Do you recognize this from when you play a shooter online?

You have these people who like play different roles. Like the sniper. He's going to climb to the top of the water tower, put down his claymore mines, and pull out his sniper rifle. He's going to protect that control point over there. That's his mission. But what sometimes ends up happening is that nobody goes to the control point. He didn't get to play the game he wanted to play. And now his team is pissed off at him for it. Or what about the engineer? You see these bridges you can blow up, so you're like, "Oh, man, I'm the engineer, so I'm going to put these land mines on this bridge and hide in the bushes, and then it's going to be awesome when that enemy tank drives over the bridge". And then you stick around and you're waiting for it. And waiting for it. And the game ends and no one ever showed up. It's like you're initiating a challenge, saying, "Come be a part of this". And that handshake goes unshook.

That's Robert Siwiak, the producer of Timegate's latest game, Section 8. He says the central idea behind Section 8 is that you're going to get your handshake.

He also explains how the game is supposed to bring back people who don't play shooters any more; how it's a reaction to the peccadilloes of Battlefield 2, Counter-Strike, and Quake Wars; how you almost didn't get a jetpack; what went wrong with the pistol; how randomly generated maps in real time strategy games were an inspiration; and how the damage model is based on the Dune novels.

Read the interview after the jump.

Tom Chick: I've been a fan of you guys since way back in the Kohan days. I imagine you were a lot smaller then. How big is Timegate now?

Robert Siwiak: When we came off Section 8, we probably peaked around 70 or so developers. We've been growing since back in the Kohan days. Back then, we were used to 30-man teams working on our projects. That was even true going into the FEAR expansion projects. Section 8 was really a big shift for us over the past couple years. We literally more than doubled in size over the past two-and-a-half year period.

TC: Are you a company with multiple teams on multiple projects?

RS: We definitely have other projects going. Over the past couple of years Section 8 was the focus, but we have what you call incubator projects. For instance, our unannounced MMO project that we have small teams working on. We're very much an idea and concept shop. We love creating our own original IPs like Kohan and Section 8. So we have other teams working on the next round of things.

TC: Is there a lot of continuity all the way back to the original Kohan? For instance, I noticed the lead designer on Section 8 is Brett Norton, who was on the design team for Kohan II.

RS: Right, Brett worked on Kohan II. He worked on Axis & Allies. We have a lot of people that went back all the way. Denis Papp, our programming director, has been on every single Timegate project for the past 11 years. Likewise, our art director, Zach Forcher. Our creative director, Phillip Morales. Some of our artists like Enrique Pena. Those five guys or so are TG veterans. You'll find a lot of old influences in there. We never really forget our real time strategy heritage. You'll find a lot of strategy found its way into Section 8 because of those influences.

TC: Part of why I like Section 8 so much is that it taps into what I like as a real time strategy fan. I'm glad to hear you say this comes from your RTSs. I love seeing that mindset brought into a shooter arena. Do you think that's risky at all?

RS: Bringing those elements into there?

TC: Yes. I ask specifically because some of the feedback I read about the beta are things like the weapons not killing you very fast. Which is true, but is a design decision that helps bring a little strategy into the game as opposed to other shooters where you die very quickly. That's the more common, and the more popular way to do it these days. I wonder if some of your decisions might be risky because you're bucking some established genre trends.

RS: Right. We are going against the grain in some respects. Having played Kohan, you also know that back then, there was an established grain for how real time strategy games were done, and how various systems worked. You know, resource management consisted of peons going, "Yes, m'lord, let's go individually chop down wood". Or unit selection with huge bounding boxes. And we introduced some new gameplay elements with a different resource system. We introduced the concept of companies. We tried to concentrate on where the fun was, and removing some of the frustrations, and increasing the usability.

So in first person shooters, there are a lot of things people hated. Respawn timers, for instance. We have burn-in spawning to address that. But it goes further. You have that category of people I can sum up with the chairman of our company, Alan Chaveleh. He's...he's...well, if you put a 360 controller in his hands, he's not going to be able to keep up with his teenage son. They're unable to play something like Halo together because it's very much about dexterity. So it was a conscious decision to address some frustrating components for the less hardcore people. You die very quickly in a first person shooter. You get shot in the back of the head. You don't know where the shot came from. You get very frustrated. So we wanted to give those people some reaction time. We wanted to let them bulk up the armor in their suit. To let them get a bunch of shields so that they know they're taking damage, and they still have time to make a decision. Such as, I need to take cover. I need to use my jetpack to get away. I need to turn and engage this person.

