BattleCry – a different kind of deathmatch

GameCentral plays the new free-to-play game from Bethesda and speaks to creative director, and Half-Life 2 luminary, Viktor Antonov.

Since nobody really believes there’ll be a Half-Life 3 any more the most commonly hoped for game at E3 has become Fallout 4. Bethesda has done nothing to encourage this though and despite years of rumours we’ve no more clue as to what’s going on with the game now then we ever did. In actual fact Bethesda had a very quiet E3 this year, just Shinji Mikami’s The Evil Within and their one new announcement… BattleCry.

A free-to-play PC game is not the sort of thing that generally makes headlines at the console-centric E3, but having now played it we can say that BattleCry is a far more interesting game than we first assumed. It’s certainly one that is very important to Bethesda, who set-up a whole new studio to work on it and brought in Ultima Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic veteran Rich Vogel to head things up.



The game’s distinctive art style is courtesy of creative director Viktor Antonov, already well known as the art director for Half-Life 2 and visual design director on Dishonored. It’s a big deal then, and the sign of an increasing attempt by traditional publishers to make free-to-play games that are attractive to core gamers.


There are very few games that have achieved that so far, and although Bethesda must surely have looked at Team Fortress 2 for some inspiration BattleCry is a very different kind game. For a start the setting is unusual, with an alternative history version of the early 20th century – where gunpowder has been outlawed and soldiers from the major powers fight in specially enclosed venues, instead of engaging in all-out war.

The game that results is a 32-player third person… well, you can’t call it a shooter but neither is it exactly a brawler. Although games like Devil May Cry have apparently been a major influence the action is a lot less complicated in practice, especially when you have to assume most people are using just a mouse and keyboard.

BattleCry – saying no to photorealism

As a result there’s not an awful lot of nuance to the combat, although each of the different character classes, and their steampunk style weapons, do play quite differently. The Enforcers are perhaps the simplest to get the hang of, as they’re the strongest and wield huge two-handed broadswords; broadswords that can also be transformed into a shield in order to close the distance with other characters.

The Duellist is a lot more mobile and dual-wields two much lighter swords, while also having the ability to turn invisible. You can probably guess the M.O. of the Tech Archer just from the name, as they use steam-powered crossbows and longbows, as well as short range throwing daggers.

The final game will also have Brawlers (exactly what it sounds like) and Gadgeteers (support class), but it’s unclear if and when there’ll be more factions than just the current British Royal Marines and Cossacks.

Everyone gets a grappling hook too, and since this is the first time anyone has played the game it’s interesting to watch as we and our fellow journos simply try out the moves and experiment with moving about the fairly large maps. Fights break out in clumps of three or four, like a late night pub brawl, and at first it seems as if the combat is just too simplistic to maintain any real interest.



But even by the end of the first game an unusual camaraderie overcomes our team, despite their being no voice chat set up. Everyone quickly realises that wandering around on your own is not going to help anyone, and so despite the lack of formal communication we start working together with other players and trying to make use of the different abilities of each class.

We’re probably exaggerating exactly how organised things were but it was interesting how very different the game felt to a standard multiplayer shooter, even after just half an hour of play. Especially with little touches such as being encouraged to find and salute the best player on the other side, at the end of a match. But this and dolling out medals to other players almost seems unnecessary, since the mere act of playing implies a willingness to do things differently to the Call Of Duty norm.

Of course there are still huge questions to answer about the game, not just in terms of its longevity but how exactly it will use microtransactions. Antonov touched upon both these subjects in our interview though, and left every reason to be optimistic about the game’s future.

Formats: PC

Publisher: Bethesda

Developer: Battlecry Studios

Release Date: 2015

GC: I must say the art style is immediately very striking, it’s not the sort of thing you’d usually expect of a mainstream PC game. How do you even describe it? With the comic book style sketchiness for the background but the more realistic style in the foreground?


VA: Yes, I mean that’s the logic that pulp illustrators from the 20s onwards having being using to tell adventure stories in a very short format, and to have an impact. And that’s what comic book artists do. So the main reason for this is that we have very short game cycles, that are very adrenaline driven, so things have to stand out and be clear. That was my logic at least.

And fiction-wise this would go with the fact that you’re going to get killed in the next minute, and playing this for the next five minutes at the most. And when people are in the trenches, getting near death, they don’t perceive reality as it is; so that gave me some liberty to come up with symbolic images, very graphic images, that wouldn’t make sense in a realistic world.

GC: It is unusual for a violent game to be anything other than photorealistic, but why do you think that is? Is it just the angry teenager mentality that can’t bear to think of the game as anything other than a serious, adult activity?

