Matt: Console based RTSs haven’t generally worked in the past so what makes Stormrise work?

Ken: Well what ultimately makes Stormrise work is that we looked at the whole problem the other way round, so instead of saying how can we bring RTS from PC across to console by bolting some interface on it, we started by playing with the controller which is the biggest barrier to entry there, and going well what could we do with this as a player that empowers us to tell units what to do, to command. And so we did a whole bunch of prototyping initially just with that whole idea of, you know, what feels good as a gamer holding one of these controllers, and then we built a game behind that that matched the pace and the depth in areas that the console gamers would want. So we haven’t really made an RTS dumb like some other things, which is - generally what they do.

We kind of approached it the other way, and the big thing that we realised, the problem with the current RTS ports is they’re unresponsive. They’re very easy to get into, I’ve played the Battle for Middle-Earth II, Sims City III and now the Halo War stuff, and it’s all very accessible in that you move the left stick around and press the A button - great, but then when you want to go from one end of the battlefield to the other, and you’re hearing units under attack, and you're going 'I’ll get there eventually', as I scroll across the battlefield, that was my biggest frustration playing those sort of games. And so responsiveness was really the thing we were looking for, coming back from our own prototyping, and that’s where Whip Select ultimately was born.

Ken and Matt playing Stormrise in the CA offices

Matt: You said before that you didn’t make it simpler in some areas, are there particular things that you had to simplify both in comparison to more current RTS on PCs?

Ken: What we wanted to do for the console players was keep the pace very fast, keep it engaging. The console gamer is used to high degree of action, and that’s what kind of draws them in and keeps them playing. Looking at where PC RTS has gotten to over the last decade or more, there’s actually some out there that have got mammoth loads of depth, depth upon depth upon depth, because that’s how they’ve matured. You know as that tree grew, its roots have gone way down, and so we wanted to start by going "we’ve got this fast pace, we don’t want to burden with learning the new interface, and feeling in command, as well as then all of this mountain loads of stuff". The Total War Games were considerably larger than most, I think on Medieval II we had 380 different units, and they all were different in some way, and most of them historically accurate! So for those out there who had encyclopaedic knowledge of that stuff they found it really accessible, but most other people went 'what’s the difference between this archer guy and this other archer guy'.

Matt: So I’m guessing Stormrise is not historically accurate then?

Ken: Not really. [laughter] That’s the thing, what we wanted to do with the content is we wanted to take this kind of new game experience we had, and then find some content that we could wrap around it to make the most of the new experience, and the new mechanics that we had. We had a look at some historical based areas, and we found them very limiting. One of the other things we’ll look at is the verticality aspect, and being able to play inside, fly above, go underground, and all these things all at once, you know there weren’t many historical areas that we could really do that.

Matt: Napoleonic Star Battles didn’t really feature a lot of up and down? You’ve mentioned the console players, what about PC players, how are the controllers different for PC players to what they are for console?

Ken: What we found was that even though we set out on the journey of 'how do we bring an RTS or a command experience to a console game', is we actually found in the end once we got the Whip Select going, and once we added the verticality, that we’ve actually added something quite unique for the PC players as well. The Whip Select with the mouse is equally as innovative as it is for the thumb sticks.

Matt: So there is an equivalent system?

Ken: Yeah. So if you kind of ... I suppose I’ve always had trouble trying to describe the controls, but where the console Whip Select is very much about kind of point in the direction with the stick and then release, the PC is almost a bit like air hockey. So you move the mouse, kind of push into the direction of the unit you want to go to.

Matt: Kind of like mouse gestures?

Ken: Yeah it’s kind of like that but it turns out that after about five/ten minutes I was doing very very small mouse whips, less than ten pixels, and I was bouncing around all my units. So it actually feels really good, while we set out on this whole console thing, we’ve actually got something which adds a fast paced RTS experience to players on all platforms.

Matt: Can players on any platforms communicate in any way with others, can they play against other platforms?

Ken: We haven’t allowed for that in Stormrise. We did look at it - I think Microsoft have panorama or something that they had to play between Vista and the XBox, and it’s still not something that we won’t rule out. In development, we can actually play controllers against PC guys, and some of the guys in the Dev team actually prefer one or the other, I had some guys playing the PC interface the other day going "but you can’t do this", and it’s like "yeah you can you’ve just got to do it this other way". You’ve got to think differently, so even though the mechanics are the same underneath, and there’s an equivalence in the interface, people actually do approach the game differently which is kind of unique, and it changes the way that they play against each other. So in Dev we can actually play the two interfaces against each other, but it won’t be available for the players straight up.

Matt: You’ve talked about verticality earlier, I understand that’s one of the big features of it as well, how does that work, what does that do?