And then likewise, with a feature like lock-on, it's a conscious decision to make it easier for people who might otherwise have trouble aiming. We are going against the grain, but we're doing it methodically, we're doing it consciously. We're trying to bring some people back into the first-person shooter genre who may have been scared away.

TC: Kohan was a critical success. A lot of us real time strategy gamers loved what you did and thought it was revolutionary. But there's a perception that it wasn't a successful game because it wasn't as big as, say, Command & Conquer. There weren't a lot of Kohan clones. It's almost you guys started a revolution, but then nobody else showed up. So I worry a little that might happen with Section 8. That people who should play this game, people who would appreciate what you're doing, might not find it. I would hate for what happened with Kohan to happen with Section 8. I'm wondering if there was ever any pressure, or even doubt, about what you were doing with Section 8? Was there a temptation to play it safe, or is this approach just ingrained in how Timegate approaches game development?

RS: Oh, it's definitely the latter. We are gamers. We try to play everything that's out there. If we weren't working on the games we're working on, we'd be the guys standing in line at Gamestop the day they come out. Section 8 really started in 2005. That was the origin of the decision to do a sci-fi shooter. Of course, we got pulled in a different direction when Sierra came to the table and said, "Hey, we've got this FEAR expansion pack for you to work on". So we kind of put Section 8 on the back burner. But if you think back to that time, that was when we had just wrapped up doing four real time strategy games. We could have easily gone the route of doing Kohan 3. But at the time, our passions had shifted. What was everyone playing at lunch, or after work? It was Battlefield 1942, Planetside, Counter-Strike, Halo. We put together a list of ideas about what we wanted to work on next. It wasn't a list of ideas about what would be the next safe money maker. We didn't want to make a Halo clone or a Call of Duty clone. The question was, "What's the sort of game do we want to create from the ground up?"

For instance, we wanted a dynamic sci-fi universe. From Kohan, one of the things that was successful was the random map generator. Now we knew we couldn't do a very good-looking random map generator for a first person shooter. But what does a random map generator accomplish in a real time strategy game? It was that sense of a dynamic world where no two games play the same. And Section 8 evolved from us wanting that experience, not from what everyone else was doing.

In some areas, it seems like a natural evolution and everyone's on board with it. Some things seem like a kick-ass idea. For instance, why wouldn't anybody want a jetpack? Why wouldn't you want a burn-in spawn rather than staring at a timer? But there are some areas that some people question. Such as the lock-on or how long it takes to kill someone. When faced with that sort of opposition, well, we're just not out there to make that sort of game. We're out there to make an experience where the player can drop onto a battlefield where he can survive long enough to make a difference. And if he has the tools at his disposal, it shouldn't require the dexterity of a 16-year-old on Red Bull.

TC: Section 8 has so many - and this is going to make it sound cold - but so many of what I think of as systems and subsystems. There are these interconnected pieces that players can manipulate. You touched on lock-on that makes a whole system out of autoaiming. I think it's brilliant. The spawning that you call burn-in, I see a system there with its own set of choices. Do you equip deflector plates and spawn within range of anti-air? The way you've circumvented the timer by letting the player look at the map as he approaches rather than just waiting. The trade-off in terms of when you hit the brake and what kind of control you have over where you land. That's all part of your unique spawning system. So you've got all these systems. Over the course of the development, which ones were the hardest? Which were the most hotly debated and required the most iterations to get working correctly?

RS: Oh, man. One of the features that was most difficult was burn-in spawning. From a technical standpoint, it was very difficult. But the more interesting story is how it influenced gameplay. At first, we just gave people the ability to drop in anywhere on the map. Anti-air turrets weren't a part of the original game plan. We just let people come in wherever they wanted. But everyone was dropping right on the control points. You kill a guy, you're down to half health, he just drops right back on top of you to finish the job. It was chaotic.

TC: I can imagine.

RS: A natural evolution was adding in the anti-air turrets. Extending that even further was giving the player the ability to put those turrets himself, so he could make his own choke points on the map. This one feature got its hooks into the rest of the game. All of a sudden, there was a lot of strategic depth.