VA: From my viewpoint, photorealism is just an artefact of the tools we have and personally I’m always driving for less information and more precise information. So here is the process of elimination, eliminating the clouds that don’t matter, the buildings that are not important, and concentrating on the uniforms, the helmets, the weapons, the blood effects and things that are actually perceivable in a battle. And I’m convinced that that’s the way we should use game media, making pixels useful where they need to be – rather than just generically reproducing reality.


GC: That’s very interesting, but when you say that are you speaking primarily from a gameplay design point of view or from an art design perspective? Or is it a straight mix of the two?

VA: They need to merge, because again… we have a short cycle and nobody would have the time to analyse visuals in combat in a separate time frame. It all comes as a bunch, as a compound. So it’s very important for the gameplay experience that we don’t pollute people with useless information, and things are very legible and very clear. That’s the gameplay standpoint.

On the other hand, for art and fiction I’m opening a door here and… I’ll give you an example: the sun. It’s very sketchy at the beginning of the level, and then it starts to bleed into the clouds. It brings a bit of symbolism and allegorical quality to death here and in every level, whether you loose or win, the environment is gonna change in a different way. You’re gonna have crows that symbolise death when it’s approaching, a red moon, a dark storm coming into the sky.

So we’re gonna have two different servers for winners and for losers, and have a range of reactive environments because we want to use every pixel on the screen in the most efficient storytelling way. So I take the liberty to have a bit of a crazy fairytale-like environment change, that are currently after every match.

BattleCry – oddly we don’t remember it being this gory when we played it

GC: Where did the idea for the setting come from? Because the other thing that’s unusual about it is that it doesn’t seem to have any Americans in it.

VA: [laughs] This is intentional. The setting was created with the premise of no gun technologies, just to bring the comparison with World War I, which was a very crucial moment of how warfare changed and a lot of European civilisations were changed and collapsed in its wake. Really, there’s so many Americans that are potential players and it was interesting to just take factions that feel a bit more like an adventure film like The Man Who Would Be King or Zulu. Big, broad adventure films.

We bring a 19Th century Rudyard Kipling-like fiction and we bring older icons of the older world and we concentrate on Europe. That being said Americans could always be allied with the British and exist in their faction. Because we’re very close to historical reality, and this is post-World War I.

GC: Because it’s actually very patronising to American gamers, this assumption from other publishers that they won’t be interested in anything in which they do not feature.

VA: There’s a balance there but there’s also some thirst for interesting costumes that have some authenticity; and there’s such a treasure of history to be exploited and explored in video games, that’s not even touched upon.

Even like using an Eastern European faction like the Cossacks. Because very often you would concentrate on Western mythology, cowboys and the Western frontier – but what about the Eastern frontier of what’s called Western civilisation? How about that part of the world? There’s so much good mythology there. So I think it will be refreshing to introduce new heroic soldiers.

GC: And of course their marvellous moustaches.

VA: [laughs]

GC: So in terms of gameplay I imagine one of the difficulties here was deciding at what speed to set the action, because this plays at the same pace as a shooter and that makes it very difficult to be precise with your moves.

VA: The reason for this is that the short game cycle has to be easy to access and feel fluent, as opposed to painful. And if it was slower it would be difficult, or a real effort, to chase everybody in the level. And a real effort to catch them. So you would spend a lot of your gameplay time in useless and meaningless efforts that are just simulating reality. You want to just cut to the chase, to the action.

GC: Sure. I guess the ideal would be to run at super speed, i.e. normal gaming speed, and then slow down when in combat. But you can’t really do that in multiplayer because everyone has to be at the same speed.

VA: No, exactly. Because you’re in the same time and space and if you get killed because you’re moving slower than the other person that will seem unfair. So this is the nature of the type of game that it is.

BattleCry – the Royal Marines gadgeteer wasn’t in the demo

GC: Are these the sort of things you are experimenting with at the moment, when balancing the game?

VA: It’s balancing and it also has a lot to do with the perception of the world… we have a special camera, which is a third person camera but has a lot of heritage from first person. It’s a camera that’s way closer to the shoulder than other multiplayer third person games; and when you do combos and kill someone it’ll actually move around you, and so the system will display things that your character does. So the camera will follow you from an objective and subjective viewpoint, and show how your character’s moving in the world. And also feel like you’re the character.

GC: I don’t suppose you’ve played Fable Legends? Over on the Microsoft stand?

VA: No, I haven’t.

GC: That was very disappointing, but it does have some similarities with BattleCry – in that it’s a third person melee game. But it just felt so uninteractive and dull, the action is very anaemic and there was very little need for tactics or strategy. And I’m just trying to rationalise why that was… I guess it was the speed: because it was quite slow-paced you never felt unsure about where the enemies were or worried that you might be caught unawares… Sorry, I’m interviewing myself now.

