Do we want to have a health reading, for instance? Do we want respawns in our game? Now, we don't have that in all game modes, but of course we don't want death to be as definite as it is in the real world. So, it's our own design sense that we need to make those decisions right. It is an entertainment product, and we need to stay true to that. Then all the designers know that we're making a game.
We want that." "Oh, you did that?" "That is really cool, we'll lift that into the game as well." We rarely feel held back by it in the design process. That being said, we mostly use the authenticity as a source of inspiration. We want to show them respect in everything we do. We're very honored, humbled to work with them. We're trying to always be true to the soldiers that tell us these things. How do you balance the real with the fiction? I don't necessarily mean this in a narrative sense, but more on a gameplay design sense. That's new gameplay right there." And you'll see it in our game. We use this thing." And they showed us a little mine, we call it the spider mine, that you place and it fires out tripwires in all directions. So we started sketching on this Claymore mine and they came up to us and said, "We don't use those anymore. So, we started designing - we wanted a booby trap. KB: As an end result it brings pretty cool ideas. What does that offer you from a creative perspective? It also helps being in the same country and meeting people firsthand, so you can build trust in a different way, I think. But at Danger Close, the relationship is on a completely different level. We had military advisors, both American and Swedish, and they all did a great job. So it was really interesting working with the franchise from that angle.ĭid you work with consultants much at DICE? But that is also a good example of what came out of the discussions with the consultants that we worked with. So we share position, we share information on enemy positions, we share ammo, we even respawn each other. With such a small unit, we can share a lot of information with each other. They also brought up the entire concept of fire teams, which I don't know what you've read about that it's a two-man fighting unit we have in the game.
We are an international dev team and so we latched onto that: "This is really cool, we want to get that in." So, a lot of that is that kind of discussion. One of the first things they talked about was the other guys they met, who had been deployed from all over the world. Operators from the Special Forces community for hours and hours and hours, and just listened to them. That has been a big part of Medal of Honor since the first days. We wanted to take what was good from 2010, of course, but mostly we wanted to really root this multiplayer in the close relationship with the former and active military personnel that Danger Close has. KB: We started with a very open, or blank, canvas. How do you define what it is? I know you're not starting from scratch again, but in a sense. It was also interesting to be able to sit in the office, work together with the single player team to really define what Medal of Honor multiplayer is. I mean, we have a lot of guys who's been there since the first Medal of Honor, 14 years ago. I just looked forward to work with the Medal of Honor team. Kristoffer Bergqvist: I think there was a really interesting challenge.
Here he explains how he changed the way the team develops multiplayer games, what defines the feel of a game and how to try to achieve that, and how the team kept out of the geopolitical situation this time around, taking a page from EA Sports' book, not CNN's. He was charged with changing the studio's way of making multiplayer games. To find out more about this process, Gamasutra sat down with Kristoffer Bergqvist, a DICE veteran from Sweden who moved to Los Angeles to join Danger Close as its creative director of multiplayer. And we've taken steps this year to really bring those two halves together." The new iteration of the franchise does not take this tack, as mentioned by producer Luke Thai in a recent Gamasutra interview: "In 2010, Medal of Honor was also perceived as two separate games in one box.