Interviews// World In Conflict Developer: Martin Walfisz

SPOnG: Sure, you are also keen to stress the ‘scalability’ of the game – meaning that the game will be able to be played on medium-spec PCs, which is fairly important…

Martin Walfisz: Very important, I think being European developers and understanding that there are so many different regions where the typical ‘medium spec’ machine is a lot lower than it is in the US (and I guess, in the UK and Sweden as well) means that we’ve taken a lot of care to make sure the game is as scalable as it can be.


SPOnG: One last tech question – how the hell did you model those incredibly-realistic nuclear explosions? They are really the stand out ‘wow’ moment in the game aren’t they?

Martin Walfisz: Heh, yes, well one of our artists, Thomas, he is just amazing at using our particle system and creating effects out of that. So that’s our particle system at it’s best. So, he creates it from scratch – so first you have the big flash and the white-out of the screen, then you have the ripple effect across the ground – ‘boom’ – and then comes the smoke, the mushroom cloud and so on – just seeing how such an effect is built from scratch over time is amazing!


SPOnG: And talking about taking the RTS genre to a wider market, any plans to take the game onto home console in the future?

Martin Walfisz: Well, with World in Conflict – with its more immediately accessible, action-oriented, arcadey gameplay – could potentially fit better on consoles than most traditional RTS games. It’s certainly something that we have thought about, but we’ll have to wait to see what the future brings.


SPOnG: I know it’s something that EA is hoping to do with C&C3: Tiberium Wars on Xbox 360.

Martin Walfisz: Yeah, they did it with the 360 version of Battle For Middle Earth 2. I really applaud the effort, though I don’t think they have the controls just right yet. I’m really looking forward to playing C&C3. On the other hand, for us, we don’t want to create games that are ‘so-so’ PC games and ‘so-so’ console games. For us we have to create the perfect PC game before we can talk about moving onto console.


SPOnG: Sure, going on to the single-player and the multiplayer aspects of the game. How long would it take to play through the entire single-player campaign?

Martin Walfisz: Well, we’re aiming at ten to fifteen hours, although it’s still very much a work in progress. Then you obviously have the skirmish mode, which allows you to play endlessly against bots/AI; and then thirdly the online aspects where you can play against human opponents.


SPOnG: So, the single-player aspect is really a kind of learning or training experience, a stepping stone into the ‘proper’ multiplayer game?

Martin Walfisz: Absolutely, you can describe almost any RTS game released in the past ten years in that way. That the single player is really a way of teaching you the game and then letting you go off and play online. However, it is also worth noting that the single player game is a full experience in itself, so people who don’t want to play online will have a really fun, in-depth experience.


SPOnG: The other thing you are really stressing is that the game can be played in twenty-minute ‘bite-sized’ chunks?

Martin Walfisz: Yeah, in 20 minutes you can enjoy a full battle. Just like the Battlefield or Counterstrike games, like online first person shooters. We are really the first and only strategy game to offer that sort of gameplay for strategy gamers.

The gamers we’ve already invited to play the game are really enjoying this ‘offering’; you don’t have to wait for ages to find other players to play against and to start a map. When a map starts in a traditional RTS game you never know if it’s going to take 30 minutes or three hours, but you have to be in it for the long run because if you jump out those guys won’t want to play with you again! Here you can jump in at any time, the default timing for a map is 20 minutes.