Ken: To take a step back, what we wanted to do is bring the camera in closer to the units, so instead of the God cam kind of floating over the top, we wanted to bring the camera in closer, something that End War has done recently, and it also allows for a greater feeling of being in the action. We found that from a tactics point of view, we could now run the whole game on natural line of sight, so what you could see your units could see, no fog of war is needed anymore. It’s always a problem with the 3D rendered RTSs, and we had this trouble even on Total War, how do you show when your units can’t see something? On Total War we just popped them in, and we didn’t you show you a shroud or a fog of war or any of that sort of stuff, and it was just left to people’s imaginations a little bit you know, on some of the C&C’s and the like they do show the fog of war.

So in this kind of search for natural line of sight, you can now sneak around the outside of some guys, and we realised - hang on, well one way of sneaking around is to go underneath them, and the camera will just come closer to your units, and you can kind of run around almost third person that way. And then as you open out into a larger area, the camera will give a little bit more distance and give you that RTS feeling again, and it was like 'oh wow', suddenly tactically it was quite important, earning the high ground, so the verticality aspect of going on top of a roof or having an air unit around means that you can actually get back your comfortable God cam view of the world, but you’ve got to earn it. You’ve got to have a guy on a roof, a sniper or you’ve got to have an air unit available, and using one of the control mechanisms we call indirect ordering, you can actually tell others what to do, which is really cool once you get into it.

But it’s a right you have to earn, and so tactically against your opponent you can see that they’ve stationed an air unit up somewhere, and you can go and take that out, so that essentially now reducing their awareness of what’s going on, and then start moving around the outside, there’s no point trying to sneak around their flank if they’ve got an eye in the sky, and a lot of these other units can spot for artillery too, so you can get the infiltrator - which is like a spare cops unit on a roof top somewhere - and you can be paying the targets for artillery. So if you’re getting hammered from artillery somewhere, you need to go and find one of these guys who are around.

So the natural line of sight, the verticality, being able to really explore the spatial awareness of, and the tactics that you can have in there, very much like we all do now in shooters and team based shooters, brining that into strategy is one of the philosophical things that we’ve kind of done with it.

Matt: Yes, because the normal standard with RTS is just build as many big tanks as you can and just go that way.

Ken: Yeah, so with that too the game isn’t designed around just get a big bunch of guys who you just push all in one direction. There’s huge bonuses for a proper use of cover and crossfire, and you really can take down some big enemies even with the basic units, if you set up a good crossfire environment, which means in multi player there’s lots of arguments - "hey man, you’re meant to stay there, and we’re meant to keep these guys, and hold that point, and you buggered off".

"We’ve actually got something which adds a fast paced RTS experience to players on all platforms"

Matt: So tell me about multiplayer - what sort of modes do you have, what sort of options are available?

Ken: The competitive multi player is to two teams of four, so eight players in total, and it is possible to play one versus seven, though you can’t do that in ranked matches on XBox and that sort of stuff. If you’ve got a mate who is boasting about how good they are, well get seven others together and let’s kind of see how they go! We’ve got some really hot shot guys, Sanatana and Andy from QA here are both in the top ten in the world for Warcraft III, and they kind of boast a lot about things and so we can have a gang up session that way, but mostly we’d expect a clan based type matches four vs four competition, and hopefully they’ll be some ladders and stuff set up at some point, where people can kind of go through and have clan battles and stuff. Of course you can play with one vs one, the multi player maps that we’ve got, we’ve got smaller ones through to much larger ones, some are more ideally suited to the two vs two which are great, up to the much larger maps which are great for four versus four.

Matt: Is it possible to have four different teams all against each other?

Ken: At this stage it’s just the two teams red and blue, because we really wanted to get that sports feel to it, because in most conflicts there does generally turn out to be one faction against another, and explore the balance that way. What we wanted to really look at for Stormrise in this first incarnation, of getting the basis and the solid game play and the balance right, before we start to open it out and explore all these other opportunities. In terms of multi player as well you can skirmish multiple players against just an AI, which is great for just you and a mate wanting to dial up the AI to hard, and sit back and laugh as it tears you apart.

Matt: Is there a single player story campaign as well?

Ken: Yeah, there’s twelve missions in three acts, and it follows through a particular commander’s story throughout the course of Stormrise and introduces the player to the world, to the environments, to each of the two factions, and each of the units that they have. You get to play with and against each of those units throughout the course of the entire single player campaign, and one of the things I really liked about Warcraft III was that their single player campaign was almost a stage introduction to the entire game, so that by the time you’d finished you were ready to go and take on some multiplayer.

There is a single player campaign, but multiplayer is where the meat is.

Matt: Does that imply then that the single player is really just a tutorial and that the multi player is what the game is?

