Dateyourgame: Attila's community blog about Video Game – Walkthrough – Gameplay – Reviews – Tips and Tricks

Hello everyone this is Greatdictator and for a change, an interview with one of the developer over at Digitalmindsoft, who is currently working on a title with big potential Men of War, I advise you guys to go check it out it worth it.

Hi, thanks for this interview.

First of all, can you introduce yourself to our readers? What is your job and responsibilities in the Men of War project.

My name is Chris Kramer and I’m Managing Director of Digitalmindsoft. In Men of War I was responsible for outsourcing and project management tasks, as well as map and mission design. I was also working on the cinematic experience the game delivers.

Men of War is a World War II game, an era that quantities of games already cover. Why did you decide to go back to World War II, a genre that has been done several times over? What does your game offer that we didn’t already saw in countless other games and that could attract players that think they’ve seen it all in term of the era and in term of the real time strategy genre?

We could have searched for a more innovative or less used scenario. However we decided to put all our energy into the impressive gameplay of Men of War. Our task was to give Men of War an unique level of depth, as well as a gameplay you don’t see in any other game no matter they are in the same genre or cover the same topic. World War II is a huge topic with a massive amount of scenarios involved, a topic that offered us a lot of features and technology to add.

What new players will attract for sure is the enormously level of detail the game has, if it comes to the point that every soldier carries his own inventory, or that every AI soldier reacts to the environment and to the enemy on its own, or the most detailed armour penetration system ever created in the genre. You have barely any limitation in defeating your enemy and thus the game entertains you for many months, especially in multiplayer.

In Men of War players can take control of an individual soldier, it’s a fairly unique feature that very few RTS games ever included when did you come up with this unique gameplay element?

When the first part of the series was under development by Best Way, they added the basics of the feature at a very early stage of development. The game had only very simply AI and path finding routines, so they added this feature as a temporarily substitute to the very limited control mechanism. The feature went on growing with the time and Best Way liked it more and more until it became one of the most unique features in the genre and a key element of Men of War’s gameplay.

Did you guys at some point think about making a modern times tactical RTS game set in the Middle east regions or other hotspot regions of the world where conflict could occur?

“Could” is the very point, we don’t want to use an actual or uprising conflict for our games for moral reasons. I simply find it very unattractive to entertain with conflicts that aren’t solved and are still going on, it would hurt too many feelings, especially when it comes to involved parties.

More interesting and likely would be some slightly futuristic, complete sci-fi or another time period in history.

The Men of War engine seem very good. Can you tell us about the history of this engine, is it built from scratch or an already used engine. If it an already used engine, what other games use it that our reader could be interested to try and what kind of improvement does the engine has gain during the creation of Men of War?

Men of War’s engine is built on the GEM engine from Best Way, in fact MoW uses the GEM 2.5 engine whereas the first part in the series called Soldiers: Heroes of World War II featured GEM 1. It’s improved in many aspects, graphics wise, technology wise, physics wise and especially performance wise.

We are noticing that Men of War has a colorful, nearly joyful color tone, while most recent video games have a gray or brown feeling, is there any reason for this artistic look to the game?

Yes, we don’t want to have “yet another” game. To be fair, Men of War has quite some dark scenes too, however we wanted to have a colour balance to keep the game refreshing, even after quite some gaming hours.

While playing the beta we noticed a great attention to the vehicle damages which are very realistic from our point of view. Realism in the game work both ways, you can destroy the enemies by aiming at the weak points but you can also be destroyed the same way. What advice would you give to new players that are not use to such realism in video games?

Be open, try stuff out, there is always something you can learn in MoW. I myself find out strategies after years, just because you have so much options. A great help of course is to watch matches from players like Attila, they teach you a lot. Try what you would do in real life and find out how well it works in MoW.

What I also recommend is to play with friends to learn the game, you get a faster feedback and they can explain their moves and how they did something. Learning together is always a lot more joyful.

An other aspect we experienced in the beta is the great extent of the individual and collective AI capacity. How smart is the game AI and could you gives example of what kind of amazing thing the A able to do?

Besides most RTS/RTT the game doesn’t have a master AI that moves troops around and gives them orders. In Singleplayer they have a certain guideline from the mission designer, for example their tasks and attack points, but other than that they are acting on their own and have an individual smart AI, you usually only know from first-person-shooters.

So the unique element is the group communication, that means individual AIs will communicate with other AIs in the same area, they will attack together or retreat together, depending on their situation. If they are under heavy fire they will come up sneaking and if they get hit, they will run back to cover and try to heal themselves, whether they act cowardly or heroic depends on the AIs decisions, not on the mission script. This AI makes the game feel very realistic and ads so much to the replay value of it. You never know what the AI is up to.

There are many features to Men of War which one would you say your most proud of?

It comes all together, Direct control would be useless without detailed physics, physics on the other hand wouldn’t make a difference without direct control and the micromanagement abilities. Of course direct control is a totally outstanding feature, but I’m proud of how everything comes together and supports the idea behind the game, rather than just an individual feature.

Is there any plans on having updates with more then unit balancing in the future, like expansion, sequels?

Let’s release this great game to everyone first, than we shall talk about the future =)

Thanks for you time!
You’re welcome!

To Complete this interview here is an other exclusive coop video from Attila.