Interviews// Operation Flashpoint: Red River

Military games, well, there's a few of those about aren't they? So, what does Codemasters have to offer in this sequel, in Operation Flashpoint: Red River?

Well, I've had a look, but before I give me opinions in full, let's listen to one of the main men behind the title: SPOnG readers, please welcome...

Adam Parsons, executive producer at Codemasters!

SPOnG: Looking back at the reception of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, what sort of things did you take from that and look to refine in Red River?

Adam Parsons: Well, I joined the project at the tail-end of Dragon Rising, so I came to the series quite fresh. I had already worked with Sion (Lenton, creative director) before and had been following the development of that game for some time.

If you ask me, I’d say we tried to do too much. Dragon Rising was too broad, too wide an experience. So we came out this time with a remit to do a lot of improvements across the whole game, but to focus it down to a four-player co-op experience with an emphasis on and infantry marine perspective as well.


SPOnG: It’s curious that you’ve chosen to focus heavily on the co-op side of things. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of a competitive mode like a deathmatch mode.

Adam Parsons: No, it was one of those decisions we took because we didn’t want to recreate the same experience as a lot of other games out there, where you can go in and play against 14-year-old kids who call you all sorts of things. They’re not the sort of games we’re into. We want to produce a co-op experience where it’s all about playing with your mates and having a load of fun. Working together, going through different military roles and levelling those up really helps that.

Essentially, if we’re going to do Player-versus-Player, it can’t be a token experience. It has to be a natural progression of what we’re doing at the moment. So on that front… it’s a case of ‘watch this space.’


SPOnG: Do you think online gaming is heading that way, to a completely co-op heavy environment?

Adam Parsons: I think so. There's a whole load of games out there where the focus is all about shooting people - there's a lot of griefing and it ruins the fun for a lot of people. I’ve veered away from a lot of PvP games because of that. When I come home from a hard day at work I don't want to go online and be insulted by a bunch of other people that I don't know, on top of being shot in the head in a nanosecond by a 14-year-old kid. I'm sorry [laughs]!

I want to call up my mates and invite people to a session of Red River and work at the high score together. That's the sort of experience I want, and the experience a lot of people are going for. You only have to look at games that have become incredibly popular like Left 4 Dead to see that there's a massive market for that. I think that's where online is going - bringing more people together.


SPOnG: The dialogue and premise in the presentation video is quite light-hearted and full of military bravado. What were the reasons for going in that direction with the story, and what influences did you have?

Adam Parsons: Incredibly, we had an ex-marine who was a writer on the project, so the vernacular in the game is fairly accurate and authentic. Those were one of the founding pillars that we wanted to build this game on. I think you’ve got around - you’re probably going to quote me on this now - but over 650 instances of the word ‘fuck’ in the game.

I think it was Mafia 2 that got the most expletives in a game, but we thought we’d try and get close! But if you watch films like Generation Kill, Jarhead, Redacted, this is how these guys talk. It’s reasonably authentic and when we throw in the swearing that’s because this is how these guys respond to each other in the field.

We really want to focus on the marine experience because it’s cool - you see these similar marine-themed TV dramas and film and it just breaks away from the idea of existing shooters out there present, where you get clean guns and have all these custom kits. In reality, they’re strapping on sights with tape and elastic bands and personalising their mp3 players and badges and stuff. That grittiness was cool, and that was why we took it in that direction.


SPOnG: How has the EGO engine helped in achieving what you’re trying to accomplish in Red River?

Adam Parsons: It’s been a massive help. EGO is used across all projects, so what you find is a team will develop something based on that engine, and the technology is transferable to another project. With a little bit of work we’ve adapted the post-processing code from DiRT - both the previous and the upcoming game - stuff that these guys are improving and adapting all the time. We can take those components and put it into our game and utilise it. The things we’ve got here - lens aberration, all the heat haze, all the different effects and digital distortion - that’s stuff that can go back into EGO too.

The great thing about the next stage in the engine is that the rendering times have been improved massively. We’re able to create even more detailed, immersive worlds and bigger worlds. It’s great at doing fantastic draw distances, and you can actually travel to those faraway villages when you’re in a mission.

You can start off at something like Mission 4 where you have to get over a ravine, and the backdrop opens up into a beautiful valley, and you have the opportunity to travel through that valley. That’s one of the greatest advantages with the EGO system, that you can draw this huge world and have it populated with enemies and vehicles. It’s a massive help across all projects at Codemasters.


SPOnG: Any drawbacks using the engine though due to its multi-purpose nature? I spoke to Guerilla and they were talking about how they prefer using bespoke technology for their games.

