Conflict: Denied Ops - Hands On Test & Interview
Quick Interview with Pivotal GamesAfter shooting everything that moved, and quite a lot that didn't, for an hour or so, we concluded the preview event by grabbing a few words with Terry Watts, a designer for Conflict: Denied Ops in Pivotal Games.  Pivotal Games' Terry Watts (avec Italian beer). YouGamers: To start off with, we played through a couple of levels in the preview sample... Terry Watts: There's actually 5 in total here, but there's 10 in the whole game.
YG: Will there be anything like achievements in the game? TW: There are "Citation Awards" on the PS3 to match "Achievements" on the 360, but I can't give you an exact answer as to whether they've on the PC version or not.
YG: One of the big "selling points" of Conflict: Denied Ops is the co-operative gameplay system. Why do you think such a feature hasn't been used all that much in games? TW: It's actually very hard to design for, and implement, co-op because of the lack of control you have. With a single character, you always know where they are and you can trigger things to happen, out of their view. With a second player, you've suddenly got to account for this - you can't just trigger things because that second person might see them, and react to that. So there's a whole extra consideration to take place; if you're loading stuff behind the scenes, spawning guys, etc the second guy can interfere with this, so it takes a lot more effort to work around.
YG: So is co-op more of a design problem, than a technical one? TW: Both really - we give the two characters the ability to roam the levels completely separately; one can be at the start, one at the end. Take streaming data: if the two players are at either end of the level, it's difficult to figure out what data needs to be streamed in or out. So we have to load the entire level, complete, in one time; this gives us the freedom to allow the characters to be free. But you do have to design set pieces so that they can't be interfered with by characters too.
YG: The other selling point is the destructible environment - how this is handled? TW: There's various aspects to the system. One aspect are the destroyable props: there are hundreds of them per level, and if it looks like it can be destroyed, then you can. Another feature is the "puncture tech" which allows you to shoot unique shapes and holes through materials. These holes are completely dependent on what weapon you're using; if you use a pistol, you'll get a neat little hole through the wall, but use a shotgun and it'll take out multiple, larger holes. The puncture system also ties in with load bearing - shoot the top and bottom off a board, and the middle will collapse away. There are also set piece destructions in each level, such as whole buildings, which are pre-scripted and animated. Another cool feature of the destruction system is that in a lot of games, when you destroy something or somebody, the debris and corpses will fade away in a certain amount of time - we don't do that in Denied Ops! Everything is in play, the whole time: you can wreck havoc through a level, then walk back and still see it all as you left it. We're really happy with that: it's a cool feature, as it's nice to walk through a level, turn around and see masses of destruction everywhere.
YG: That seems to ask a lot of the hardware; that's quite a lot of information to retain... TW: Absolutely and it was a challenging problem for the coding team to solve. They've done some very good code that allows us to remember all of the positions and details, but use very little memory.
YG: So what will be next for the Conflict series? TW: We haven't forgotten about the original storylines and characters, so we can always go back to them. But we'll see how well Denied Ops does, and if it goes well, then we'd love to continue with these characters.
Conflict: Denied Ops is being published by Eidos, and will be available on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; the release date is currently the 12th of February 2008.
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