Ross Wilding

Yeah, it is. And again, that's the kind of idea of just drilling down into the functionality of these spaces, is that this is interchangeable, and if this space suddenly needed more personnel to come and work there, they could basically extend the size of this quite easily.

It's like everything is all fully realised, all the locations and things. They're not just a straight shooter map.

Yeah, and this is one of the things that we're driving at, is that a lot of what we want to do in Squadron is have a lot of exploration and feel like you're basically behaving how you would behave in these locations, as opposed to just, this is a game, I'm obviously going to go in, kill some guys and get to the objective, I'm just going down a corridor, I'm looking for where the objective marker is taking me. We really wanted it so players can start to explore these spaces and see how people were living.

Yeah, absolutely. And we've also got the stimulus that the AI here are going to react to as well. If you're in an area where there's no lights and you suddenly switch the lights on, then you could draw the attention of the AI. And all that kind of stuff is planned at this stage as well.

Yeah, and that's something we can dig into in a little bit, where we basically talk about how we want as much of these environments to be interactive as possible. So we're basically going through them, and you see terminals and consoles. You should be able to interact with them and read the stuff in there, and a lot of the things are going to be physicalized in there, so you can pick them up, throw them around, move them about, do that sort of thing. And all those, again, will feed back into the sandbox environment. So if there's enemies in these spaces, you can actually use them to distract enemies or even use them as cover and that sort of thing.

Stealth kill and drag the body away so you don't get seen.

Yeah, basically. I mean, that's a large combination of it. And in some cases, as I said, it's gameplay driven, and the fact that it's like, oh, well, this doesn't actually work for what we hoped, in which case we'll go in and we'll change it. And in other cases, it's just we've blocked something out, and again, when we're doing it very early on, the art guys have gone in there, and they've obviously got a lot more reference material and stuff. So there'll be some cases where a shape just doesn't quite work for a believable space. And in those cases, we basically say, OK, well, we need to change the layout a little bit to accommodate.

Narratively, we pretty much cater for what the player does as well. So if the player goes in there all guns blazing, then the whole base is going to be on alert. Maybe you get to pick up some bits of information here and there, especially if you're in a crawl space or something like that.

So that's something we're still experimenting with at the moment. But what might be nice, for example, is if, say, again, you're in here, you fight these guys, and they're down to the last man, and he's on his own, and he's struggling. Maybe he radios for support. And then in that case, we could say the nearest next zone, he's basically requesting help. And then something else, which we've not decided yet for this location, but something we may do in other locations, is if an enemy or a group of enemies are struggling, perhaps they call in dropship support, and then an extra wave of enemies could actually come to the location. And in that case, we can obviously make things more difficult for the player.

Could end up with enemies coming in from behind him that he thought he'd already dealt with.

Exactly. And again, we're working on some of the systems at the moment, but there will be systems that also allow players to give themselves a little bit more of an advantage in tackling some of these situations as well.

To be honest, at the moment, I feel like everyone's starting to get quite excited about everything, because in the past, when you're in blockout, especially when you're developing a new game, the tech is moving along with it at the same time. There's a lot of unknowns, and you're planning and setting things up with the assumption of how something's going to work. But we're past that first hurdle, and we're getting into the stage now where we know what the spaces are. We've obviously been developing them for a while. Now we know what the mechanics are, and they're starting to come online.

Plus, we've got some gorgeous art as well now to run around, which always really helps.

I mean, the art is obviously stunning. And the thing I'm most grateful for in this video is I can take all the credit for the artwork that's been shown.