MGS Operative - What can you tell us about your approach to designing the multiplayer aspect of PDZ? What were your goals at the outset, and how did you work through them?
Chris Tilston - We wanted something that was fun but balanced it needed to be balanced to survive in a live environment where exploiters would continually use the most powerful weapon. So a lot of the weapons are balanced based on a lot of factors other than the damage and fire rate, with some of these being the accuracy of the weapon, the reload times, the ammo capacity, the range of the weapon and how good it is against armor.
We also wanted to keep fans of the original multiplayer from PD happy and give them something familiar, which we do in our Deathmatch mode, but also to try and take the game into new territory with Dark Ops. Unfortunately, that means multiplayer is really two different games which is bad from an amount of work we need to do side but great for the person who buys the game. (Actually its maybe three different types of games if you include the bots, which can be played offline and online.)
Deathmatch is very similar to PD 64 in that a weapon set (that can be fully customized) is picked and players respawn when they die. Dark Ops on the other hand is round based and players have a single life. Dark Ops is tenser and using the secondaries well really can make or break a round. With Dark Ops we wanted to explore the uncertainty you get by not knowing what weapons the players will have until they come round that corner.
When we added the secondaries on top of these weapons we wanted the weapons to move the gameplay sideways and give the player more options. We didnt want secondaries which just made the gun fire faster but secondaries which allowed the player to play in a different way. They give the great deal of depth and when used in the right situation can tip the balance in the firefight. This was an iterative process where things that didnt make the cut were replaced by better ones.
If a player is a really good tactician, or has got a good feel for the guns, theyll figure out the best time to use the secondaries. Take something simple like a secondary which attaches a silencer. A good tactic in Dark Ops would be to have one or two allies with silenced weapons race forward to get into a good position and have the main force take a different route. The scouts can then take silenced pot shots at the enemies using the element of surprise and not show up on radar (apart from the person who they are hitting).