TC: And that's also part of how it recalls real time strategy games. It's about map control. And it doesn't just influence where players spawn, but an AA turret shuts out other deployables. Since deployables are dropped from orbit or brought in by an airplane. Anti-air turrets don't just interact with spawning. It also ties into the subsystem of deployables.

RS: Exactly. With any project, you always start off with about three games worth of ideas. So you have to narrow it down based on your time, your manpower, your budget. How much can you actually get in there as a set of features? And when we had to draw a lasso around Section 8, it was about having a dynamic world where the player is very much empowered and he has a lot of items at his disposal to make strategic decisions. The deployables were an extension of letting the player set up defenses. Not quite base building, but the next best thing. Reinforce bases, create choke points on a bridge, set up a forward offensive base. In fact, do you know the outpost mission?

TC: Oh yes.

RS: That's where that came from. We had players creating these hubs of deployables that basically became a target for the other team. You're wondering what everyone is doing over there, but they're there because someone set up all these defenses, so you naturally want to go and blow them up. So we wound up turning it into an outpost [dynamic combat mission] which accomplishes the same thing. And now you'll notice outposts come in, everyone calls in their deployables, and that's how it plays out.

For almost any feature we have in Section 8, you have to think about how it affects everything else. Lock-on, for instance. You already touched on it, but we have a lot of customization options with the passive modules. If you really really like lock-on, you can increase the timer on it for how long you can stay locked on and how quickly it recharges. But if you're someone who really hates people locking onto you, you can take the sensor blocker to prevent those guys from locking onto you. There's a tug of war in there.

TC: The sensor blocker will disrupt a lock on?

RS: Yes. You can only lock onto something your sensors see.

TC: Oh, right, you can only lock onto someone who's been scanned. The flashing eyeball icon when you look at an enemy who hasn't been detected yet.

RS: Right. And in the top right corner of your screen, you'll notice another eyeball icon. There's even a little twang sound effect that tells you that you've been detected. That's your clue that someone could lock onto you. So if you have a sensor blocker, you can remove yourself from the sensors and you can't be locked.

TC: This brings me to something else I've wondered. The passive modules must have been a huge pain in the butt to balance.

RS: Well, keep in mind that we're a group of people who made real time strategy games. Do you know how many races and how many units we had? This pales in comparison.

TC: Were there passive modules that were cut?

RS: Yeah. You have to make sure the players' decisions are weighted equally. So with the passive modules, you can take any ten. That means every single one you pick has to be somehow equal to the others. But we found some that no one was taking. So now, you'll notice that some of the passive modules have two or three stats. That was kind of the compromise. On its own, you might not care about a passive that makes it more difficult for turrets to detect you. But if it's paired with other attributes, you care about it a little more.

TC: Right. I can see how you guys are trying to sweeten the deal for some of the passive modules.

RS: That was what we did when it seemed like something wasn't panning out. Some of them are very straightforward. The shields, the armor, doing extra damage. The lock-on, the repair rate, the jetpack recharge. We knew areas we wanted to tweak, but sometimes we had to put them in a sweeter package. It was a similar issue with the equipment. In fact, interestingly enough, we intended for the jetpack to be one of the equipment options. But ultimately, it was so cool that we decided we had to give a jetpack to everyone. Everybody is going to take the jetpack anyway. Seriously, why wouldn't you take the jetpack? How do you a compare a jetpack to grenades, or a mortar. It's a no-brainer. You take the jetpack.

TC: Was that ever the case with the overdrive?

RS: Not as much. We originally had passive modules that made you go faster, but overdrive... Well, did you ever play Battlefield 2?

TC: Oh yes.

RS: Plenty of times you spawned at a base, you're really far from the action, and there's always that guy who takes the jeep and drives away without you.

TC: I hate that guy.

RS: Right, because then you spend two minutes walking to the action only to die and then you're waiting to respawn again. Or how many times did you commit suicide to get to the action faster? Overdrive was a conscious decision to let you move around the map without ever feeling like you needed a vehicle or that you might as well just commit suicide.