VA: No, no, that’s totally fine. You’re helping me think about our game as well. [laughs]

GC: In BattleCry you’re constantly worried that someone’s going to come up behind you, so you’re always on the look out and always on the movie.

VA: Exactly, exactly. Again, we want to eliminate dead time and useless parasite time that doesn’t give you any adrenaline rush or satisfaction. What you get to play here is the building block of the game, which is team deathmatch. Now in other modes there’ll actually be stories to resolve and machines to deal with and things to solve that have meaning to how the combat will happen. So this is the building block of basic fun, fast-paced combat and this is the deathmatch mode. But of course there’ll be more modes.

GC: Can you talk about the other modes?

VA: I can just mention that there’s going to be a fortress mode, and capture the flag mode…

GC: What’s fortress mode?

VA: Fortress mode is a thing we have where you have to attack a physical space as a soldier. So one faction is defending and the other is attacking, and this creates a natural story element within the environmental gameplay – as opposed to just fighting face-to-face with other soldiers. But there’ll also be other story elements that will affect things, so there’ll be a more complex scenario of what is happening.

It’ll be more tactical as well, so some of the architecture that you see there [pointing to the deathmatch game being played behind us] would be the other faction’s fortress and they will be defending it, which creates a much more tactical and story-driven focus. Every faction has its own fortress and so it becomes an important element to defend it.

GC: So when you talk about story is there a campaign mode or is this just a meta-game?

VA: No, this would be a campaign, basically you can imagine the same exact level but a few of these buildings will be actual fortresses and rather than just killing everybody you win by conquering their respective territory and occupying their fortress, which will be a difficult thing to do.

BattleCry – a free-to-play game you can trust?

GC: Considering the amount of work that has gone into the story and art, is there any sense that you’re creating a wide enough universe that it could be used as the basis for other games in other genres?

VA: There’s three levels of story here, this is the tip of the iceberg, this is the last moment of a soldier’s life. You go in and you fight and you die. Prior to this we have comic books, that are being written right now, that go into the origins of the story and the soldiers. And there will also be a meta game which will be allegorical of World War I and will show how each faction’s wins or losses affect the big war picture.

GC: The game is currently PC-only, but are there any plans for consoles as well?

VA: Well, for now what I can say is that it’s a PC project, but it’s very console friendly and there’s no reason that this could not appear on consoles. We have not announced anything for now, but it’s very console-friendly and it should be very accessible.

GC: Consoles owners do tend to be more wary of free-to-play than PC gamers though, so how exactly is that going to be handled? Especially in terms of microtransactions?

VA: From a developer’s point of view, and I come personally from shooters and packaged games, but while developing this we’re treating it as a triple-A project with the highest quality value. Free-to-play is a distribution and business model, so that doesn’t affect the way we built the game.

On the other hand free-to-play is interesting to me, as an artist, because it makes it accessible to the largest number of people very immediately. And there are generations of young adults who are very used to this model now, and we’d like to have people attracted to the game because of the quality and fun rather than forcing them to pay for microtransactions.

GC: But it is very common for the free-to-play model to have a negative impact on gameplay, where a game has been made purposefully more difficult or the amount of grinding is increased in order to tempt you into buying in-game currency or items.

VA: Oh this is something that we’re not going to do. I think this is core to what we’re doing: there will be no pay to advance. When players decide to improve their characters, customise and make them more unique, it will give a different flavour to the way they play. This is the purpose of this. Establish a pretty strong basic DNA of the characters and we’ll have so much more to offer, because it’s an ornamental game with old world Imperial uniforms and weapons and paraphernalia.

GC: So all the microtransactions will be for purely cosmetic reasons?

VA: That’s a big role of what the soldier is and the ranks, etc., etc. and there’ll always be an asymmetrical balance between the different characters, so nobody could be stronger than the same category as his enemy. But there’ll be different ways to achieve victory, a variety of ways to fight so more skill will be required. So the progression will be in the complexity of what you chose to do and how you chose to do it. And on top of this the beautiful weapons and uniforms, with some science fiction elements.

GC: And just finally, what’s the story with the David Beckham lookalike?

VA: I was surprised by that too. [laughs] Because I’m not into soccer very much myself but these are intentionally painterly sketches and they don’t really look like the characters in the game at all. We have a great comic book artist that works for us called Francisco Ruiz Velasco, he’s worked for Guillermo del Toro on all of his films as a storyboard artist, and he was given the freedom to use any inspiration he liked, to make very striking and energetic characters. So I’ll ask him if he was inspired specifically by Beckham, to draw him as a Cossack!

GC: [laughs] Okay, thanks for your time.

VA: No problem at all, thank you.

BattleCry – slice it like Beckham

Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter