Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
War's a serious business.
As for those controls, Lindop claims they're pretty similar, even opting to play the PC version with a 360 controller. "I like the 360 controller when I'm playing because my skills at flying a helicopter are better. It's one of those classic balances between a high-fidelity simulation model and one that doesn't necessarily require every button to operate."
It's going to be an interesting summer, with both Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, and ArmA 2 coming out alongside one another. There's animosity between the teams, mostly from Bohemia after their recent furious reaction to the incorrect suggestion that someone from the original OPF team was working on Dragon Rising. But Codies is taking the attitude that the genre's small enough that there's room for both games, and both are likely to provide something quite different. Lindop once more:
"Our Flashpoint and their Armed Assault I don't think are fundamentally the same game. They went down a very serious simulation route with things like Virtual Battlefield Simulator. What we wanted to do with the game was still keep that simulation core, but we wanted to focus on delivering the human experience of being in combat. What's it like to be shot at? The whistling noise, the tracers going past. So I don't think their focus is quite the same."
Does Codies feel that it owes anything to the legacy of the game?
"They made a great game. For a game that's now bordering on a decade old, it had a great legacy. It's why people are excited to see another one. I think [Bohemia] are justifiably proud of the work they did on that. I'd say you have to give a nod of courtesy to the fact they did all this groundbreaking work the first time around."
But there's no desire to continue the scuffle. "I think we've taken the right approach. We'll judge them, and hopefully they'll judge us, by the game that's put out. It's the only honest way of doing it. I'm sure there will be things I'll really like in ArmA, and things I won't. I think it will be the same for them and OFP. It's one of those things where you say, they're allowed to express their opinions, but we're working!"
As they enter crunch, the team are still listening to their forum, still trying to include as much as they possibly can, and refusing to compromise.
"We read the forums because we want to deliver as much as we can," explains Lindop. With a wishlist of thousands of features, there's only so much the team will be able to achieve, but they want people to know they're listening. "We've got a really good community guy, he sends us their questions from the forum. If we can answer it we will, and he forwards the answer back to them. I'd feel like I wasn't doing my job properly if I didn't read the forums."
"We went into it knowing that the worst living nightmare of the PC guys was that we'd compromise. You read the forums and they still think we will. They're basing that judgement on experience with other franchises that have gone cross-platform and simplified," says Lindop. "So we were very deliberate in making gameplay that you could get into, but at its heart it's still a rather unforgiving, quite relentless experience.
"Why? Because the purpose of the game is to show what combat experience is like. The truth is, in combat you don't bunny-hop, you don't run at the enemy blazing away, you don't hide behind rocks and feel better. You get a bullet in the face and you bleed to death. If you hit the spacebar you'll dive to the floor, because what's the most important thing you can do? It's not jump, it's get your face in the dirt as rapidly as possible. When you're carrying 170lb of gear several miles, the last thing you'll fancy doing is star jumps while somebody's shooting at you."