Interviews
Randy Pitchford Walks Us Down Hell’s Highway
June 06, 2008
The video game industry has profited mightily off of real life conflicts, none more than World War II. In the process games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor have raised the bar when it comes to first person shooters. Besides getting gameplay, graphics and story locked down the developers face the added burden of treating the source material with the proper respect. Gearbox achieved all three in their previous entry in the genre, Brothers in Arms. We get a chance to see if they can pull it off again this summer when gamers get a chance to once again assume the role of Sergeant Matt Baker in their sequel, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. The new game focuses on one of the biggest clusterfucks of the war–Operation Market Garden. It was a battle the Allies ultimately lost when they tried to push through German lines, getting stonewalled on the banks of the Rhine. We got a chance to talk to Randy Pitchford, president and founder of Gearbox Software, about his studio’s debut game on next-gen consoles and got a history lesson in the process.
DasGamer: For those of us who slept through history class, what was Operation Market Garden?
Randy Pitchford: Operation Market Garden was the largest Airborne invasion in the history of the world. In 1944, September, the Allies had been successful in France but the Germans had retreated and held a strong line to protect the Siegfried Line. With the Allies getting stretched, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery hatched a plan to seize a series of bridges that ran through Holland and then run an armored division along that highway, penetrate the German line and run them all the way to Berlin. His plan was to end the war by Christmas. The hope that this would happen in a 48-hour operation. The strategy was to drop every paratrooper they had along this corridor. There were over 35,000 paratroopers involved. Baker and his recon squad drop into the base. The 101st Airborne had the toughest part of this. The Germans had some of their best soldiers taking a break. It turned into one of the largest and most famous battles of the war.
Where does the name Hell’s Highway come from?
The battle was in the top five in terms of losses per hour in the war. The Germans attacked from all sides and tried to crush it from all sides. That’s why they called it Hell’s Highway. It lasted eight days.
What separates Brothers In Arms from the other WWII shooters?
The best war movies are those that are focused on just a few days with a group of guys like Saving Private Ryan. In Band of Brothers, each episode is one action in that group of guys. We’re not trying to cover an entire war and bounce around with a bunch of different characters. That’s no way to get engaged in the drama of the situation. If you’re playing as a character you want to focus on that character. We can really go deep and make our environments more accurate. We don’t shove history down your throat. You won’t see documentary footage between missions and you won’t see mission briefing maps. In BIA, it’s more like Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan where you learn about what’s going on by the objectives they have to deal with. When we talk to veterans who were there at Market Garden, they remember things that happened to him and his buddies and he’ll cry. This is a man who was trained to kill and weakness is not something that’s in his DNA. It’s not about duty and honor it’s about the guy next to him.
What type of research did you do for this game?
On top of reading all of the history and studying the after-action reports and other information from the National Archives, we went to the locations of the actual battlefields. There were a lot more veterans involved in this game than we ever had in the past. George Koskimaki, who wrote the book Hell’s Highway, he was a radio operator for division headquarters, has been down here several times. We interviewed him for many, many hours and got his feedback. We also got to speak with Don Burgett, who wrote wrote The Road to Arnhem: A Screaming Eagle in Holland.
Did you go to the battlefields like you did with Normandy?
We did. Some of the survey trips were interesting because we had veterans meet us in Holland. We had a 101st Airborne American paratrooper that was there walking with a German soldier that was there. It was wild the respect they had for each other given that they were trying to kill each other 60 years ago.
Do you portray any real soldiers in your game?
Yes. One guy is Col. Bob Sink, who was played by Capt. Dale Dye in Band of Brothers. While we have Dale Dye voicing that character in Hell’s Highway, we modeled the character to look like the real Bob Sink. Col. Robert Cole returns for this game. You’ll spend time with them and they’ll give you missions in this game. There are other characters like Field Marshal Montgomery that will appear in the game.
What kind of multiplayer experience can gamers expect?
We have 20 players on Xbox Live and PS3. That’s rare because usually you only get 16 before you run into bandwidth and latency issues. We have vehicles in the team-based game modes in Hell’s Highway and we’re simulating that across the network. Brothers In Arms is about being a squad leader and issuing commands. We have the command interface in the online game. Now you can say, “Move over there,” and you can see where I meant because a particle will show up to mark the enemy. You won’t find that interface in any other online game. You now have the ability for one guy to tell the other guy where the enemy is. We’re simulating that across the network and the Unreal engine makes that possible.
How does the battlefield change during an online engagement?
At the beginning of a match the environment might be all nice and neat. By the end of the match everything is torn to bits. There’s now a difference between cover and concealment. You may not see an enemy behind cover but if you shoot in that area the bullets will penetrate. It’s astonishing to see the destructible cover online with other gamers in the fray.
How did you take advantage of the next-gen hardware when you developed this game?
We have this unbelievable level of detail now—right down to characters’ eyeballs. The shader for the eyeball itself is ridiculous. The iris, the pupil are all modeled. The light is reflected correctly. It’s rendered based on what angle the light is to the lens. We can dilate the eye when we want to. Clearly, it’s not a person. It’s still a computer graphics character, but we’re getting there. It’s cool to have this new range of emotion. You see the characters have stubble growing on their face. His wound isn’t just a color on his cheek. You can see an actual ridge in there. And that’s new to this generation. For purposes of creating emotion through virtual characters, this is very important. When we see fish in Finding Nemo and we feel something because of what we can see on their faces, we believe it’s possible.
Hell’s Highway hits shelves this Fall. Click this link to pre-order your copy.
–John Gaudiosi
Tags: Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Gearbox, Randy Pitchford, Ubisoft
