Battlefield 1942

Game That Changed The World

The World was going to end in two weeks time. At least, that's what we'd all been led to believe, paranoia fuelled by the scaremongers, insistent that on the stroke of midnight 2000, every computer on the planet would meltdown, malfunction, take on a mind of its own, turn against humanity and wipe out every man, woman and child on the planet. It was then, in the twilight days of our world, a long-haired rookie games joumo (some bloke called Korda apparently) was asked to spend the final few days of his short life reviewing an FPS called Codename: Eagle, designed by Swedish developer Refraction Games. The game featured a single-player campaign so dire that he awarded it a scathing 44 per cent, convinced that - despite its fun multiplayer options - the game would leave no mark on the history of gaming. Just like the Millennium Bug scaremongers though, he was very, very wrong.

Admittedly, Codename: Eagle bombed, selling few copies and receiving near-universal scorn for its unintelligent Al and dated graphics. Yet months later, whispers from the Net began hailing the game's multiplayer game as a work of genius.

"Freeform, vehicular-based FPS combat," they said. "Do anything, anywhere, at anytime," they claimed. Within a year, Codename: Eagle had acquired cult status just as the popularity of online gaming was swelling like an allergic reaction ft thanks to the success of Counter-Strike, Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament. But it wasn't Codename: Eagle that would change the face of online shooters forever, but rather its spiritual successor Battlefield 1942, a game which singlehandedly managed to redefine the genre and set new standards for other developers to aspire to. Having completed work on Codename: Eagle - its debut game - Refraction Games was assimilated by Digital Illusions and work began on Battlefield 1942, a project that had already been in the planning stages at Refraction since the mid-90s.

"We'd toyed with the idea in late 1996," recalls Digital Illusions' creative director and former Refraction member Johan Persson. "We discussed every possible setting from the modem day to WWII. Something we were clear on however, was that it should have dead-easy, consistent controls, be multiplayer focused and integrate land, air and seavehicles into a first-person shooter of Quakesimplicity. We wanted to create the ultimate feeling of freedom in an FPS."

Producer on Battlefield 1942 Lars Gustavsson was also part of the Codename: Eagle development team that went on to create the ground-breaking Battlefield 1942. "When I joined Refraction Games in 1999, the team was already working on Codename: Eagle. We felt that the multiplayer part of the game would be great to transfer into a WWII setting. In fact, the first demo of Battlefield 1942 was actually created with the Codename: Eagle engine with Tiger tanks, Typhoon fighters, the battleship Bismarck, B-17s, submarines and much more."

Challenge Everything

It wasn't long before Battlefield 1942 attracted interest from publishing behemoth EA, clearly keen to make its mark on the rapidly expanding online shooter market. The driving force behind the game was to create a shooter that could strike a perfect balance between authenticity and the kind of pure, virtual war-based entertainment that had showed so much promise in Codename: Eagle. "We read loads of material, visited museums, talked to people and tried to dig up every little piece of information that could be of interest," recalls Gustavsson about the research that Digital Illusions conducted during BF1942's development process. "Then once we had a good knowledge base, we started creating the game and quickly realised that if we had to choose between realism and fun gameplay, fun gameplay would always win."

The pressure was now on, and with the press slowly beginning to generate genuine interest in the project, great things were expected from the game. Digital Illusions was playing with the big boys now - Valve, Epic and id - and as if that wasn't daunting enough, the team also had to quickly learn how to adapt to new working practices and pressures within a very short space of time. This, after all, was its big chance to create the game that it believed Codename: Eagle should have been, a multiplayer-driven freeform shooter. And it only had one shot at getting it right.

"Having only just merged with Digital Illusions, this was the first major project for us guys from Refraction Games, and the team grew extremely quickly in a short space of time," remembers Gustavsson. "Having a growing company at the same time as trying to lift yourself to manage a much bigger project was a daunting task. We had to go from a couple of guys sitting in an apartment, to organising ourselves as a company. We had to do proper planning, technical evaluations, manage larger teams and most of all, work towards a set timeline with a design that set out to do everything - land, sea and air combat in the same game with 64 players."

Roots

As the project progressed and public and press interest continued to intensify, it would have been all too easy for the team to have got carried away on a wave of hype and premature self congratulation. However, the developer never forgot its heritage, ensuring that it kept in constant contact with the small but fiercely loyal Codename: Eagle community, often using it as a sounding board for new ideas. In fact, such was the community's loyalty that one USbased fan even went as far as phoning Digital Illusions' local pizzeria every night to order food for the entire team so that none of them would have to take time out of development to get their own dinner. Now that's dedication.

