and plausible system--one that was not scripted, but allowed the soldiers on both sides to care for their lives, act and react to the interesting and real combat puzzles. To do that, we had to come up with a system that was consistent with real-life fire-and-move concepts, but very easy to use. The system had to respect the chain of command so that you're not micromanaging each guy but giving general intent to your fireteam leaders about where you want to lay down a base of fire to suppress the enemy and on which flank you want to hit them with another team.

The system had to assume that the men behave like real, trained soldiers. They had to be fully capable of engaging the enemy, covering each other, finding cover for themselves, and getting good firing positions to engage from. We programmed them with logic that respects the standard operating procedures and battle drills these men were actually trained with.