Bet on Soldier Designer Diary #1 - Why Bet on Soldier?

Imagine Counter-Strike if it were set in a dark future where megacorporations rule the world and mercenaries battle it out on television for fame and fortune, and you'll have an idea of what the upcoming first-person shooter Bet on Soldier is like. The debut game from France's Kylotonn studio, Bet on Soldier promises to be a fast-paced shooter in which you play as a star mercenary looking to get revenge on the evildoers who did you wrong. You do so by entering the Bet on Soldier system, where you take on mercenary missions for cash, and a worldwide audience watches to see your performance. And since you fight for yourself, you have to purchase everything in the game, from bullets to armor to teammates. Bet on Soldier has its origins in an earlier first-person shooter called Iron Storm, and to explain the origins of the game, as well as Kylotonn, CEO Vincent Roman kicks off our designer diary series.

Bet On It

By Roman Vincent
CEO and Producer, Kylotonn

Welcome to our designer diary series. The entire team at Kylotonn is very excited about sharing our experience in making Bet on Soldier over the course of the next few months as we get closer to launch. We are all very proud of the work we are doing on the game and hope you are going to enjoy it. For those of you who do not know a lot about us, Kylotonn was created in 2002, but most of our team has been together since 2000. We were part of another studio called 4X in France and were all originally responsible for the game Iron Storm. Although it was the team's first first-person shooter, it sold about 300,000 copies and proved to be a nice debut success. Unfortunately, due to internal reasons, 4X was forced to close its doors. This disappointment led me to decide to form Kylotonn. I then recruited a number of my former colleagues at 4X, and we started development of our first game, called Bet on Soldier.

From the beginning we had an idea here at Kylotonn to develop a sequel to Iron Storm. We felt we could really improve the game in numerous areas. We had a multitude of fresh ideas, and we all possessed the desire to make this the game we really wanted it to be. We also wanted to create something different from all of the other very similar first-person shooters already on the shelves and offer a new challenge for the player, with particular attention to the multiplayer experience.

After much reflection, we decided that in order to achieve our goals and implement our numerous ideas we had to create something new rather than be constrained by having to work within the boundaries of the original Iron Storm. However, we still wanted to keep some of our favorite elements from Iron Storm, such as the unique setting and the idea that soldiers can be valued on the stock exchange. This whole premise was pushed a lot further after we created our universe and began revolving the whole thing around money. This is how we came up with what we are calling the Bet on Soldier system.

The ideas came together quickly, beginning with the background of the war between two governments who had commercialized their war to the point that it was being televised across the world, and continuing with the idea of having our supermercenaries earn income by betting on their own performances. We wanted everything to revolve around money and the notion that these mercenaries were not just fighting for their governments, but mainly fighting for themselves. We then developed a range of other ideas, from destructible/upgradable armor, introducing huge exoskeleton vehicles, to the development of a nonlinear solo campaign with a storyline focus for one of our supermercenaries.

The final element at the design stage was on the multiplayer side of things. Again, we wanted something different, something to stand out among all of the other online shooters. The whole betting element hadn't been done before, so it was essential we build the multiplayer game around this. By combining elements of the single-player game (betting, duels, upgradable armor and weaponry, and the reliance on money), we felt that we could create an online experience that marries team-based and solo-oriented play to ultimately offer something totally new and exciting. We can't wait to share more with you at E3 and in the coming months as we get closer to our ship date.