Interview: Neil McEwan On Creating Bravo Team’s Unique VR Cover Shooter

Sony have been going to great lengths to make PlayStation VR the home of the first person shooter, both third and first party. There’s already been some great efforts like Arizona Sunshine, Raw Data, and Farpoint and more, but 2018 is the year to cement that reputation.

Out today is Bravo Team from Supermassive Games – I’m sure many of you have seen our less than glowing review of the game already – and we sat down a week or so ago to play a few levels and then chat to Game Director Neil McEwan about how they’ve come at the challenge of creating a VR shooter with a rather unique move and cover system.

TSA: Having spent a bit more time with Bravo Team, it reminds me a lot of light gun games like Time Crisis. I’m assuming that was fairly intentional on your part?

Neil McEwan: We didn’t purposefully say that, but I love that game! I previously worked on House of the Dead game, so I love those types of games. They’re games I played as a kid and still continue to enjoy, so definitely, even if it’s not at the forefront of our discussions, for someone to say that actually makes me well up a little bit.

TSA: Do you need to take a moment? [laughs]

Neil: [laughs] A little bit…

TSA: I think it’s just that you get that feeling from the way you pop in and out of cover, but the key difference, of course, is that you have control over where you go. The cover system and locomotion in general is really interesting, and I’m curious how that came to be instead of something more freeform like Farpoint?

Neil: We had a number of things we wanted to try out and this bubbled up as a potential thing that could work. We wanted to service the gameplay and enable the play to get around the level pretty quickly, without that getting in the way from a comfort point of view. We tried it out – it was relatively easy to prototype, but difficult to finesse – and it kind of serviced the gameplay and felt pretty good.

Also, we were trying to replicate an action movie, and you get those sequences. It was fun watching you guys play and how you went “Woo!” as you slid down the rooftops…

TSA: Were you watching when we managed to synchronise the jump?

Neil: Yeah! And it kind of services that, in a way, seeing your character vault over a gap.

We just decided this may be a thing worth trying and it worked with the through the gun experience, where the AI was going and the kinds of level layouts that we wanted to do.

TSA: With the gunplay, it still feels a little bit odd to me going from just having an aim down sights button on a flat screen to having to physically aim down sights in VR. Is that something you had to design around? There are things like the guiding lines on the holo sight of the main assault rifle.

Neil: Yeah, definitely. I’ve made traditional flat shooters before, and as a developer you bring all of that baggage as well: this is how you iron sight, this is how you aim with the head.

So take recoil, right? We would be simulating that in the game and animate that out, but actually, if you rumble the gun a little bit, that’s physically happening to the player so they have to steady themselves. And with targeting, it’s normally attached to the player’s head and now we’re giving you a physical gun.

From a development point of view, it’s so good because it’s so new and you can experiment with stuff. So we detect when the controller is near your head, but do we dampen it down? And obviously we don’t have aim assist, because the aim gives you that accuracy.

TSA: With the level design, you’ve often got a split path design and the voice comes in to say you should split up, but it doesn’t feel like you have to and you could probably barrel through a lot of situations.

Neil: Yeah, you could. It obviously depends on the difficulty setting that you’re playing on, and also how good your ability to play the game is. We purposefully balance it by watching people play and playing it ourselves.

We white box the levels, play them and work out what’s fun, and then we do try and create these scenarios. Sometimes they’re organic where we have a big open area with lots of ledges and elevation, and we’ll see people going up to higher ground, and so we adapt the AI to service that.

It is about you working together and that tactical element.

TSA: It is quite a natural idea; you see two paths and know that you can probably do better by splitting up.

Neil: Yeah, and then we try to bring you back together and balance the challenge so you feel like you have to come back together.

TSA: I still find it a little bit odd where, just like Farpoint, the core of the game is all about co-op – Farpoint was co-op wasn’t it?

Neil: It was yeah, but I played it non-co-op. I don’t have any friends. [laughs]

TSA: [laughs] And that’s why you put an AI friend in Bravo Team?

Neil: Yeah, yeah. That’s my best friend!

TSA: [laughs] But building a pure co-op shoot on a system that is inherently isolationist is an interesting decision, even if you do always have back up in case you don’t have someone to play with.

Neil: I mean, although I joked, and I actually like playing games with real humans. I think that’s more fun and that was the foundation for what we were doing. We built it around that idea and there isn’t a plethora of other games that are doing that co-op anymore. They’re either team-based or individual, so it was definitely something that we could see an opening, especially in VR.

TSA: It does sometimes feel like half the fun is just coming from playing with friends…

Neil: Which is why we put a lot of effort into the AI buddy as well. We try to balance that out and simulate. Although it’s never quite like playing with a human, we went through various stages with him, where he would rush forward John Wick style and kill everything, which just wasn’t rewarding. Then he would hang back, which was annoying because he just felt like a spare wheel, so we put in being able to call out orders to him, like halt and forward. We also added a voice to him, so he does start spotting enemies for you, as well as having the Operator in your ear doing that as well.

TSA: Having him call enemies out to you is important, because there might be points where enemies are flanking or coming from different directions. I think the enemy AI design is a really interesting point, where it can feel like there’s endless waves coming at you, but there can be moments where you can be caught out.

Neil: […] A large chunk of the development time goes into the AI, because it’s the bread and butter of what you’re doing. From a development point of view, we don’t have a massive GDD of “if the player does this, then the AI should do that.” What we do is we tier it with a set of questions:

• Are the AI stupid?
• Do they react in a way I expect them to?
• Are they evasive of being shot at?

You answer those questions as you play, and it’s really something you need to work on. Also, you’ve got the VR element, so it’s:

• Can they see me when I’m in cover?
• Do they shoot at my chest or my head?
• Is the player aware that his body or head is exposed?

The binaural audio is something we put a lot of effort into, so you really hear where the bullets are impacting. That’s something you don’t get outside of VR.

TSA: The game’s story is pretty straightforward, seeing you fight your way through a city, and from the few levels I’ve played, you’ve tried to create different districts here, so there is still a bit of variety? You don’t really get to say, “OK! Now for the James Bond skiing section!”

Neil: No, we really wanted a level of realism in there.

TSA: That’s another thing: there’s a distressing lack of red barrels in the game! They’re always there to make explosions, and explosions are fun!

Neil: Because they feel too cliché to me! [laughs] I can’t argue that they’re not fun, but if I’m completely honest, we wanted to focus on the player to enemy and enemy to player combat, the through the gun experience.

TSA: Lastly, I want to talk about Supermassive as a whole, because it feels like you’ve become Sony’s go-to studio for VR at the moment and you’re building up this expertise with the system.

Neil: Yeah, definitely. This is my first VR game, so from a personal point of view, it’s fun to be in the Wild West and try things out, and then we do also have that foundation of having shipped VR games. We’ve got a lot of expertise across the board from art to code to audio that we can build on.

The teams work close together, and then we can throw something else into the mix like a different controller. We’re taking that knowledge, applying it and evolving it, so yeah, I think we are at the forefront of where this stuff is going.

TSA: It’s going to be interesting to see two or three years from now, if you carry on down this path, what the second, third and fourth generation of VR games are going to be like.

Neil: I mean, one of the reasons why I came to Supermassive was for the VR. It’s so exciting to be involved in that, because if I was to make another first person shooter, I kind of know what I’m doing. I’ve made four or five of them and they’re not pushing it forward, so personally that’s really interesting.

Thanks to Neil for chatting with us about Bravo Team. You can catch our review of the game here.