Homefront is a challenging shooter from a studio of self-made developers. Kaos Studios began as renowned mod makers for the Battlefield series before launching their first original work, Frontlines: Fuel of War, one of the first 64-player shooters on home consoles. Homefront is an equally ambitious step into advancing the possibilities of single-player shooter design. Its story comes from Red Dawn screenwriter John Milius. Kaos has cast his tale of North Korean invasion against a foreground of emotion, consequence, and violence. I recently had a chance to play the game's opening chapter and ask Lead Level Designer Rex Dickson some hard questions about the game's themes, mechanics, and improbable story concept.

IGN: One thing that strikes me about the game is the conflict between the themes of being a civilian and not a super soldier and the moment-to-moment nature of gameplay, which still seems very traditional for a shooter. There are waves of enemies coming in, a pretty standard shootout with an armored vehicle requiring C4 to blow up, and then you get a super weapon at the very end of the level to make you feel powerful. Have you tried to push back against that conflict at all?

Rex Dickson: In terms of the idea of killing off the "super soldier" we knew we couldn't dumb down the player's skill. You can't mess with the player's ability to shoot, aim, and hit targets correctly. We can't change the way that weapon works or feels because then it wouldn't feel good to people who know how to play FPS's. So we pretty much have to deliver [the themes] in the context of the fiction.

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In terms of the end of the level with the C4 and all of that—the general theme we were going for was, rather than have this big arsenal of weapons, the player has to leech most of their weapons of the dead soldiers. The resistance has limited resources so they're forced to scrounge whatever they can off the people they kill. The Goliath at the end—what you call the big super weapon—that is all they have to level the playing field, the only weapon they have that can tip the odds in their favor. He's kind of like our version of Dog from Half-Life 2. We think of him more like a character than a feature. He does appear frequently throughout the first half of the game, but that's the only major weapon they have at their disposal.

IGN: Why can't you affect the player's ability to aim for the sake of the theme and creating emotion? Why can't you tell players this experience is going to be more about feeling than winning?

Rex Dickson: The thing is, what are you going to dumb down? Are you going to make the player's accuracy less in the beginning? For the player, if they put their crosshair on someone's head and the bullet misses because the designer's put in some function that says he hasn't learned to be accurate enough with this weapon yet--the player's going to say it's unsatisfying. Essentially the designer took control of that situation away from the player to serve a fictional need. I don't think you can do that to people.

If you put your crosshair on someone, your bullet's going to hit, that's how shooters work. It's like taking a traffic light and saying red, green, and yellow will become purple, white, and blue. Anyone who approached the traffic light wouldn't know how to interact with the situation, they wouldn't understand the language, it would break the rules that players have come to understand. I just don't think that's a good direction to go in.

IGN: But that assumes the necessary objective of any first person game has to be shooting another person. In real war, the moments where you're actually able to put an enemy in your sites and shoot them is a small fraction of one percent. It almost never happens. And that's the moment that almost never stops in shooter games. So if you're making thematic choices with the mechanics you have to also make thematic choices about the game objectives. If you're not willing to make a thematic choice with your mechanics, how can you ask the player to take the theme in the fiction seriously? Games like Killzone 2 took chances affecting the basic controls to make players feel differently.

Rex Dickson:I understand what you're saying, but I don't feel like you can take away something from an experienced player that they've already earned by nature of their history playing games like this over and over again. I do agree with your statement that if FPS's could get away from that mode where you spend 90% of your time mowing through an endless wave of enemy spawners—that's the golden chalice where we want to end up. But you need to take steps towards that. We mainly achieve those goals via our dialogue, fictional context, and what's going on in the scenes. We model ourselves after Half-Life, that feeling of being outnumbered, out-gunned, on the run. You're basically getting what you can off these dead enemies to get your next clip to fight on to the next space.

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It does strike me what you say—Danny Bilson at THQ, who's the head of our label, hates core combat. He'll sit there and, as a designer I'll be like "OK, I need you to fight through about 3 minutes of core combat." After 30 seconds he'll be like, "Where's my moment? Where's my moment?" It would take us 5 years to make a game that has a moment every 30 seconds. But he's pushing us in this direction where it's like these unique moments have to counter-balance core combat fatigue or massacre fatigue.

You mention Killzone—I think it's a great example where you can go on for 5 minutes of killing and killing and killing. You're just waiting for the death counter to trip so you can move up to the next fight and it's 4 more minutes of the same thing. It's polished and it looks great, but man, it's exhausting. We call that massacre fatigue. It's something we talked to the designers about. This is going on too long, we're getting massacre fatigue, let's turn back the kill counter and get the player through this more quickly.

IGN: So how did that affect your approach to level design and objective design? It still feels like there are a lot of really familiar set pieces and objectives here.

Rex Dickson: I think most of the focus is on what's going on around you and what's happening to these civilians, how they're affected by this war, and your squad mates. I think this is a key point—if you look at any nation that's been occupied, you usually get segmentation into three groups. You get those who passively accept they've been occupied and this is their new life and just want to deal with it. There are those who choose to pick up arms and fight back. Then you have this other population that's kind of stuck in the middle. They don't want to choose either way, but they're inevitably affected by it.

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What you'll see in our game is each character represents one of those different factions. The Connor character [the gung-ho rebel who rescues the player at the start] represents the more extremist side. He feels that if thousands of civilians need to die in order to get the Koreans out, so be it. The Boon character, who you meet later in the level, he is more focused on protecting American society. He feels that it's not worth civilian lives, his motivation is not killing Koreans but restoring American society. Rianna represents the human reaction to violence. She's not a trained soldier, she's not used to killing so she has very human responses when she sees all this violence. It's more about those elements and how they conflict with each other.

The other thing we're interested in expressing is this isn't a trained squad. They don't take orders from each other, they're just people working together. When one person says they're giving an order the other says, "You can't order me, I'm going to do what I need to do to stay alive." There's a lot of tension between them because nobody's in command. I get asked a lot if we have squad commands in the game. Absolutely not, we're all on the level with each other. It's not a traditional military structure and that's one of the things that's so unique about this game.