Hey before we start we got guests this is Rob he and James works together in this episode
And this is will she's doing the art. She's great
All right (Hi :>)
Not long ago World War 2 was the setting for shooters Call of Duty Medal of Honor and Battlefield were all sepia toned
Borrowing the aesthetic Spielberg laid down in Saving Private Ryan recently with the FPS warfare genre leaping headfirst from modern to sci-fi
there's been some talk about returning to the Second World War and doing it over again with new tools and technologies we couldn't have
Imagined when Medal of Honor first hit shelves, but whatever that conversation comes up. You'll often hear the same groans
Come on World War two has been done. It's boring
We've run out of war and that response makes sense on the surface sort of I mean, yeah
if we made a World War 2 action game exactly like we used to I completely agree it would feel repetitive and
Unnecessary the naysayers are correct in declaring that we don't really need another game set in Normandy or the Eastern Front
Here's the thing though
A lot of stuff happened in World War two and game designers have barely scratched the surface when it comes to that period in history
If you actually look there's an incredible wealth of material that we've not even touched before so today
I thought it'd be fun to look at just some of the exciting alternative
Possibilities for riah Pro Qing the World War 2 action genre, here we go idea one
Globalize the Second World War was a global conflict
so global
Then it's almost difficult to grasp in occupied China
guerrilla fighters derailed trains and raided military bases South African forces invaded German, Namibia
Revolts across the Middle East challenged colonial authority and firefights raged through the bungalows and tennis courts of British, India
But for some reason every time we build a world war 2 shooter
We always revert to the greatest hits album of famous battles d-day Stalingrad
Pretty much any skirmish that appeared in Band of Brothers. See this is the thing. It's not that we're tired of World War 2
We're just tired of playing the same 5% of World War 2 over and over if you're considering building a world war 2 shooter
Why not focus on some of the lesser-known battles?
I mean the Pacific Theater has been tragically under explored as a setting and it's rich with drama from the invasion of Alaska's
Aleutian Islands to the Burma Campaign
Just because these battles aren't nearly
so famous didn't make them less important or dramatic to the people on the ground fighting them and the new types of terrain and
tactics you'd find in these unexplored settings might open up new interesting game design possibilities - besides
How cool would it be as a player to be put in the boots of soldiers from places like the Philippines India and Greece?
Soldiers whose stories? We've probably never heard before battles
A lot of us may not even know who won + come on who wouldn't jump at the chance to play as a Nepalese Gurkha
idea to boil down the conflict a lot of times World War 2 games
Especially the shooters in action games will try to cram an entire offensive or even an entire war into one campaign
That's really not necessary though
There are a lot of individual battles that raged for days or even weeks
With the front line moving over lots of different terrain a game about a single
Engagement could be made just as interesting. Maybe even more interesting
If you did it
right sure quantum
Leaping - different soldiers continents away from each other to experience major battles in a bunch of different places has its benefits
But imagine sticking with one unit in one prolonged battle for one objective
Experiencing the highs and lows every step of the way every desperate victory every tragic loss
It would take some creativity but that sort of contained
perspective on the war could feel far more personal and have a much greater sense of logical progression now at first it might seem like
Staying in one place would mean sacrificing on variety but most battlefields tend to have a wide variety of features
ranging from ridges to defensive
Fortifications towns low mountains even specific structures like hotels or docks more than enough to build a campaign around
consider how spec ops the line managed to keep each location
Distinct without ever leaving the Dubai setting or how each time you picked a level to play
It showed how far you'd progress on a miniature sand table of the city it gave the game a good sense of progression
Both strategically and thematically and while it might seem like it's taking artistic license to make the environment
Reflect the emotions of the characters fighting there. There's actually a kind of realism to that
I know it seems cliche to talk about the environment becoming a character but it's actually really common to hear veterans personify a
Battlefields environmental features to talk about the valley of death or the fight for that
Damn Hill war tends to give geography and emotional layer and by condensing the campaign to one battle
You could give players a little more of each feature being an important and memorable
Landmark rather than just one more river another factory another barn another bridge
idea, 3 revamp the gameplay one of the reasons World War 2 started to feel so stale in the action genre is because the guns
And tactics were starting to feel too familiar
We had just clutched that m1 rifle while sprinting across the fields of France one too many times
One solution to this problem would be to find some underrepresented weapons or feature some battlefield
Modifications that soldiers actually created and consider what a change in tactics might do for gameplay
Imagine a world war 2 game that played more like Far Cry than Call of Duty where the objective was to scout raid and capture
Enemy installations. That's an entirely different experience
This is also we're focusing on different regions of the world could pay huge dividends since changing. The geography will necessitate altering
How the game plays and feels imagine fighting a guerrilla war in the jungles of Mindanao?
That'll feel completely different from landing on Omaha Beach or advancing on Stalingrad central plaza
Or what about a game about resistance fighters in Manchuria who were often mounted bandits rather than professional soldiers that might play more like Red
Dead Redemption than Medal of Honor
You see what I mean about how much more there is to this war than games have shown us?
Idea for engage with period themes our World War two games
So rarely dive into the real questions about the war
Exploring the things that made it vital and crucial and the few times we have the game has almost always been better for the effort
call of duty world at war
subtly judged you if you committed war crimes in an attempt to say something about how war can make people naturally fall into cruelty and
Despite the weird futurism of Wolfenstein the new order that game is fundamentally about Nazi ideology and atrocities
I'm not saying that either of these games is a hundred percent successful in engaging those questions
But both times the attempt resulted in a more gripping and potentially thought-provoking
Experience and while I'm at it I might as well talk about the elephant in the room
look the fact is we've been making games about world war 2 for about 30 years and
Almost none of them even mentioned the Holocaust the most notable one I can think of right now is Valkyria chronicles
Which is not even a world war 2 game. That's kind of messed up now
Of course, I understand why developers prefer to avoid it
But you can't make a whole genre of games about the Second World War without engaging this topic
You just can't I understand that the Holocaust is an ugly
difficult and controversial subject to confront but if you're afraid of ugly and horrific subject matter
Maybe you shouldn't make a game about the largest most costly conflict in human history
It just kind of comes with the territory
And I'm not saying that the game has to gravitate around the Holocaust but there should at least be some
Acknowledgement that this catastrophe is happening, especially if the game is set in the European theater
You could build it into the scenery with German propaganda
You could include a mission about smuggling out a person who's been in hiding. It doesn't need to be a big focus
It just has to exist you remember the concentration camp liberation sequence and Band of Brothers those scenes
Only took a few minutes of one episode in a 10-hour series
But they're memorable because it's a turning point in the soldiers emotional journey
even if you only include one or two references those
inclusions will speak volumes and help make the events of the war feel larger than what's on screen on a
Lighter note, you could also flesh out the period by including pop culture or period music we often use pop songs and Vietnam Games
But we sometimes forget that World War 2 was very much a radio War
Troops listens to Armed Forces Radio both at sea and at the front not to mention propaganda broadcasters like Tokyo Rose
It's an easy element to include and it'll give a greater sense of the world outside the battlefield
I've barely even scratched the surface of possibility here
But I hope we've sparked your imagination a little the Second World War is just so full of untapped material that there are literally
Thousands of ways developers can approach it. And personally I really hope they do see you next time ((Captions by RobinWilds)