TC: So this ties into something else I've wondered about. On one hand, Section 8 de-emphasizes vehicles. You don't need them to get across the map. You don't need them to have a lot of firepower. You don't need them to deal with bases. However, Section 8 also emphasizes vehicles in another way, because now when a vehicle appears, you have to pay attention to it. It's not just another unit that you can take out with a couple of shots from a rocket launcher. It's a force to be reckoned with. It's a big deal.

RS: Well, that kind of hits it on the nose. We want to de-emphasize their importance. We want Section 8 to be first and foremost an infantry game, with additional elements on top. Looking at other games that we loved, you always got the feeling that you weren't in the top three on the scoreboard unless you were in a tank or a helicopter getting all the kills. It makes you feel weak as infantry. What was the result? You got five people standing around the tank spawn knifing each other to get that vehicle. The game was about getting to a vehicle and getting a ton of kills. So with Section 8, the mantra was that your powered armor suit is a vehicle. You have the overdrive. That's why we don't need a jeep. We turn you into a jeep.

Likewise, going up against vehicles, we didn't want them to be completely overpowered. So for instance, the heavy tank has four seats. We wanted to make it so that if you're going to have a lot of firepower, you need to coordinate it. It's going to cost you. You have to save up enough points to call it in. And if you then get three friends to take the other seats, you should be a force on the battlefield. And like you said, when these vehicles come out, they're powerful, but the infantry aren't helpless. Every single weapon will do some damage. Granted, the missile launchers and explosives will do best, but a bunch of guys with assault rifles can do decent damage. There's balance there. How do you make your vehicle investment feel substantial, but without making infantry feel second-rate? When you're infantry and you see a tank, you still have a lot of options. You can call down a deployable rocket turret. You have loadout options. Even if you don't take the missile launchers, you can take mortars. You can use the jetpack to get away. Or if you made the wrong call on the battlefield with your loadout, a supply depot is right around the corner, or you can call one in. I think another source of frustration in other games comes from the class-based structure. There were times it felt like you made a bad decision. You took the assault class, but oh no, here comes a tank. You might as well die or commit suicide and then spawn back in with an anti-tank weapon.

TC: You went with standard weapon archetypes in Section 8 instead of anything sci-fi. It's very intuitive, very real world. Tell me about that decision.

RS: I'm sure you've seen Battlestar Galactica, right? It's science fiction. You've got guys in space ships, but it's very relatable. The fact that these guys are traveling through space reminds you the show is science fiction as opposed to seeing unexplainable things that are effectively magic with a technical explanation. You play a game like Unreal and you get a bio goo gun and arc laser pulse cannons. Those push the game far in a sci-fi direction and that's not what we want to do in Section 8. Section 8 is meant to be analogous to our modern world, and relatable. It takes place a few hundred years in the future, but this military is equipped with weapons we'd see today. The tried-and-true assault rifle. The machine gun. So that people picking up Section 8 won't pick up a bio goo gun and not know what to do with it. They're going to look at a missile launcher and figure it's going to work well against things that are armored.

Also, from an artistic standpoint, we wanted to work towards a mechanical feel. A few years ago when some games were trying science fiction, there was some resistance to it. Their popularity didn't catch on in some respects. It was niche. You could say Tribes or Planetside were victims of that niche. But if you look at Battlestar Galactica, it brought in a completely different audience than, say, Star Trek. So that was an influence. We wanted something relatable that you could pick up and know. It's not sci-fi, but it's a first person shooter with sci-fi elements to it.

TC: You obviously had a lot of fun with the weapon animations. I'm thinking of the heavy machine gun. Whatever's going on during the reload, I love watching it. The gun kicks out a cylinder. It seems to vent some kind of hot gas. The new clip has some kind of crystallization on it that the guy breaks off before he slaps it into the slot. Or even the assault rifle which has a weird round donut hole magazine that spins into place, and then a little light fills up like a progress bar and it's ready to go.

RS: There was a period of several months where we tried to find something cooler looking than just popping a clip into the bottom. We wanted it grounded in something that could be realistic. You know, if you look at the assault rifle that wound up in the game, you can see at the bottom a traditional clip. The circular thing started off just being an ammo indicator, but that evolved into being the clip. At one point, we even considered giving the assault rifle two different types of ammo that would reload separately. It worked with another system in there that you may not have picked up on. But there are certain weapons that can pierce shields.

