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Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood Impressions

We discover that Earned in Blood promises to take the Brothers in Arms series to a whole new level. Find out how.

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When it was released in March, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 proved to be one of the most enjoyable and original first-person shooters to come out in recent years. This was due to the game's innovative take on the shooter genre. Instead of having you run around lone-wolf style like you do in so many shooters, Road to Hill 30 put you in charge of a squad of smart, almost humanlike soldiers that you led in battle. It was up to you, as squad leader, to use real squad tactics to destroy the enemy, even while you were busy ducking bullets. Now developer Gearbox is working on the follow-up, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, which is due out later this year. Six months doesn't seem like a lot of time to churn out a vastly improved sequel, but Gearbox is sure aiming to try. Earned in Blood promises to be a much more challenging game than its predecessor, thanks to the fact that Gearbox is taking off the training wheels and letting the enemy be as mobile and aggressive as you. And there are a host of other new features and additions that should get your attention, as well.

Get ready to move out, because there's another Brothers in Arms game on the way.
Get ready to move out, because there's another Brothers in Arms game on the way.

Earned in Blood is an apt title for this sequel, as Gearbox president Randy Pitchford told us up front that this will be a tougher game than the original. Basically, Gearbox held back in the first game in terms of enemy artificial intelligence, because it was afraid that having players learn a whole new way of playing first-person shooters would be tough enough without having to worry about a cutthroat opponent. As a result, the Germans in Road to Hill 30 were a fairly docile lot and didn't really exhibit maneuver tactics, at least not on the scale of what you did to them. That translated into a puzzlelike experience at times, as you essentially had to suppress an enemy position and figure out how to flank it over and over again. In Earned in Blood, the training wheels come off, and you'll definitely earn your victories in this game. The German AI is a lot more intelligent than before, and it will constantly try to shift positions to prevent from being flanked. It will also spot opportunities, like an unguarded flank on your side, and move to exploit them. "It puts a new layer of pressure and intensity on the player," Pitchford said.

We saw the new enemy AI in action in a fierce firefight amid the ruins of a village. The American squad entered a large field broken up by stone walls. At the far side of the field, two German squads opened fire upon detecting the Americans. In Road to Hill 30, to solve this tactical situation, you simply lay suppressive fire on the Germans and move a fireteam up one side to hit them from the flank. However, trying to do that in Earned in Blood will prove trickier; when Pitchford executed a standard attack, the Germans detected the flanking attempt and maneuvered around the field, mirroring the American movement. Before we realized it, the sides had literally switched positions on the field, with the Germans having maneuvered to where the Americans had entered the field, and the Americans ending up where the Germans originally had opened fire. Replaying that encounter, Pitchford then showed what happened if he focused both of his fireteams on suppressing just one of the German teams. In that case, the second German team rushed along the side to flank his positions, putting him in a bad situation.

The sequel features a lot of war-torn buildings to fight in.
The sequel features a lot of war-torn buildings to fight in.

While this tougher AI will undoubtedly be good news for fans of the franchise, we're told that you won't need to be a veteran of the first game to learn and enjoy Earned in Blood. At the same time, Pitchford expects a much faster learning curve in the sequel. Your challenge will be to put the enemy on what Gearbox calls "horns of a dilemma." In other words, you want to put the enemy in a position where it has no alternative but to die. Judging from the mobility of the German soldiers in the demonstration, that will definitely be more challenging this time around.

Band of Humanlike Brothers

Earned in Blood will be closely tied in to the events in the first game. In fact, approximately 25 percent of the game lets you take part in some moments from the first game, but this time from a different perspective. You'll play as Sergeant Joe "Red" Hartsock, one of the team members of Sergeant Matt Baker, the hero of the first game. However, this doesn't mean that you'll rehash the exact same moments from the first game, as Harstock was usually dispatched to perform different tasks during missions. The rest of the game, however, picks up immediately after the events of Hill 30 and will carry the story forward. Like the first game, Earned in Blood incorporates historically accurate events and locations and draws upon official US Army after-action reports detailing real-life battles, so pretty much every encounter you have in the game is based on one that happened during the actual campaign.

Meet Sergeant Joe
Meet Sergeant Joe "Red" Hartsock, your character in Earned in Blood.

The sequel will be set in a lot more urban-type settings, as well. If you think of Road to Hill 30 covering the first half of the D-Day campaign, Earned in Blood will cover the second half, when Allied units fought to secure the Norman countryside, to liberate French villages and towns, and to wipe out pockets of German resistance. This means a lot more war-torn settings to run around in, and the environments will be more complex than before, giving you more room, as well as options, to maneuver. In one case, Pitchford led his men in a fairly large urban battle, and his squad took advantage of streets, alleys, and burned-out houses for cover. At one point, they came upon a German squad engaged in a firefight with another American squad (this one led by Baker), and so Harstock's squad was able to come up from behind the Germans and cut them down. He then focused his sight on Baker in the distance, and Baker waved to Harstock. That brings up another new feature in Earned in Blood, specifically the attempt to make your squadmates feel more human. For example, your AI teammates will draw upon thousands of different lines of context-sensitive dialogue, and they'll have different things to say as the game progresses.

Earned in Blood should look a bit sharper than its predecessor, as well. Gearbox went back and incorporated new shader effects, so now you can see sunlight glisten around the edges of a leaf. The biggest improvement, though, came in terms of texture resolution. There were apparently a number of complaints about muddled textures in the first game, so the programmers went back and figured out a way to boost the resolution of most of the textures in the game fourfold in the Xbox version. In some cases, texture resolutions have been increased by 16-fold, resulting in a better-looking game. Earned in Blood will also offer new types of destructible environments. There are a number of new weapons in the game as well, including a mortar that you can order your squad to man while you direct its fire, and new types of machine guns and submachine guns.

Finally, the multiplayer front should hold a number of very interesting new features for players. Road to Hill 30 was popular on Xbox Live, and so to keep the fans happy, Gearbox will fold all the existing multiplayer levels into Earned in Blood, while also adding new content. Moreover, there's a new cooperative skirmish gameplay mode that will let you and a buddy play together in a campaign mission, or you can create your own battle by selecting an existing map and editing the parameters, like having you play on offense or defense. You'll even have a chance to play from the German point of view in skirmish mode.

Take aim, because Earned in Blood ships in October.
Take aim, because Earned in Blood ships in October.

We're pleasantly surprised at the scope and scale of the improvements in Earned in Blood, especially considering the timetable that Gearbox is working under. Earned in Blood should definitely elevate the gameplay from the first game quite a bit, and we're looking forward to facing off with the new AI. Gearbox and Ubisoft are once again looking to release the game for the PC, Xbox, and PS2, and we can expect Earned in Blood to ship this October.

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