We’ve spoken before about the ambition behind Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 and CI Games’ push to break their game series into the AAA category. To that end, it’s venturing into open world game design and putting more control over the experience and how you tackle objectives in the hands of the player. It’s easy to see that that this goes well beyond what the first two games attempted.
Having gone hands on with the PlayStation 4 version of the game for the first time, we sat down to chat with Tomasz Pruski, Senior Level Designer at CI Games.
TSA: One of the things I found amusing was seeing Bolivia complain about their appearance in Ghost Recon Wildlands. How does Georgia feel about Sniper Ghost Warrior 3? [laughs]
Tomasz Pruski: [laughs] We’ve not been officially contacted, but I feel like we’re not portraying Georgia in a bad light. It’s a country that has actually seen conflict in fairly recent history, but we’re not recreating an actual thing here, we’re just loosely basing it on events that have transpired. We’re not having this big controversy of having actual events in the story, but it resonates well with the narrative we have in the game.
TSA: Within the conflict that you’ve created for this, are you trying to tell different sides of the story?
Tomasz: So at face value, the separatists are a purely evil movement that just want to kill people and take over the region, but if you stop, listen to the in game dialogue, look for clues about the characters in the open world, you’re going to learn a little more about their movement and the reasons for the uprising. We’re not telling this complete story of why the separatists are doing what they’re doing.
We are planning to tell the other side of the story in the second DLC that will be released later this year, but yeah, we feel that this is more of a backdrop to the real story, which is with the two brothers and their relationship. So the separatists are not the main focus of this story.
TSA: You’re bringing this story in an open world now – and we’ve actually talked about this big talking point before! – but how are you going about making it fun to explore? What have you been able to take away from other games?
Tomasz: So the first thing we did was to set certain expectations. We never wanted to create this open world RPG where you roam around talking to NPCs, taking side missions and getting lost in the endless loop. The open world’s main goal is to enforce this sniper fantasy, where you are alone behind enemy lines and have to do your own recon, find your own sniping spots, way in, way out. All the locations are pretty much open for you to strike however you want.
Having that, you also have to fill this world with something. It’s not just driving between missions, so in the world we’ve put these little question marks on the map and these are different scenarios. It could be a prisoner rescue, where you’re helping civilians, and once you reach a certain threshold, you get certain perks like weapon attachments. There’s drone challenges, where you fly your drone somewhere inaccessible to, for example, turn off a generator which will unlock a magnetic lock, and then you can gain access to a loot crate with a collectible or weapon attachments.
There’s also secrets like storied sniper rifles throughout the world, artefacts like old coins that tell you the story of Georgia. Some of the open world question marks will also have background information on some of the characters. So you’ll find documents or something that’s going to tell you more about this person.
Oh, and there’s one more thing which I nearly forgot! There’s the Most Wanted list which has certain targets that you can track in a journal, and if you take them out you get additional rewards.
TSA: You’ve got the drone in the game, of course, which is great for scouting around, marking enemies and so on, but I also found it’s quite easily spotted, which I didn’t remember from playing this before. That’s an interesting balance where I’m trying to be stealthy, only to cock it up and have this little drone get a bit too close and be shot down.
Tomasz: It can get spotted, but it can also be modified to have better camo, so it flies a bit more quietly and has some camouflage options. I think it even has two tiers of that, so you can fly it a bit more closely. A lot more closely, actually.
It’s pretty fragile too, but once the battery runs out or it’s destroyed, it enters a cool down, so you can still use it later on, you never permanently lose it.
TSA: I do quite like the idea of the battery running out and it falling on someone’s head. That should be a kill in the game!
Tomasz: It should! [laughs] Actually, it was lethal at one point in development, so you could fly it into somebody and it would kill them with the rotor, but we found it was a bit too overpowered!
TSA: One of the joys of open world games is getting to mess around, and how much do you cater to people wanting to do that? We were talking a bit earlier about putting C4 onto the ATV, or on cows… [laughs]
Tomasz: Yeah! So we put in a lot of gadgets. C4 is the most mess-able one, because it sticks to stuff, so you can actually stick it to your ATV, but there’s also some vehicle patrolling mission areas and you can stick it to their vehicle, wait for it to pass a checkpoint and then blow it up.
There’s also a lot of stuff you can use to lure enemies. The drone has a luring mod, but you can also have luring bullets. If you’ve got two guys stood next to one another, taking one out will potentially result in alerting the other guys, you have a bit of a window where you can correct your shot or kill the other guy, but it takes a bit of skill. So if you don’t want to risk it, you shoot a luring bullet behind a corner and the closest guy will go and investigate, then you can take them both out. There’s a lot of that.
You can use the environment to mess with the AI too, so fuse boxes, generators, explosive barrels…
TSA: With the beta test a little while back, what were you able to take away from that?
Tomasz: Well first of all we got our troubleshooting out of the way. A lot of people sent us their diagnostics and what problems they were having. You know, as a company we have limited resources to test the game – we have 150 PCs, maybe? – so when thousands of people get into your game with different configurations, they have different problems. They sent us all their stuff and we fixed a ton of it.
In terms of design, though, we also had a lot of feedback and implementing that stuff was why we postponed the release date. So the drone was made into its own thing and not a gadget that you chose from the gadget wheel, because people wanted to always have access to it, and the red dot was added for bullet drop, which wasn’t originally in the design, but people said we should make the game a bit more accessible, specially for newcomers. We revamped the wind indicator to be a lot more readable. AI stuff, weapon stuff, controls…
A lot of people had a lot of ideas for the game and some of it was pretty good, so we put it in there!
TSA: Getting up and running on console, was that difficult for you? Obviously, there’s lots of optimisation going on, but the last few times I saw the game it was struggling a bit even on PCs, and consoles aren’t exactly equivalent to top end PCs.
Tomasz: It was definitely a challenge! Especially since the two consoles are actually different to each other, so each one was an individual case, but I think we got it done. You’ve seen the game on PS4 and it’s pretty smooth. It’s only going to get better, because the day one patch is still coming.
TSA: Finally, you’re also going to add multiplayer after release, but are you going to put drone races in there?
Tomasz: I might now! That’s a very good idea. Is that for free? Can we use that one?
TSA: You can use that, yeah. I just want drone races!
Thanks to Tomasz for chatting to us about the game. Be sure to check out our written preview and some video highlights from the game.