Adam Parsons: Well, with the EGO engine you’ve got a core set of code components, and a lot of the games are based off that. But, there’s a lot of bespoke code that has to go into each game as well. If you look at other engines out there on the market, some are great for fantastic landscapes, but there’s little else they do. Some are very geared towards racing, and so on.

The way we work is, because it’s all component based, we can spread the tech across different projects and then update it back into the EGO. There’s flexibility in that, and as you’re essentially building the codebase with fellow teams it means you’ve already got a lot of that done from the start.

I guess with anything there’s pros and cons - our biggest advantage is that it’s always being updated by a central tech group. If there’s any issues with it we can speak to these guys and they can optimise it, or if there’s optimisations we’ve done at our end they can feed back into the central tech itself. So of course there’s always going to be pros and cons to both development approaches, but I think we’ve got a really good balance for Codemasters.


SPOnG: Do you think it’s hard to stay original in the FPS genre these days, when it’s populated by all kinds of competing future-day modern warfare games? How did you go about making Red River stand out from the crowd?

Adam Parsons: We’ve had a DNA for Flashpoint which is its authenticity, having a big toolset pooled from contemporary warfare and having a clash of global superpowers tied into this future-fiction ‘What if’ scenario. We’ve always done it so it’s set far enough into the future that it could happen and its realistic in that context. It’s never set somewhere 40 years into the future where we’re using laser weapons, that’s not what we’re about.

But it does allow us to draw on events that could well happen in the future - one of the big superpowers that could be a big force is China, obviously, so we felt it was right to kind of stay in that direction and bring the superpowers into the over-arching storyline, but maybe we’re setting this particular game in Tajikistan based on insurgencies in the Middle East. There’s plenty of opportunities around the world to wonder what happens next, and of course the superpowers could be involved in all of these.

I think with shooters at the moment, they are a little tired. They’re all corridor based, stop-every-ten-minutes-for-a-cutscene experiences with the slow motion reveal of the bad russian guy. That’s not what we’re about. The other part of our DNA is freedom of choice. You can go into our world with all these toys and can choose how you deploy your fireteam, what weapons to take in, how you load out your fireteam member and his b-mods, and can change their class at any point.

You can go through the entire campaign and select a different class to boost their skills if you’re bored with the setup you have at the moment. It’s all about freedom of choice, and not about you have to go down this straight line to complete the mission. You can go over bridges, through ravines, can flank enemies, work with Charlie or Alpha or you can work on your own and give commands. That’s what also gives it that replayability that you won’t get with other shooters out there.


SPOnG: Speaking of inspiration, do you think you might use current events - like the civil unrest in Egypt and Libya - as a starting point for future Operation Flashpoint titles?

Adam Parsons: It’s hard to say. We purposefully set out with a remit on day one to always draw from something in the future, always from something that hasn’t happened. We don’t really want to go there, drawing from current events. I think it’s a very sensitive area - we don’t need that to sell the game.

I don’t think we’d look at Egypt, for example, in three years time and make a game based on that. What we’d like to do is make a game based on what could happen somewhere else in the world.

So, it’s not really an area we want to go drawing inspiration from. I think you’ve got to be incredibly sensitive about what happens. There are people losing lives in Afghanistan and Iraq and one of the guys back in the office lost her brother there, so something where it’s that close to home is not something we want to do.


SPOnG: Did you get any inspiration from fans of the series who provided feedback for Dragon Rising?

Adam Parsons: Yeah, and obviously there’s a lot of feedback we get from the community. We’ve got some 1000 people all with their own ideas about what the game should be, and there’s lots of really good points that we’ve taken on board from those guys and actually implemented into the game.

There’s been improvements made to the AI for example - we already knew, but it was good to get this confirmation from the fanbase. We’ve got an improved line of sight, so if there’s an instance where one of your fireteam crosses your line of sight the command report structure lets you know that via audio feedback. That’s much more improved than what we had before.

On top of that we’ve streamlined the pathfinding tech behind these guys, so they’ll do their very best (unless it’s a critical moment) to go around you. That’s part of the community feedback too, but one thing that sticks in my mind is that recently we mentioned to people that we were doing a hardcore mode.

Now, Red River includes situational text at the bottom of the screen, and the community said ‘we don’t want anything like that in a Hardcore mode.’ So we went into the team relatively late into the development cycle, and asked whether we could afford to take that feature out of Hardcore mode. We realised that it was doable and that there was no knock-on effect and it was a low risk venture.

So, we did that, and that came direct from the forums. It’s an example that shows we do listen. We can’t always implement everything that everybody wants - we obviously set a flavour and direction for the game a year ago and we have to follow that - but there are also a lot of smaller things that we can take feedback for and change.


SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time!

Adam Parsons: Thanks a lot!