Another day another first person shooter, but Turning Point looks a little different. Influenced by the book "What If" by Robert Cowley, Turning Point is set in an alternate 1953 where the Nazi's have invaded the US after previously conquering Europe and the Soviet Union. No space marines comparing muscle tone here then. I recently spoke about the game with David Brickley, executive producer at Codemasters.
The Xbox 360 is chock full of shooters - how do you make yours stand out from a genre dominated by heavyweights like Halo and Call of Duty?
I think FPS has moved beyond being thought of as a single genre - Halo is Sci Fi, CoD has gone modern and so is up against the Tom Clancy titles now. Not every shooter fan plays every type of shooter because there are elements of each that may turn people off. With Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, you have a team that's had experience going all the way back to the PS1 of making WWII FPS now taking that detailed knowledge to imagine an authentic 'what if' scenario that, pretty amazingly really, hasn't been done before as an FPS. And whereas Halo and CoD are fantastic titles, there's an almost instinctive appeal in wanting to see New York fall, or how Washington DC could have become a ghetto, that neither they nor anyone else can offer.
Do you think the market for WW2 first person shooters is saturated, hence the twist you have added?
Arguably yes, but then Turning Point isn't a WW2 shooter, because in our scenario it never happened the way we know it did. You're not in Europe, or the Pacific. You're not an heroic soldier - you are essentially an ordinary man who becomes a terrorist in his own country. As I said earlier, there's an authenticity which owes a debt to our historical knowledge of our own timeline in terms of vehicle or weapon design and believability, but that was to keep the game away from going sci fi. Turning Point only works if you believe it could happen, and from what Hitler planned to America's own dubious presence on the world stage today, we think the game encapsulates many themes people haven't explored before.
Are you worried that players may fail to appreciate or notice the storyline and just feel like they are just shooting Nazis yet again?
No, I don't think so, because it's obvious at all times that the Nazis have the upper hand - you're the one falling back, not them. How is one guy going to take on an Occupation? Throughout the game there are evocative visual reminders. Whether it's combat blimps mowing down fleeing civilians, recruitment posters for the Hitler Youth or Capitol Hill draped in the Swastika they all ground the player in a different world from one they've seen in games before. Even the score by Michael Giacchino is devoid of the usual brass fanfare you'd expect in a military shooter.
Story and setting aside does Turning Point offer anything new to the FPS genre?
We're really happy with the third person combat (grapple) which allows you to take on anyone hand to hand and kill them quickly. You can use them as a human shield to move from cover to cover or even kill them according to the environment - chuck them off a bridge, drown them in a toilet. It reinforced the desperate, guerrilla tactics your character has to employ.
What made you choose the Churchill taxi driver accident as the game's titular 'turning point', and were there any other historical WWII turning points considered for Fall of Liberty?
We chose the Churchill scenario because the idea that history can turn on one person is a compelling concept. The taxi incident is interesting because it was a seemingly minor occurrence that could have changed the entire world. Automobile accidents happen every day, and any time someone is killed tragically the effects will ripple out, but it's hard to imagine that one person's absence could touch hundreds of millions of lives. We considered other scenarios, like what if Hitler had controlled the oil rich regions of the Middle-East before invading Russia, but strategic 'what ifs' seemed too theoretical. We wanted the turning point to actually be a point, a single moment in time, a single person that changed everything.
Did you draft in any experts to create the timeline for Turning Point's pseudo history?
We didn't, but there's a core group of people at Spark that have been making WWII games back to the first Medal of Honor on the PS1. Over the past ten years of making these games, all kinds of experts have been involved in the process, from veterans to military historians to weapons experts. At this point, there's an amazing backlog of WWII knowledge within the studio as well as over $20,000 dollars worth of research materials: books, films, stock, footage, period weapons and uniforms, and so on. Some people have joked that we could open a pretty good WWII museum around here.
What inspired the Nazi weapon and armour designs for Turning Point?
Nazi technology pushed the boundaries of science fiction in reality, so when we were asked to do an alternate reality game with the Nazis we had deep well to draw from. The challenge was to make the player feel that this could have happened and that it felt "real" to them, now. They were designing flying saucers, guns with flexible barrels that could shoot around corners, death rays, and flying tanks. Some of there tech is still too fantastic to feel real. But they were also designing weapons that are common to today's militaries, ahead of their time, rockets launching from submarines, jet bombers and fighters, and of course the Nuclear Bomb. We decided to do a 30% "crazy fantastic", 70 % "believable/plausible" split with our designs for weapons, vehicles, and technology.
What piece of developer-designed Nazi weapon/armour are you most proud of and why?
The infantry weapons were really fun to design, after doing so many WW2 games I feel this was a chance to be a bit fresh. I liked the Vampir gear the best. When you are down in the bombed out subways and sewers trying to get out of New York, you see some faintly glowing eyes in the dark. It's a frightening feeling being hunted in the dark by a predator you can't see. The Nazi's here will hunt you with the "Vampir" night vision technology. It is an active infrared night gear system. This differs from modern night vision systems in that you have to cast an infrared beam of light and you can only see what is illuminated by your IR Lamp. It functions much like a flash light, but you can't see the beam without the goggles or scope. The scope and lamp assembly for sniper rifles was massive in size. The power to generate a usable beam was generated from a future/steam punk looking wind up back pack. The great looking weapon system coupled with the Vampir mask and slightly glowing goggles create a creepy, predatory feel to the enemies that use them.
The Xbox Live demo elicited a lot of feedback - how important is this to the creative process and how does it affect the final stages of development?
It's more that the timings for magazines and the like force a situation where you're making a demo before you've finished the product. It's nothing new in game development. We were happy enough to release the demo we did in that the setting and spectacle got a generally good reaction from the audience and helped raise awareness ahead of launch, so it achieved its goal in that respect.
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty is released for PS3, 360 and PC on the 14th March.
