Weapons of Warfighter
At A Glance
A walk through the offices of Red Storm Entertainment finds plenty of weapons—some mock-ups, some real—in and around cubicles of the multiplayer team. They even take the guns out to local shooting ranges to accurately capture the look and feel of these weapons, and then translate them to the near-future weapons found in the game circa 2013. Red Storm focused heavily on weapons for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter™ on Xbox 360™. Christian Allen served as both weapons lead and lead multiplayer designer for the new game, which pushes the envelope of options for Xbox Live® gameplay. Allen put down his guns to chat with us about the game's arsenal, and also give us an insider peek at the multiplayer development process. Xbox.com: Can you run through the process of how a real weapon is captured andcreated for the game? Allen: For most of the high-tech weapons that you see in the game, because they are not generally available, we will partner with the weapon developers. They will either send us non-functional versions of the weapons to model from, or we will send out folks to meet with them and capture a range of high-res images to model from. Xbox.com: How do you create advanced weapons that don't necessarily exist yet? Allen: All of the weapons in the game are in at least concept stage somewhere. For weapons that are in an earlier stage of development, often times we can obtain 3-D prototype models that weapon modelers use for concept and scale. Xbox.com: What real next-gen weapons have made their debuts in the various Ghost Recon games? Allen: The XM8 series was first showcased in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon™ 2, the SCAR assault rifle package was first shown in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon® 2 Summit Strike, and several new weapons are being given to gamers for the first time, including the concept MRC, a caseless bullpup carbine, and the AS50, the new sniper rifle just being developed for the SEALS. Xbox.com: Tell us about how the team goes out to test real weapons for the game and what that brings to gameplay. Allen: We actually go on quite a few shooting trips. A lot of the team has experience with weapons, but nothing beats getting real trigger time. Familiarity with weapons gives us the ability to tune the weapons in the game to accurately capture their feel. There are a lot of different factors that go into the way a weapon handles in real life, and all of those can't be replicated (or aren't fun to play) in game, but getting our hands on the real guns lets us transfer the general experience to the player.
Hi-tech meets the front lines. Xbox.com: What does Xbox 360 bring to the table when it comes to weapon-firing animations and the weapons themselves? Allen: The detail on the weapons on Xbox 360 is leaps and bounds higher than on the past versions of the games, allowing us to nail their presentation even better. In addition, the class system allows players to have a wide variety of gameplay-impacting changes based on class, without restricting the choice of weapons. Xbox.com: Tell us about some new weapons and things that were only available because of Xbox 360, like the smoke grenades. Allen: Smoke grenades are a great example of something we have wanted to add to the franchise for a long time, but never did because of technology constraints. Because we focus on large, outdoor environments where potentially every player can see every other player at any one time, framerate was always a concern. In the past, if we were going to put smoke grenades into the game, we would have had to compromise on how good they looked in order to make sure that the game ran smoothly. Now we don't have to make any compromises! ”We chose Nicaragua to provide new environments |
