One of the big problems with European Assault (a PS2 MoH) seemed to be an over-reliance on incidental rewards like medal tokens. Will Airborne feature reward that’s more inherent in the action?

Gilmore: [pauses] Let’s just say it can be very, very challenging when you have an innovative feature in a game; there’s a strong temptation to celebrate it, often by putting additional icons on the HUD or whatever. And sometimes you integrate a feature but you realize it’s not as well understood by the user as you thought it would be. You go to a focus group and people say, “I don’t know whether I’m crouched or if I’m standing.” And suddenly you’ve got a crouch meter on the screen. It does tend to clutter up the HUD and create a “gameyness” to the whole thing.

One of the things we hit on over a year ago was the idea of shock versus injury, and that gave rise to Airborne’s health meter. Call of Duty had that Halo-style system where you could seek cover and recharge completely, and it was really controversial. If you read the reviews there were a lot that said it was really fake and a lot that said, “It’s great - I really don’t want to manage my health while I’m trying to have fun.”

So as we were thinking about that, we asked, “What happens to a soldier when they’re hit by a bullet?” Well the first thing is that you go into shock - in your mental space you’re thinking that you’re way more injured than you actually are. But you can recover from that, leaving just the injury. So we created a hybrid system that was part shock and part injury - you can recover part of the damage but there are permanent thresholds. That felt as close to the real experience as we could get.

In CoD 2 and 3 it became a subconscious thing to duck behind cover and recharge. You often felt immortal because of it.

Gilmore: Exactly. What you have to understand about Airborne is that we had to jettison about ten years of entrenched design dogma that had to do with linear design. Designers had literally come to their jobs every day of the week, in some cases for ten years, and built linear games. So their whole concept was of a player starting there, going there and then there. The AI would be waiting for them there and there, just like a Dungeons & Dragons module.

When we started on this game we said, “We don’t know where the player’s going to come from, he might come from that door or he may come from the sky. We need systems that can deliver all of those options.” The question we asked ourselves every time was, “What really happened? How did it really work?” So when the designers protested that “the players will just break the game if they can land anywhere - they’ll just bum rush through the whole level,” we asked them that question. And what really happened in WWII was that the Germans had an MG42 down there and if you tried to bum rush that you’d be in pieces.