For two years, Digital Illusions lived, breathed and slept Battlefield 1942, working seven-day weeks and traineedoctor working hours in order to hit its deadlines. After two years of feverish development, Battlefield 1942 was finally ready for release. The response was phenomenal, proving a true vindication of Refraction's/Digital Illusions' vision that a vehicular-based multiplayer shooter could be commercially successful.

The game stormed to the top of the PC gaming charts, and within a few months of its release was already the world's second most popular online shooter, behind Counter-Strike. Its massive, freeform levels and 64-player games (up until this point, 32 had been the norm) provided a new and exciting challenge for the now gargantuan online gaming community to sink its rapacious teeth into, providing an experience and freedom that no other shooter could offer.

Battlefield 1942's success is perhaps even more impressive given that its single-player campaign proved to be such a massive disappointment - an innovative and dynamic WWII campaign hideously marred by unintelligent Al that often made a mockery of the game's freeform nature. "From an Al standpoint it's one of the most complex games I can think of," says Persson. "A couple of bugs unfortunately destroyed much of the illusion."

Gustavsson is also big enough to admit that the Al was far from perfect. "We were too focused on the multiplayer. We knew we could do that well based on what we achieved with Codename: Eagle, and so we directed most of our resources at the game's multiplayer aspects rather than the single-player part. But the group of people who created the Al did well - with more resources, it could've been great."

Clearly, Codename: Eagle's multiplayer game had massively influenced Battlefield 1942, but given that both games shipped with such poor single-player campaigns, it's striking to note just how much the gaming public's priorities had shifted in two years. Codename: Eagle had been scorned for its abysmal single-player campaign, with only a handful of fans ever fully appreciating its true multiplayer magic. Conversely, Battlefield 1942 was hailed as a masterpiece, despite a single-player campaign that was virtually unplayable.

Close, But...

Despite Battlefield 1942's popularity -and the subsequent success of its expansion packs Road To Rome and Secret Weapons of WWII - both Gustavsson and Persson are the first to admit that it was far from being a perfect game. "I would have liked to have spent another 6-12 months polishing the game and making it more solid," claims Gustavsson. "The response on the multiplayer demo of Wake Island took us all by surprise and we could only implement parts of what we learnt from that before it was time to ship. That's why the first patch came so early."

For Persson, Battlefield's shortfalls were more specific. "The artillery didn't quite become all that we wanted it to be, and if I could change it now, I'd have a slightly different line-up of vehicles. Also the naval battles weren't fun enough, and I think that's something we could have spent more time refining."

Raising The Stakes

With the bar raised, FPS developers were forced to reassess their goals and projects. No longer would the public be satisfied with tired multiplayer deathmatch conventions, or restrictive linear levels bereft of vehicular combat. Digital Illusions and EA had taken the world of online gaming by surprise, and it wasn't until the release of Epic's sublime UT2004 - a whole two years later - that Battlefield 1942 was finally bettered. By then of course, the game had cemented its position as the world's top vehicular-based online shooter.

"The integration of vehicles into the genre of FPS games looks like it's here to stay," believes Persson. "Soon, it'll be so common that it won't even be mentioned as a feature. BF1942, along with Quake III and Unreal Tournament showed that the market was ready for multiplayer-centric games."

But Digital Illusions wasn't content to just sit back and soak up the plaudits. Work began almost immediately on the solid though similar Battlefield Vietnam, and more importantly, on Battlefield 1942's true sequel, Battlefield 2. With its sparkling new engine and innovative new ideas, Digital Illusions could be on the verge of reclaiming the crown that it held on to for so long with Battlefield 1942. And to think it was all thanks to an overlooked shooter that everyone (including a wet-behind-the-ears games journalist) wrote off as a single-player dud, whose multiplayer game provided the blueprint for one of the most groundbreaking games of the millennium so far. What are the chances of that? Probably about as high as the world ending at the stroke of midnight 2000. Nearly.

The Future

Battlefield Too

This summer, Battlefield 2 will finally ship - and from what we've seen of it so far, it could just be the best multiplayer game ever. Featuring vastly improved teamplay that'll hopefully make cohesive teamplay a reality rather than an optimistic dream, Battlefield 2 is set to feature squad leaders who'll be able to issue orders to members of their squad as well as acting as mobile spawn points.

Even more exciting is the integration of a player-controlled Commander unit, who have access to a strategic map from which they can direct the actions of an entire team. With all-new vehicles and soldier classes and the added impact of modern weaponry, Battlefield 2 really is looking like a class act in its new desert-combat setting. Expect a review to be winging its way to you in the very near future.