Interviews// Breach: Atomic Games' Peter Tamte

It was in the gaming saloons of London's Trocadero Plaza where I met with Atomic Games president Peter Tamte to have a chat about the studio's latest title, Breach. With the multiplayer-only downloadable title freely available for passers-by to play, it seems like a fitting location for a road test.

With Medal of Honor already out and Call of Duty: Black Ops just around the corner, Peter knows that the release of Breach could be easily overshadowed. But the game has two very unique selling points – cover and destructibility. With multiple places to hide away on the expansive maps and the ability to destroy almost every single structure, there's plenty of scope for many new gameplay tactics.

Atomic has worked on military training programs in the past, which explains the fresh take and opening up of tactical play – but the Hydrogen engine that powers Breach came from a rather unfortunate forebear. Six Days in Fallujah, the controversial 'game documentary' that served to put players in the shoes of a real-world, modern-day military situation.

In this interview, I chat to Peter about the demise of Six Days in Fallujah, what the industry still has to learn from the controversy that eventually killed it and why Breach is not gunning for direct competition with EA and Activision's own war games.


SPOnG: How did the concept of Breach come about? What sparked your desire to hit the digital distribution platforms?

Peter Tamte: We wanted to create an experience for the digital platforms that was different from anything you've seen before. What was encouraging was that this kind of game has already been proven in this space.

Past downloadable titles have been niche games that haven't really sold a lot, but EA tried this experiment about a year and a half ago, Battlefield 1943, and brought a game of much more mainstream appeal for 1200 Microsoft Points. It became the fastest selling downloadable title in North America.

But at its core, Battlefield 1943 is really a stripped down version of a retail game. And it's consistent with what the publishers are saying on the strategy side, because all the big publishers are saying to their investors right now, 'our strategy is to continue releasing expensive games, that are mostly sequels.'

Our strategy with Breach is to do the exact opposite. Our aim is to disrupt the way video games are priced, and to contribute to an environment where original content can flourish.


SPOnG: Are you at the same time disheartened by the performance of new IP that attempt what you're doing here? Zombie's Blacklight: Tango Down is an example of a game that tried to do something different in the digital space and that received mixed reviews.

Peter Tamte: You know, I think the challenge that they had was that Blacklight's pitch was all about 'twelve maps for $15'. They didn't really bring anything new to the category, and our approach with Breach is to say that this game exists specifically to let you do things that you can't do in the full-price military shooters. Because let's face it, most people buy those full-price games.

Call of Duty is going to sell like, 15 million copies – I've got to assume that everyone who's playing Breach has already played Call of Duty. So I've got to give people a reason to play Breach. What we're doing then, is giving players access to a whole range of military tactics that are not available to them in Call of Duty.

We want to create an experience that's not available in any other game at any price. That's a much different situation to what Zombie and Ignition were doing with Blacklight – that was more like giving us the same experience but just at a cheaper price.


SPOnG: This game focuses a lot on the importance of cover and destructible environments. Everything is pretty much destructible, right? With that in mind, was it much more challenging to build maps using this engine than it would have been if you were working on a standard FPS map?

Peter Tamte: A lot more challenging. One of the things we invested in when building our engine was a very robust set of authoring tools that lets us experiment with destruction. So what we would do is rough in these environments and then playtest them extensively. Every 24 hours, we's change it and playtest it again.

When you're using that level of destructibility you're working with the unknown, essentially. It's a matter of making sure that the destruction was in the right places to make the game a lot of fun but at the same time ensure that the destruction plays a meaningful strategic role. As a result, we have choke points on the map that are designed to either have a lot of destruction or not a lot at all, it's very intentional.


SPOnG: You showcased a base capture mode in your demonstration – what other modes can we expect to see in Breach?

Peter Tamte: There'll be five game modes. What you saw was called Infiltration, which is a conquest-like game with the idea being to capture points. Another one we have is called Convoy, that's more of an assault and defend game type – but the defend point moves all the time, being a convoy and all. So the defending team's job, whenever the defending team is around the convoy, it moves. The attacking team have to either disband the defenders or disable the vehicles.

The third game type is Retrieval, and in that one a canister spawns on the battlefield and each team tries to locate and bring it back to the exit point. The fourth one is called Team Deathmatch (laughs) – I can give you a long explanation on that one if you want – and the last one is called Sole Survivor. We just announced that one last week, and is inspired by feedback from the training community. There's no respawns in it, and that fundamentally changes how you play the game because you end up shooting and moving much differently.