TC: It's range dependent, right? I've noticed the heavy machine gun ignores shields from about 50 meters while the assault rifle ignores shields from about 20 meters.

RS: Right. It was this idea that the assault rifle would be a hybrid. It would be medium across the board for all distances. The machine gun was meant for short ranges. But at a distance, it's less effective. It can't pierce shields. Meanwhile, the sniper rifle was the opposite. It's a rail shot that will knock down your shields first. We have this idea of two different kinds of ammo. A rail shot that moves so fast and is so powerful that shields were developed to counter them. But in the technology concepts in Section 8, some people got smart and went old school. Remember Dune?

TC: Yeah, you have to move slowly to get through the shields.

RS: Exactly. So in the backstory of Section 8, the idea was that weapons have evolved so far to counteract high velocity rounds, but what if you had a slower velocity slug? It may not have enough energy to travel very far, but it's powerful enough to do damage, but not fast enough that shields would stop it. A lot of weapons fall into the category of either slug shots or rail shots. The close range weapons are the slug shots. In close, it's going to rip someone apart. That's how the assault rifle works. Within 20 meters, the idea is that it stops using rail shots and starts using slug shots. Meanwhile, at long distance, weapons use rail shots. They take out the shields, but they also do more damage against an unshielded target.

TC: That makes a sniper great for support. He seems perfect for reaching into battles to help knock down shields.

RS: But keep in mind that a rail shot does a lot of damage to an unshielded target. It helps the sniper become the finisher. Whenever someone's shields go down, it's very visual. You see that blue grid around them. It means that's my target. I'm looking for the flash on the horizon when someone's shields go down and I can probably pop them off with one shot.

TC: So that's what that blue grid effect is. It means the target has no shields?

RS: Right. The shields go down, you see them collapse from top to bottom. And when shields reinitialize, you'll see them go from the bottom up.

TC: Very nice. Well while we're talking about specific weapons, how does the shotgun fit in? Is it like slow velocity slugs? Is it just general damage?

RS: It's very much a lot of damage. The machine gun wound up being the close-in tear-through direct-damage-to-armor weapon. It kind of pushed the shotgun out of that slot. What's the point of then having two weapons that do the same thing? So we wound up turning the shotgun into a weapon that does a lot of damage and shreds through shields quickly. It's also pretty effective against vehicles and deployables. It's an in-close killer, but instead of just piercing through shields, it does a ton of rail damage.

TC: It is useful to tote around to take out deployables.

RS: The sniper rifle is actually effective against deployables as well.

TC: Well, help me out with the rocket launcher then. I can't figure out how it would fit in. Am I missing something there?

RS: The rocket launcher was always meant to be for deployables and vehicles. We don't have any superweapons. We didn't want it to be the equivalent of the Halo rocket launcher. That one-hit kill superweapon weapon. Since you can take any weapon in Section 8, you can't really have any superweapons. So its role on the battlefield was always meant as the best thing to knock out deployables from a distance. In most cases, it'll take out a deployable in two hits. It's meant to be used against vehicles. It's the one thing that will really shred a tank. It's a little harder against a heavy armor, because the heavy can actually move quickly to get away from the shots.

TC: Are there under-the-hood calculations that make the rocket launcher do extra damage against a tank?

RS: Certain weapons are meant to be more effective against different targets. Deployables and vehicles are one category, versus soft targets in another category. There are tools in there we can tweak to make those characteristics. From the beginning, we knew we didn't want the rocket launcher to be an anti-infantry weapon.

TC: Okay, then, here's the tough one, Robert. Sell me on the pistol. Why would I ever take a pistol?

RS: Yeah, the pistol. It used to be the pistol versus the shotgun in terms of which one should we make as the short range weapon. Originally, the pistol completely bypassed your shields. It was capable of killing any player in roughly three or four shots. It was just too powerful. As far as what its role is, it's the pistol and shotgun for close range. The pistol still does some piercing damage. I think the pistol can actually knock someone down faster than a shotgun or assault rifle. I've gone up against some people who can drop you faster with a pistol than some of those other weapons. But I will admit that its role is hard to justify at times. If there's one weapon I would have liked to do something different with, it's the pistol. One of the ideas that never went all the way through was turning the pistol into a fallback weapon. Or even to make it secondary equipment like a grenade or mortar or knife. A quick-draw limited use thing if I run out of ammunition and want to pop off a shot while me and another guy are playing that reload game.

