Welcome, dear reader, to the next part of our series of developer's diaries, where we report on the development of UFO: Aftermath, a tactical, squad-based game of turning back an alien invasion. Thank you for coming back to this, and thanks to posters and visitors to our forums and thank you to everybody for stopping by in our last official chat on Wednesday, February 19. Those of you who did not make it there, yet want to know what we spoke about, can still read the transcript of the chat at: http://ufoaftermath.co.uk/?c=chat&p=transcript.
Diary: Degrees of Freedom
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A hotly debated topic on our forums recently was the question of tactical options in the game and their number. This can be summed up as follows: in real life, just as in some games (e.g. Jagged Alliance), the soldiers can stand, crouch or lay prone and move in these respective positions, they can shoot a single shot or a burst and they can decide how much time they spend aiming to increase their chance to hit. The questions being asked are: will these options be available in UFO: Aftermath? Which, if not all? And if not all, is it still worthwhile to play the game?
The last question, obviously, is the most important one, but before I get to it, let me set the record straight and explain how these things are going to work in UFO: Aftermath. You can walk and run: the latter is faster and noisier, the former is slower and stealthier. There is no crawling. When attacking, most weapons have two modes of fire (all others have only one; no weapon has more than two). These are typically aimed and burst fire and the mode you choose governs your chance to hit the enemy and the time it will take. When firing in aimed mode, soldiers will kneel down, more to give the player a visual indication of the mode of fire than to get more cover.
I know for a fact that there are people out there on our forums who will be hugely disappointed by what I just said (despite the fact that this is basically what we have been saying the whole time). But please bear with me. Before I explain our decision, let me tell you more about the way tactical combat works. This is not directly related to the question we are discussing, but I hope it sheds more light on our approach to the game.
While the soldiers move over a square grid, the line-of-sight and line-of-fire calculations are done using the level geometry. This means that we take a soldier's position and trace a line from him to the enemy. If the ray intersects with any environment object (or, more precisely, with a solid texture; if you have a large polygon with transparent texture with only a small opaque circle in the middle it will only block the line there) the LoS is blocked. Obviously, this would not be very good technique, because the soldier cannot change his position continuously. Therefore we trace several rays from various points in his square to several points in the target square and average them.
The other thing we take into account in these calculations is the soldier's facing. The "fields-of-vision" are "oriented" - soldiers do not have eyes on the back of their heads (and yes, you can select the facing of your soldiers when they stand).
Now let's get back to the tactical options. Let me state for the record that I do not think that our game will be super-realistic (leaving aside its fantastical premise). Yes, the actual soldiers have more options (more degrees of freedom). However, the question I am posing here is: would it necessarily be a better game if we implemented them all?
There is no doubt that the multiple tactical options are essential to any good game, or rather to any game at all. A game like Snakes & Ladders, where your movement is completely governed by the dice and board, would not be very interesting if it was not for its spiritual meaning. But it does not follow that the more tactical options a game has, the better it is. Even quite a small number of alternatives at any given time can make for an interesting game. In chess, for example, there are only 20 alternatives for the first move and nobody would say that chess is a shallow game.
The question here then, is what to keep and what to drop. When comparing our experiences from various tactical games, we came to the conclusion that no matter how many modes of movement or modes of fire we had, we only used two of them. In Jagged Alliance, for example (I keep speaking about this exceptional game, as it is perhaps closest to the ideal of a truly realistic tactical game), I never used crouching and I always allocated as many APs to a shot as was possible. Doubtless, there are players out there who had a different strategy, but I do believe that for many this strategy also entailed a reduction of the game complexity.
When we started to design UFO: Aftermath, our goal was to make a game that would be accessible to all kind of players, not only to hardcore veteran wargamers. We have no illusions as to UFO: AM being a truly mass-market game - we are surely not going to compete with The Sims or even C&C Generals. But if we can make the game no more complex than say, Civilization, we would have hit our mark.
For this reason we wanted to have only two modes of movement, two modes of fire and two stances. We decided for run/walk because it is little bit easier to implement than run/crawl (prone units occupy two squares instead of one). We decided on aimed/burst fire because it is quite an obvious choice. Both these decisions are, in my opinion at least, good ones, and will make UFO: Aftermath a good game. I am not sure at the moment about stances: we have standing/kneeling, which again is somewhat easier than standing/lying prone. However the stances are directly connected to the modes of fire. Therefore if the stance had its intuitive meaning (kneeling gave you more cover, but took time to get in and from), the player might feel frustrated when he would have to switch the mode of fire in order to get into desired position. As a result, the stance currently has no implications for the soldier's visibility or vulnerability and it is only, as mentioned above, a visual representation of the mode of fire. This is one option where we might yet change the system and decouple the stances from mode of fire, but given the project's deadline, it is by no means certain.
The usual assertion of the "hardliners" on our forums is: "That isn't real! That isn't how it works!" This is actually a poor argument. We are making a game, not a simulator. We try to have enough tactical options to make the game interesting but not so many as to make it overwhelming.
What these "hardliners" are actually trying to say is: "This is too abstract. This is not intuitive." This is a valid objection and one we must address. The reason why ordinary people can play a game like say, Combat Mission, reasonably well, even though it has many more possibilities than chess, is that they can make assumption about the workings of the game world. Even without ever playing the game they can assume that a single soldier with the Sten has little chance against a Tiger tank. They know that an armored car is going to be faster than a foot soldier and that they would not send two guys with Luger pistols against a knoll with a Bren machine gun nest on top of it. In chess or any other completely abstract game you do not have this mass of prior knowledge and therefore you have to do quite a lot of study if you want to play reasonably well.
However, I maintain that the level of abstraction we adopted in UFO: Aftermath is absolutely adequate; making the game little bit more abstract will make it more accessible to people who have no previous experience with this kind of game. We want the player who does not come from a military background to think: "Wow, this is just as I imagined war to be." We do not want MIB veterans saying: "This is just like when I was fighting the Cerillians back in '97."
Martin Klíma
ALTAR interactive