Homefront: The Revolution’s setting is certainly an evocative one, of striking out against an oppressive occupying force in your home country. However, you won’t stand up against the KPA forces on your own, with AI resistance members working alongside you in the single player and a distinct and separate co-op mode that can be played with your friends.
It was that co-op that we played for yesterday’s previews – both written and in video form – before speaking to Stephen Rhodes, Narrative Designer at Dambuster Studios.
TSA: The first thing I’d like to make absolutely clear is that the co-op game is completely separate from the story campaign. Is that the case, or can you play through the campaign in co-op as well?
Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, the co-op is completely separate from the single player campaign, but it takes place chronologically after the events of that story. So the events of the single player kind of lead into the co-op missions and their narrative.
TSA: I think that’s interesting, in that it means the kind of gameplay you’ve got in the co-op is quite different. Though it’s in the same open world, it’s more directed and you have clearer objectives to head towards.
Stephen: It is, yeah. With the multiplayer, we basically give you an objective and there’s a small narrative surrounding what you’re doing and what you’re sent to achieve, but the freedom and the non-linearity comes into how you actually do that.
We give you a large amount of space to play in, for you to find the way you want to do it, so that’s where the same non-linearity comes in, but the actual objective itself is a linear set.
TSA: Compared to playing the Red Zone demo that you had last year, I think you do lose that little spark from the open world. I guess that’s a balancing act, trading that off against the fun of being able to play with a group of friends?
Stephen: Yeah, exactly. That’s the core difference. In single player, we can control everything and we know what’s going on. There’s only one person and everyone else is AI stuff, but when you throw three other people into the mix and they’re all talking to each other, I think it’s more about the experience that they have as a team and how they react to certain situations.
That’s where the enjoyment will come from, rather than giving them this whole huge, broad thing to play with, because then what we’ll probably get is people going off in different directions. If you give them too much room, they can just get lost, they won’t play the objective and they probably won’t have fun then.
So although we do give quite a lot of room to play in, we do make it a bit more constrained. You have the freedom to muck about as a team and do it how you want, you still have to go towards the objectives.
TSA: How do you go about still making it feel like you’re on the back foot and the underdog in a lot of these situations? Because when you’ve got four people there, and hopefully they’re going to be competent players…
Stephen: Hopefully! That’s not always the case! [laughs]
TSA: [laughs] But, if you’re sticking together, you can handle a lot more enemies and bigger challenges.
Stephen: I guess the main way that we do that is we put the objectives and the things that you’ve got to achieve in places which aren’t necessarily easy to access. So you have to get into a KPA fort, or you have to find a sniper team over there, but in order to get there you have to go through enemy controlled territory.
And there’s always the numbers game. Even if you are four people and you’re all really, really good, you are still only four people and there’s only so many avenues of attack that you can cover. You’ve also got a very finite amount of resources, whereas the KPA are seemingly endless. They have so much more at their disposal to throw against you.
Even on the easy difficulty settings, you feel like you’re up against it, but when you get up to the harder difficulty settings, it gets something else!
TSA: Right at the end of our play time, we did try one of the easier missions on a harder difficulty level.
Stephen: Oh, really? How did that go?
TSA: Not very well! An armoured truck came up behind us, and I figured I could take it out alright, but then I got downed and the others were getting killed at the same time. We got separated and could have done with sticking together a bit more.
Stephen: Yeah. Communication is definitely key, but it can only get you so far. You need the tools and the knowhow on how to deal with a certain situation.
TSA: What kinds of missions will we see across the twelve that are shipping with the game? Will there be adventures into the Yellow Zone and Green Zone, as in the single player, or are you sticking more with the action packed side of things in the Red Zone?
Stephen: There’s going to be a mix, and the aim is for each mission to have its own theme and unique feel, from both a narrative and a gameplay point of view. So we’re trying really hard not to reuse objectives, and stuff like that.
You will see them take place in different zones, and that’ll be really interesting. You’ll have situations where you know you’re going to do a Yellow Zone mission, and so you know that you need to tailor your team in a specific way and have a certain array of equipment, because of the different style of gameplay that you’ll find in that.
But the plan is for each mission to be unique, have its own unique objective, and have it’s own theme and feel to it.
TSA: In terms of the character growth, as a separate game mode to the single player, one thing that I liked was picking a starting profession and just the sheer variety of options! Is “Game Developer” going to be the most overpowered ones?