TC: Moving on to the dynamic combat missions, the DCMs, which would be my single favorite innovation in Section 8, tell me how it came about. Was it something from the very beginning you knew you wanted to do? You mentioned how the outpost mission evolved from watching gameplay. Did the DCM system come about that way?

RS: The DCMs were pretty much in there from the beginning. Determining how it all worked was a long road. At the start of the project, we were playing a lot of Battlefield 2, so I'll use examples from that game. You have these people who like play different roles. Like the sniper. He's going to climb to the top of the water tower, put down his claymore mines, and pull out his sniper rifle. He's going to protect that control point over there. That's his mission. But what sometimes ends up happening is that nobody goes to the control point. He didn't get to play the game he wanted to play. And now his team is pissed off at him for it. Or what about the engineer? You see these bridges you can blow up, so you're like, "Oh, man, I'm the engineer, so I'm going to put these land mines on this bridge and hide in the bushes, and then it's going to be awesome when that enemy tank drives over the bridge". And then you stick around and you're waiting for it. And waiting for it. And the game ends and no one ever showed up. It's like you're initiating a challenge, saying, "Come be a part of this". And that handshake goes unshook. With Section 8, we wanted to give those people, those people who wanted to do more than shoot bad guys and capture control points, we wanted to give them more advanced objectives they can play. And we wanted to put in a system so that the other side is aware of it. It creates a hotspot on the battlefield. One side gets to go, "Hey, we're going to defend an outpost. Now what are you guys going to do to stop us?"

And it was difficult to create a system. At first, we were thinking of them like quests in an MMO. But what happens if 32 players want to go on sniping missions? So we came up with a dynamic mission system that adds flavor to the fight, and players have challenges to look forward to. That's why we have certain archetypes in there. Like the VIP mission is a sniper mission. A high value target needs to be assassinated. It's for the guy who wanted to play that sniper role. And when you complete these missions, you get tangible rewards. If the convoy gets to its destination, you get to keep the truck. If you escort the VIP or get the commando to it objective, the bot doesn't disappear. He sticks around. The bomb will blow up deployable and structures.

TC: Right now, you can be completely oblivious to how DCMs work, and they just happen. They're a reward for just playing the game, or more specifically, for using your equipment correctly. Then you earn the resources and the missions happen. If anyone wants to know the nitty-gritty, he can just hit the F5 button and it's all spelled out there. But it's mostly hands-off. Was there ever an iteration that was more hands-on, where players would more directly interact with the system?

RS: The initial idea was for players to initiate the DCM. You would be the sniper and you would go, "Hey, I want to go on a sniping mission", so you create that kind of scenario. But it was difficult to set up system where everybody had that power. What would happen if 32 people want to go on a sniper mission? You also had the reverse case. You had people who didn't know the missions existed. We had to take a step back. We knew we wanted to create hot spots. How could we go about regulating this further? And kind of like requisition points, we came up with the system where players earned resource points and could then spend them on a DCM. Every action in the game had a reward. Blow up two turrets, get a reward. Heal someone, get a reward. Capture a control point, get a reward. If you got enough feats in the right category, you could kick off a DCM. The cost would be related to the mission. So for the example of the assassination mission for the sniper, you had to do things as a sniper. But at that point, it became very complex. It was like, "Okay, I need two of these points and three of these points to get this mission, but for this other mission over here, it will cost me...wait, where's the instruction manual? Can someone make me a reference card?" So then we decided to go in the opposite direction. Let the players influence the DCMs, but make it more passive. That's the system you see now. You've obviously taken a look at the F5 screen, so you know you can see the pre-requisites for different missions. For those players who want to influence missions for their teams, they can play it that way. It was kind of a compromise.

TC: I like how you mentioned earlier the random maps in a real time strategy game as far as being a design mandate behind the DCMs. That's a great comparison.

