Writing Homefront

According to outspoken Epic Games’ design director Cliff Bleszinski, the middle-class game is dead. Speaking before a GDC audience, Bleszinski opined that only triple-AAA blockbuster offerings and small indie efforts were viable in today’s, and tomorrow’s, videogame industry. With so many titles hitting store shelves, and gaming time increasingly eaten into by a diverse array of entertainment possibilities, it’s difficult to deny he has a point. The ultra-competitive FPS genre, dominated by juggernauts such as the Call Of Duty series, Halo and the Battlefield franchise, is particularly hard to stand out in. So how do new IPs rub shoulders with such giants and not get brushed aside? Kaos Studio’s C.J. Kershner, chief writer on new first-person shooter Homefront, due out this tomorrow in the UK, has the answer: by telling better stories. A big promotional push from your publisher doesn’t hurt either.

‘We’re a small fish in a big pond and the challenge is to convince people to eat something other than CoD. Which makes Halo a tuna… or something,’ Kershner says. ‘It’s going to be difficult to compete with the likes of CoD and Battlefield on our first try. Both are established franchises with multiple titles to their name. Black Ops is the sixth game in as many years and I’ve heard its marketing alone cost over $200M. How many people are simply buying the same Call of Duty, the same Halo, year after year? The established franchises are guaranteed three million day-one sales from the faithful alone.’

It’s an eye-watering figure, if accurate, and goes some way to contextualise Call Of Duty: Black Ops‘ astonishing success; the Treyarch-developed shooter last week became the best-selling game of all time in the US. But Homefront is being well-supported by publisher THQ itself, which Kershner readily admits: ‘THQ has supported us with a terrifying viral marketing effort and a 40-foot billboard in Times Square. I nearly cried when I saw it in person; it’s a rare privilege to work on a project of this scale.’

It’s clear that such success stories like Call Of Duty do not depend on marketing alone; if the product lacks quality, it’s a tough proposition to sell. Despite averaging a high 80s Metacritic score, Black Ops was criticised in some quarters by being a rather by-the-numbers sequel. Kershner agrees: ‘I slogged through Black Ops and Reach more out of professional obligation than personal enjoyment. High production values, but low innovation; a shinier coat of paint on the same model car I bought 12 months ago.

‘There are also a ton of new contenders this year — Bulletstorm, Brink, Duke Nukem, Portal 2, Crysis 2, Deus Ex. The pre-summer season is going to be an absolute dogpile and I give the likelihood of Modern Warfare 3 by year’s end the same odds as the sun rising tomorrow morning. Let’s not forget Gears Of War 3 and Battlefield 3 also in the fall. Utter madness.

‘And as a gamer, I’m tired of bombastic dusty manshoots with stories cribbed from Tom Clancy and set-pieces by Michael Bay. We aim to occupy the middle ground, combine story and action in a coherent way, somewhere between Bad Company and BioShock.’

It’s Kershner’s job to flesh out the BioShock half of that balance, a comparison made after my professed admiration for Irrational Games’ 2007 critical smash hit, mainly due to its adaptation of author Ayn Rand’s solidification of Objectivist philosophy in heavyweight literary pieces ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Andrew Ryan, clearly a proponent of Objectivism as evidenced by the very first banners glimpsed in Rapture’s rundown dystopian tunnels (even his name is a play on Ayn Rand), is the conduit through which such mature themes, and great stories, are channelled. A thinking-man’s shooter, I propose to him. Kershner sees it differently. ‘What, for you, defines a thinking man’s shooter? Despite its thought-provoking premise and rich environments, BioShock was a game about using magic heroin to electrocute the mentally handicapped and steal their lunch monies. At least, that’s how I played it.’

It’s an interesting counter-argument, and opens up the discussion as to whether game stories are viewed differently depending on the player. Would BioShock have resonated with me as much as it did if I hadn’t read ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ beforehand? Is a parallel context in other media important in defining how ’successful’ gaming narrative can be? ‘BioShock attempted to tackle a serious subject to which many gamers hadn’t been exposed,’ says Kershner. ‘It was refreshing to encounter a game that required some literary and cultural awareness. I re-read Atlas Shrugged in the days before its release.

‘The first hour is one of the most engrossing experiences I’ve ever played. It was the presentation — the lighthouse in the mist, the giant bust of Andrew Ryan, the reveal of the underwater metropolis with the swelling orchestral score… and then stepping out of the bathysphere to find the utopian vision had gone horribly wrong. I plodded through the forest, the market, and the docks doing whatever was needed to advance the plot, but mostly just setting people on fire and eating candy bars out of the garbage. There was a spark when I finally confronted Ryan and another when I entered Fort Frolic, but it never recaptured the magic of those opening moments.’

As we talk further, it’s clear that Kershner believes that the plot line isn’t the only conduit for telling a story. He cites the tongue-in-cheek dialogue of the original Battlefield: Bad Company as an example that cements the motivations of the squad’s actions in retrieving the gold, the environments of the Aperture labs in Portal echoing the change in chief character GLaDOS, and the player-made stories in online multiplayer games, where a million-in-one headshot from across the map or escaping from a horde of rampaging zombies with the barest sliver of health can bear as much weight as a carefully-constructed singleplayer tale. ‘I just spoke on a podcast about the future of games and story and the best answer I came up with was “I don’t know”,’ admits Kershner.

‘There are so many different ways to tell stories in games. What I know from my experience working on Homefront is that dialogue is content. It fills the silences between gunfire and, when done right, supports the core theme. That’s just one way to do it, though.

‘There’s a world of difference between Uncharted and Mass Effect, between Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty, between Stacking and Super Meat Boy. Everyone’s conducting their own experiments, trying to figure out what works. The key is to remain flexible and not set limits on what story is or isn’t.’

As our interview starts drawing to a close, the reviews for Homefront begin to pour in as the embargo lifts on Tuesday. I ask him if he’s been keeping up with the critical reception of Homefront, and how he feels about the reaction. His response is as refreshingly honest as his answers throughout our interview.

‘Reading the reviews as they went up and watching our score on Metacritic fluctuate was rough,’ Kershner confesses, who likened the wait for the review scores to go up to those ‘adolescent nightmares about delivering a report to the class and realising you’re naked.’ He continues: ‘I can’t think of another title that’s received such a wide range of scores – on a 100-point scale, our lowest was a 40 and our highest was a 93. The majority fell within the 70 – 85 range, which seems fair.

‘The game’s not without its flaws, many of which were known internally. Over the course of production, we encountered and overcame a lot of difficult challenges. Every game does. We’re compiling a list of commonly cited strengths and weaknesses in order to better understand what we do well and what needs improvement. Would it have been nice to score perfect 10s across the board and get a bonus check large enough to buy a yacht? Of course. But criticism is an essential tool for creative growth. “That which does not kill you…” and all that jazz.

‘Regardless of what the internet says, I’m proud of the game and still enjoy playing it, even after two-and-a-half years.’

Homefront is released tomorrow, 17th March, in the UK.