Stephen: [laughs] It should be! It could be like hacking into the Matrix, and editing it on the fly… I might have to go back and make that happen now!
TSA: But you’ve got so many to choose from, so how do you quantify the difference between a huckster and a stevedore? Do the professions filter down into a handful of archetypes?
Stephen: Yeah, they’re all structured under several categories and archetypes, but they’re mostly for flavour. They give very minor bonuses to a certain thing.
My favourite is the grenade thrower perk, because he used to be a baseball pitcher, so he can throw things a bit further. It’s a nice little thing, and it’s nice to be able to throw just that little bit further than everyone else.
Someone will find a min-max and find something that’s statistically the best, but it’s more a flavour thing and the whole point is that you were a civilian before you joined the resistance. It’s like, what did you do as a civilian?
I like making an older male character and making him a janitor, so that this old grizzled janitor from a high school has joined the resistance and is going to fight the KPA.
TSA: I picked a woman and said she was a lawyer, and though I couldn’t input the name without a keyboard on PC, I wanted to call her Jennifer Walters, which is She-Hulk’s lawyering alter ego! I just need to be able to give her some green warpaint as well.
Stephen: [laughs] Yeah! That would be ace.
TSA: But just picking a profession from that list doesn’t go on to affect how you evolve that particular character. You’ve got the skill tree and stuff like that, but one thing that will have an impact is the randomness of the loot drops. We see these an awful lot in games, but do you think that’s something people will tire of any time soon? It’s a particular loop where you can be stuck waiting for this one particular item.
Stephen: We’ve implemented systems that hopefully alleviate that. You can get different categories of crate, so if you’re after a weapon, you can get the weapon crate, so you’re not getting drops from every item you can get and it’s just the weapons.
It’s an important one because you want the flexibility of the weapons, whereas with the gear, there’s a lot of vanity stuff there for how you want your character to look.
We also have a smart RNG [Random Number Generator] system, where if you’ve had something before, it won’t try and give it to you again. As you collect things, it takes options away so that the randomness becomes less.
But yeah, it’s a fair point. Obviously we’re going to give a lot of support and community things once the game goes live, so we’ll be looking at feedback on these things, to see if we do then want to implement a system where you do get hard drops in some way. If that’s what the community wants us to do…
When we were developing it, we looked to what other games offered and what other systems people found popular, and the sort of random crate system seemed to be what people really liked. So that’s the direction we went in to start with, but we’re open to feedback and maybe implementing other systems or other features that help the community and improve it.
TSA: Lastly, you can also get these loot drops with microtransactions. I’m not going to ask about avoiding pay to win – everybody’s sick of this question – but rather, do you feel we’re reaching a tipping point where people accept that there might be a few bad examples of microtransactions, but that they generally won’t get in the way?
Stephen: It’s a difficult one, because there are ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong.
The way we’ve done it, I think it’s good. You can buy Resistance Crates with real world money, but we don’t plaster the dashboard with it or anything like that. It actually tries to use your in game currency before it even tries to use anything else.
The thing is that it’s basically a time saver, and a lot of the items in the crates also have level and skill set locks, so you can’t just buy loads of crates and then use all of the gear. You still have to progress your character, so it is just a time saving thing.
People like those things, even though there’s a lot of stigma about it. We put it in there because people like the option, and it is just an option. All of the multiplayer content that we’re doing for Homefront: The Revolution is completely free; you will never be charged for anything we do for the co-op.
So it’s a system that’s there if you want it, and if you don’t want it, it won’t affect anything. I think that’s the right way to do those.
TSA: Yeah, I think it’s going to come down to, both consumers accepting that these things exist, but also for developers and publishers to standardise their efforts so that it doesn’t impact the game if you don’t want it.
Stephen: Well, it’s also a lot easier with co-op. Because it’s co-op, we don’t have any balance issues to worry about, but if it was competitive PvP and you had teams against each other, then it would be an issue. You’d get into discussions about how the other team’s got access to more stuff, whereas, because it’s co-op and you’re working as a team, having extra options doesn’t make the game any easier. The game’s going to be hard, even if you’ve got access to all the weapons, because it’s about learning how to deal with a situation and learning to adapt to match.
It was just an option that we put in there because the marketing said that people like it, so we just wanted to make it an option and we left it at that. We didn’t go any further with it, and I think that’s how it should be handled.
Thanks to Stephen for talking to us about Homefront: The Revolution. Make sure to check out our written preview and our hands on video of the game, to see it in action.