RS: Well, when I think about the first person shooters I've played, one of the reasons I often leave those games is because of the predictability. Take Counter-Strike. You're playing on Dust. It takes you thirty seconds to get to the middle. You know to throw a grenade around the corner because you know it takes them thirty seconds also. You've memorized all the sniper points so you know to hold down the trigger as you round the corner knowing there are good odds a guy is going to be there. The round is played in your head. Whereas in Section 8, and much like Kohan with random maps, we realized we can create a battlefield where even though the environment itself is static, everything on top of it is dynamic. It's not team A in one corner and team B in the other corner. 32 players dropping wherever they want on the battlefield, choosing their own bases. It's not the level designer who put a fixed turret in a guard tower always pointing in the same direction. It's the player calling in deployables, and creating choke points, and setting up base defenses. It's not the predictable spawn point where one helicopter spawns so you drive over there as fast as possible, because if you get there in the first thirty seconds, you're going to have the highest score. Section 8 is you using your requisition points as you wish. Get vehicles if you want. Get deployables. And on top of all this, when you add dynamic combat missions, how can two games ever play the same?

TC: As I hear you say this, Robert, I think of another game that reminds me a lot of Section 8. You guys share a lot of similarities with Quake Wars, but for me, that was a problem with Quake Wars. Splash Damage was so particular about the game flow, and setting up where the fights would be, and the choke points, and the axes of attack. It felt so controlling. I loved their systems, but I got tired of being shunted through the same strict map progression. To me, Section 8 is the antithesis of that. I mean, it's that same Quake Wars type of gameplay, but busted loose, without some control freak who made the map herding the action from point to point. So good on you guys for addressing something that I felt was a problem in Quake Wars.

RS: Thanks. I shared your feelings of frustration, especially with the gatekeeper roles you had in there. Up first, the soldiers have to blow up this thing. So I have to be a solider now, because I'm not sure I can count on my team. Next objective, repair this bridge. But oh crap, I'm a solider now. You had to go through those hoops. It felt like something was missing. Now I'm not going to shy away from saying we were inspired by that and other shooters out there. Including Tribes, Battlefield, you name it. We like to think that Section 8 is, in some respects, a "best of" hits of the things we've enjoyed in first person shooters, as well as fixing some of the flaws that have stuck around for ten plus years.

TC: Now a few real quick technical questions. Is there a PS3 version planned?

RS: There isn't going to be a Playstation 3 version shipping simultaneously.

TC: Ah, okay. Did you develop primarily for the PC or the 360? It seems to work well on both systems. How much of a challenge was that?

RS: We kind of had concurrent development on both platforms. There really wasn't a hard separation between our 360 and PC team. Instead, every single design decision was done in tandem for both platforms. We knew we didn't want to create two different games. In other games you might find that in the 360 port, players run a little faster, for example. You have these odd changes. But we wanted to create one game that worked well on both platforms. This extended to the control scheme as well. Take jetpacks. We could have very easily decided that would be an extra key on the keyboard. But then we realize we'd run out of buttons on the 360 controller. So what if somebody just holds down the jump button, it uses the jetpack? Okay, then why wouldn't we want to do that on the PC as well? Doesn't that simplify it? Isn't not having more buttons to push a better thing?

TC: You're letting players host Xbox 360 servers on PCs. Did you ever consider letting both PCs and 360s play on the same servers?

RS: That sounds great on paper. But then you realize who with an Xbox 360 is going to want to go up against a mouse and keyboard? It didn't really take off in first person shooters. No one was really jumping on board that cross platform kick. But you've got PCs that can connect to the Xbox Live network, you don't have games where shooter fans want to play against each other, but if there's an in for the 360 guys by letting us put a PC on their network and let them connect to that PC and run dedicated servers. There were enough people on Microsoft's end open to the idea. So we pushed for it, and that came about as a result.

TC: So the idea of not having Xbox and 360 players in the same game was strictly a matter of the control disparity? The disadvantage of.gamepads against mouse-and-keyboard controls?

RS: There are people on both sides that claim one control mechanism is superior to the other. But at the end of the day, you can't be more accurate than using a mouse and keyboard for aiming. That player would have the advantage. He would be more accurate than his console controller counterpart. We didn't want to push the game in that direction just for the novelty of it.

TC: I want to know a little about the bot AI. I'm really impressed with how well the bots use the tools of the game. You have this complex set of systems tied together. So when I saw there was bot support, I expected it was going to be something like what EA did with the Battlefield games, where they're really not good for much besides target practice. But you guys have bots who can actually play the game. They're more than just a tutorial, more than just targets. It must have taken an enormous amount of work.

