IGTV: Operation Flashpoint Dev Interview

Tim Brown, good to see you again, especially after E3. The game has come along leaps and bounds since we saw it at E3. What's the biggest change you've made since that early build?

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Obviously we've tweaked up the graphics a bit, we've put a lot of polish in as you'd expect in the final stages of the game, but one of the key things you're going to notice - and have probably already seen - is that the balancing of the game, the general way the game feels, has been turned up to 11. The other thing is the AI. As you can imagine, with such an advanced set of AI features that we've got in our game, there were issues that people would see at E3. You're going to see a lot less of those. We're still working on it, and we're just getting rid of those last few ones.

We've used various different advisers throughout the development of the game, and not just on weapons but on tactics and everything like that. What we did have access to was a lot of the weapons – not all of them – and obviously the PLA, the Chinese weapons; it's very hard to get hold of those weapons. So some of those have been recreated using video footage and then the sound designers have done an absolutely sterling job on recreating that audio. But a lot of the weapons we recorded the sound of, at a firing range out in... Nevada, I think it was.

We're very proud of the authenticity in creating this game, and obviously weapons are a massive thing. Obviously we couldn't get a Javelin to fire, because they cost a ridiculous amount of money, and the US military are a bit worried about game designers just playing with that type of hardcore weaponry.

On the weapons, we have modelled realistically the amount of time it takes to reload. From the basic weapons such as the M16 we have timed how long it takes for some of the guys to reload the weapon – not our guys, some professionals - and we've also modelled things like the SMAW and the anti-tank Javelin missile and how long it takes to reload that. So you'll see how long it takes to reload in real-life in our game, and that brings over a completely tactical point to the game, because you have to consider “Do I have enough time to assemble my Javelin and pop a shot off before any enemy spots me, or do I need to fall back and find a better location to take the shot?”

Did you use a British military advisor for the tactics, or did you use somebody from the US Marines?

We used both, actually, in some cases. Because it's obviously a lot easier to get hold of British military advisers, we did use a few guys. A lot of the stuff like the mo-cap [motion capture] that was done originally for the animations was done with an ex-SAS guy just to get the motion and everything correct, but the actual advising on tactics, that came direct from some United States Marine Corps guys who have given us a huge amount of information. We've got reams and reams of data on all sorts of things, and stuff that we're not using in this game but who knows, may be used in future games.

The reason we chose United States Marine Corps is they have a lot of the toys that people want to play with, not least me. *grins* So yeah, one of the reasons we went was partly to do with a bigger audience would like to play with United States Marine Corps weapons over British or that sort of thing. And the British do use quite a bit of US kit over in Afghanistan and Iraq at the moment. That's not to say that in the future we might not be doing anything on other armies and things like that, or military wings, or that kind of thing, but we did feel that it would be very interesting to see United States Marine Corps versus the Chinese PLA.