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When I first heard about making a game about Airborne, I honestly thought there’s no way this is ever going to work.
And then we started to really look into the idea of what it meant to jump out of an airplane.
And kind of through a lot of prototyping, a lot of working in the editor, various editors,
we kind of came upon the solution that,
hey you know what, starting anywhere in an FPS is something that has never been done before.
So I think that this is something that everybody who’s been designing MOH games and playing MOH games
for the last couple of years, is I think in a natural progression, it’s gotten to the point where
the game’s gotten so refined and so almost like a theme park ride,
where everyone had the same experience, it no longer became a game.
The most important thing for me as a player is reading the encounter from above.
You know, it’s very overwhelming when you get pushed out of the plane or when you jump out of the plane
and you look down and you see this entire level beneath you and you say, where do I go?
As we started prototyping different forms of drop zones,
we started with little pocket encounters that were scattered around the map.
You can’t have a completely open space and expect the player to have fun.
When you landed in a dead spot, you found yourself hiking a ways to get somewhere.
So that evolved into a more hub and sector form of level design
that it’s very apparent to the player when he’s in the parachute coming down.
You can look around the map and you can see distinct zones and areas and battle lines.
And from there you can make educated choices about how you want to land and how you want to engage.
As a gamer, you know, we want the game to tell us where we’re supposed to go
but we also want the freedom to go wherever we want.
So we realized from early on that we had to read the map from above,
we had to be able to see where the safe areas were.
You can see the battles you can see the explosions you can see the tracers on the way down.
So if you look from your parachute, you can see strong sectored engagements throughout the map.
And you’re like, okay, I’m not going to land in the middle of this because I’m just not in the mood to deal with that right now.
And I’m going to land up on this high pedestal and pick off enemies from that point
because I can see that high pedestal is there I can see it’s near a good fight
and I can take advantage of that. And that’s what we do so the map should read.
The first time we actually started landing on rooftops and taking out guys from above.
And really using the verticality of the space,
that’s when I was like okay we kind of hit upon something here.
This is going to be something special, something fun to work on.
And as soon as we got to that point, it was like OK, let’s make this great.
You know, I think we talked originally like, well, we’ll put little wind zone volumes or whatever all over all the roofs;
we can’t let the player land on everything.
Then we realized, you know what? It’s open.
The player’s going to land on everything. We just need to constrain him in the entire battle zone.
But inside there, everything’s game, all right.
On your way down, you know, as you get faster as you’re going down,
it gets more and more difficult to find that pinpoint spot to hit.
The important thing, and the real task for the designer here,
is to provide a lot of meaningful places for the player to land all around the environment.
And then hopefully there’s enough authoring in the environment, enough interest to the environment
that the player will come up with his own interesting landing positions and his own interesting sort of assaults on certain attacks.