Interview: Bulkhead On Expectations And Old School Shooting In Battalion 1944

A lot of people heard the negative backlash to the recent trend of all shooters heading to a futuristic, jet pack powered setting. From Battlefield 1 to the mooted World War II era Call of Duty set for release this year, major companies are reacting to that, but as you can read about in our hands on preview, Bulkhead Interactive’s Battalion 1944 takes a slightly different approach. They don’t just want to make a WW2 shooter, they want to make the WW2 shooter that everybody was obsessed with playing back in 2005.

After playing the game, we chatted to the amiable and quite brutally honest Joe Brammer, Producer at Bulkhead Interactive about their game and why, for some reason, they don’t want to put out a glitzy trailer to showcase it.

TSA: Talk to me about the footage you released the other day!

Joe Brammer: So, what we decided was that we we’re not going to do a trailer, we’re just going to release fifteen minutes of footage, just the game. We wanted to control the hype, because it’s so easy for a game to just run and become a No Man’s Sky thing, and then people would be coming to use saying, “Is that the WW2 realistic shooter?” It’s not, we’re an old school, classic shooter. World War 2 is just the palette for the classic old school feel of the game.

When we said we’re not going to do a trailer, everyone was just asking why not? I tried to explain to my mum that we’re going to release some average looking game footage…

TSA: Sorry, but to your mum? [laughs]

Joe: Yeah! I was trying to say, we weren’t going to do a fancy trailer because then people would think that it’s awesome, and she was saying, “Well don’t you want that?” And I was saying, “No, mum! We want them to think it’s good – not amazing, but good – and then when it is great, they’re like, “Oh, this is great!” instead of being disappointed.

So I was trying to explain to her we just want people to see it as it is. There’s no lies here, there’s no fluffing on the trailers, there’s no post-processing. This is the game that you’ll be playing. […] We just decided for this whole campaign that we’d tell everyone everything, we open it up.

TSA: Was this a direct reaction to what we’ve seen over the last year or two, or is it, perhaps, more of a marketing strategy?

Joe: That’s a good way of putting it, but I think it’s probably just both, right? We’ve seen that other games are doing it. I think there’s a bit of frustration from the Infinite Warfare trailer, because I really love Call of Duty games, but I don’t like them selling something else. We’ve kind of made that mistake before in our other games.

It’s so refreshing, a player who knows Battlegrounds will have seen the trailer where the cars are bugging out all over the place, it’s broken, but I played it and I loved it. I wasn’t expecting anything else, I got exactly what I was expecting. But then if you look at Ghost Recon Wildlands or Rainbow Six Siege? The trailers have the tactics, the talking, going through doors, but it turns out it’s just this glory hole simulator where your shooting each other through holes. I was disappointed, I wanted it to be something else!

TSA: What’s interesting, also, is that you’re going for an old school shooter, but you’re doing it in a different way to other companies. Where Doom or STRAFE are modern shooters with the essence of old school, you’re going for the absolute replication and feel of old school.

Joe: Oh, I love STRAFE, man. Doom’s a different one, because some things you couldn’t recreate in that. It’s like trying to recreate Goldeneye exactly how it was, but have you tried to play that game recently? Halo and Call of Duty redefined the first person shooters.

TSA: I don’t have the time to cut through the crust of dust on the analogue stick of my N64 controllers…

Joe: They’re different games in that sense. With us, I think that FPS games have got lost in what they are and they’ve become a bit too much of a click to action game. So if you look at Battlefield now, and I’m a huge Battlefield 2 fan – not Bad Company 2, Battlefield 2 – and there wasn’t a vault action or a hurdle, it was just a world of collisions, you have a jump action and a run action, and that’s it.

I think Call of Duty as well has become too much ‘press this button to vault’, ‘press this button to do this’ and then an animation will play and move your camera around. It took away the control from the player and I don’t like that. I think the 1:1 movement of showing how this soldier is hurdling a wall and jumping through a window doesn’t matter because it’s just the palette. It doesn’t matter if that’s physically possible in real life or not, it just feels right.

When you feel yourself jumping from building to building to strafe jumping through a wall and then you land behind a guy and knife him, that feels great. It’s not the knifing bit that feels great, because that’s the press action to knife, the bit that feels great is the awesome move you did to get up there.

I think that’s a good example of why Battalion is good, because we nail the movement and the feel of it. We nail it in terms of it feeling like Enemy Territory, Call of Duty and Quake. People have different definitions of what old school is and, unfortunately for me, I’m find out I’m a lot older than I thought I was!

TSA: What’s the reaction you’ve had so far to what you’ve shown?

Joe; It’s been surprisingly actually, because it’s been really positive. I know that everyone says that…

TSA: Wait, but you put out a really bad trailer!

Joe: Yeah, but we put that out while we were already here at Rezzed!

But it’s been really good, we’ve had people walking out the door saying, “This game is (*&£%@*$ amazing!” and screaming at all the Switch players outside. Some of them have turned around to queue up for Battalion!That’s the other thing: we’ve had a queue all day. I’ve made two first person puzzlers and I’ve never had a queue!

The Xbox guys, who we’re working with now to get Battalion onto Xbox, they walk over to us and they’re like, “Guys, we’ve had endless request for Battalion, can we finish this deal?” Frankly it comes down to that people want the game now.

For me, the next few months are about controlling expectations. This is a true Early Access game, we’re release the game to test it and all the money we get goes back into the game. I like the idea of doing things a little differently with pricing, the same way that Minecraft did it, so it comes out on Early Access, it’s a bit broken, so we charge less for it. After a year of Early Access, the price goes up.

So there’s an incentive to buy it during Early Access, and we’re putting a lot of that money into making the game better with new factions, new teams, new maps. Once it’s done – if it’s ever “done” – you pay a proper price for the game, you can still buy skins and stuff, but only cosmetics and nothing that’s gameplay changing, because that is really what hurts Call of Duty. It’s about the game then, but at this point it’s about the people, the testing, the community, feedback and us listening.

We’re forced to do listen, because we don’t have a 30 person testing team, we’re just a bunch of 24 year olds in an office in Derby and we need to know what people think about this game.

Thanks a lot to Joe for chatting to us. Battalion 1944 has a long road ahead of it, with its next stop being a Closed Alpha on PC in May. If you’re one of those players who’s been crying out for a return to the glory days of the Call of Duty franchise and its ilk in the mid-2000s, then this is absolutely one to keep an eye on.