RS: I think back to our RTS heritage. You have a lot of people out there who like playing real time strategy games not against people, but against bots. In first person shooters, you used to have bots. But surprisingly, support went away. A lot of games don't really have bots anymore. The AI was just what you had in the single player campaign. But when you look at the numbers, you realize there's a surprising number of people who purchase a first person shooter and never even play it online. They don't have an Xbox Live Gold account, or maybe someone doesn't want his son exposed to the internet, or whatever. So a priority for us was the offer a complete experience if you're not the type of person who wants to play online. We have a lot of people on the dev team who are like that. So it was a priority for us. We thought of it as a skirmish mode much like in a real time strategy mode. And one of the cool things about making that a priority were the tangential benefits. Because now we can have multiplayer servers that have bots on them. If you and your friends jump onto an empty server, it won't be empty. We have different types of bot setups in there. There's the starter mode that fills up with 25% bots so there are just enough to get things going. Or you can totally fill it with bots until another players comes along and takes a slot. We hope it will fill a void that a lot of first person shooters ignore.

TC: Who was the sadistic bastard at Timegate who put in one man army?

RS: That was a small group of sadistic bastards. One of the other modes is swarm mode, and the idea is to make it a bit like the Gears of War horde mode or Unreal. You're up against overwhelming odds. Some people wanted asymmetrical odds. And of course that evolved into one man army for the guy who wants to show off and go up against all of the bots himself.

TC: I can sort do it for a while if I put the bots on trivial. Do you have anyone at Timegate who can make any sort of progress on one man army at advanced levels? It just seems so cruel.

RS: On easy mode maybe.

TC: So you guys had a pretty extensive open beta. You must have been able to mine a lot of data from that. Was there anything surprising you learned?

RS: We got a lot of metrics in terms of balance feedback. Like in terms of what weapon is the most popular...

TC: What weapon is the most popular?

RS: It winds up changing. For a while it was the assault rifle. A couple of weeks later, having changed nothing, it turned into the machine gun. It was hard to interpret the data. We have a lot of stuff in the game and it takes people a while to discover it. Over time, everyone thinks something is the end-all and be-all. Why would you use anything but the machine gun? But all it takes is one person hitting on a different strategy and everyone ends up going in that direction. It was the same sort of behavior we saw in Kohan, where certain company configurations were considered supreme. But then one guy tried something completely different against it and wound up winning. There have been some interesting trends in the beta, but there are some periods of discovery that throw that off sometimes. We've also gotten some very straightforward feedback that's helpful. Things like, "Hey, can we get an auto kick for people who are idle?' And it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's an intelligent idea. Why didn't we think of that? Let's put that in." Usability updates. Our HUD used to be more confusing.

TC: I can imagine that must have been a challenge. There's a lot of information there, but you do a good job with things like fading out displays when you don't need to see them.

RS: The UI used to be a lot more overwhelming. All those things used to be displayed at the same time. You kind of got this feeling you were behind a piece of glass. But people want minimalistic. They want the information, but they don't want things blocking their view. It's like guys who jump into a jet fighter in a game and they switch the camera to the view that completely removes the cockpit. Likewise, the tutorial system with the voiceover that introduces you to features. That was ultimately from people's feedback. We got a lot of balance decisions from the beta. And also things about how the maps were structured. Tweaking the radius of AA guns. Things like that. The weapons went through a lot of balance changes, particularly in our earlier closed beta.

But as far as surprising, some people came into game hating some of the things we're doing differently. I'll go back to the lock-on example. So later someone comes to the beta with complaints about how the lock-on just legitimizes aimbots and blah blah blah. But when you look at the people who respond on the forum to explain it, it's the same people who three weeks ago wanted to quit the game because of that particular feature. It's been interesting watching the evolution. And you know, we don't win them all. For some people, Section 8 just isn't the game for them.

TC: Finally, Robert, I know it's a little early to be asking about this, what kinds of discussions do you guys have about how you can support the game after the release with downloadable content? Is that a discussion that you guys are even having?

RS: Oh, definitely. For Section 8, you can expect at the very least map packs. But hopefully you'll see a little more.