Ken: Well there’s significant challenge in the single player game, and what we’ve done is set it up so that on the different difficulty levels you’ll be forced to explore these different tactics, and explore different parts of the map, in order to beat the game on hard through single player. It’s kind of funny we get two different satisfying experiences - on easy it’s just a giant tutorial, you just go through all of that, and we introduce you to verticality and stuff; but on normal and hard, the game in itself is quite a satisfying challenge.

Matt: You’ve talked about adding new features and so on, is there any kind of plan for downloadable content for additional levels for addition – or is that way to in the future to discuss?

Ken: Well right now the thing that we’re really looking at is just putting this one to bed, and getting the word out, what we’re really looking forward to is once the game is in gamers hands is really starting to talk to them. We’ve got this new experience, and we’ve delivered a set of features to do this with, and we’ve got some great ideas of stuff we’d like to do to extend it, but we want to talk to the gamers and find out what’s the thing that really excites them most about what to do next, and so we haven’t yet officially lined up anything, but we’ve got lots of plans for the extensions and additions.

Matt: That was something I meant to ask just before regarding multi play, you’ve spoken mostly of team battles, are there other kinds of modes like captured flag, last man standing type things, are there more diverse modes or is it pretty much just war?

Ken: At this stage it’s really like I was saying before about distilling the core game play down, and just getting that right. With the mechanic essentially dominating certain points for resources, there’s a line of supply mechanic so you can use that to cut off resources to your enemy, there’s a few victory conditions in the sense that if you wipe out all of their army, that’s a victory condition - but if you link line of supply all the way the their base and then dominate their base that’s a victory condition.

Matt: You’ve got some fairly obvious competition in the console RTS sphere, which until now has been a bit empty. With Halo Wars particularly now on the XBox 360, how do you see that as being compared to yours?

Ken: I suppose at the outset I hope it’s compared a lot, one of the things that started RTS even on PC back in the mid nineties was Blizzard versus Westwood, each time one upping and the comparison generated a lot of interest in the games. A lot of people on forum are already starting to ask that question - which one is kind of better? The Halo universe is awesome and I think that in terms of where maybe C&C and even Battle for Middle Earth are too, and even End Wars, they haven’t quite been able to build a kind of passion for RTS in the console community, although maybe the Halo content might be enough to kind of get people in there.

Having played the Halo Wars demo they really have stuck to the tried and true formula of bringing what is essentially a PC game across, and I’ve heard some describe it as kind of 'RTS lite' or 'my first RTS' and that sort of stuff, which is probably a bit harsh. It is a lot of fun if you look at it for what it is, and in comparison I think what people will see when they look at Stormrise after Halo Wars is that we’ve not looked at diluting the skill that would be required in terms of mastering the game, where Halo Wars you might be able to master it fairly easily. After you get over the initial accessible interface, you still have the same problems of scrolling around, where we’re still finding the upper limit on how fast Stormrise can be played, and I think that what’s really hurt RTS going onto Console was that we’ve never really had an RTS that really cries out to the hard core gamers.

Matt: There’s a place for that in competitive players as well, because if there’s a maximum those guys will find it.

Ken: Yep, so I hope that Halo Wars sells a packet and that people really get into it, then after that graduate to a real RTS. [laughter]

Matt: So when is Stormrise due for release?

Ken: The actual date depends upon which territory I think, but the 23rd March in Australia I think.

Matt: Is there any plans for a demo?

Ken: That’s actually a huge topic for debate at the moment, and it’s a big question mark, because if you download a demo five minutes later you’ll go "I knew this didn’t work". The way we looked at this was when the conventional doesn’t work in terms of getting RTS on console, well you have to break the convention, the problem with that is it’s unfamiliar, and it’s going to it’s a mind shift that people need to take, and once they get over that it’s like "oh my God this is great" but anything that’s unfamiliar we find kind of distasteful for the first little bit. So look there’s a huge debate going on at Sega and at publishing at the moment as to whether they think it’s a good thing to do, we’re all geared up to make one, and it’s prepared, but really it’s up to them as to whether they think it will be a good publishing type decision.

"I hope that Halo Wars sells a packet and that people really get into it, then after that graduate to a real RTS"

Matt: I recommend releasing it on the XBox 360 and then about three weeks later on the Playstation network, that seems to be what publishers do lately. So, what stage are you guys up to now, is there still development, are you cleaning up?

Ken: We’re in the very last and fast polishing phase, and we’re chasing down the last little niggles and certification issues, but the game’s playing well, and the guys in the team now are just playing it to death, and having a lot of fun in multi player and skirmishing.

Matt: So if you can tell the people who could potentially be buying this one thing they should bear in mind when playing the game, or when thinking about whether to buy the game what would that be? Is there a simple bit of advice?

Ken: I suppose the main message is give it a go, because this is the start of something new, and something what will be big.