Character Classes, Cameras, and Computers Mar 7

=|HERO|=EleNg

Hello Heroes,
James Salt here, Lead Designer for Battlefield Heroes. Ben is away this week, so I am going to be continuing the story of how we made the game. This week I’m going to be talking about our character classes and the 3rd person camera.
When I joined the team we started talking about what character classes we wanted. In previous Battlefield games you were a soldier who picked up a kit and assumed that role. For Heroes we wanted to take a different slant on that idea. We wanted you to own your Hero. First up, we started by thinking of all the heroic characters from old war movies, and what kind of things made them unique. After a couple of days trapped in a meeting room, we came up with these:

• That sneaky sniper character you never see coming
• The good all-round leader who seems to have a 6th sense about what the enemy is doing.
• The big and reliable fellow who’s always got the big gun and seems to be able to absorb bullets.

Mad design scribblings about Heroes
These archetypes were the starting point for the classes in Battlefield Heroes. The Sneaky Sniper became the Commando class. The all-round leader became the Soldier class, and the bullet absorber became the Gunner class.
The unique abilities each class has in Heroes are also based around the archetypes. For example the Soldier’s ability to ‘See enemy Soldiers’ is to give that class a feeling of having a 6th sense.
While the work on the classes was happening I got an text message from Ben, who was away again. It read, “We should try 3rd person cameras.” My first reaction was along the lines of “LOLWUT!”. But it cant hurt to try it out now can it? So we made a 3rd person camera in our Heroes prototype. I spent most of the day running around the world with this new view. I was surprised. It didn’t feel bad, it felt different for sure, but it felt good.

A non-typical 3rd person
The camera isn’t one of those you commonly find in 3rd person games, where you are controlling your character relative to the camera position. And that camera position is constantly moving around to give you the best view.
The best way of describing how our 3rd person camera feels is: rather than seeing the arm and weapon as with a traditional 1st person shooter camera, you now see your character. Everything else is basically the same as a traditional camera, so you still have a solid feeling of aiming and control.
There are a bunch of other things that were helped with this new camera. Firstly, new players seemed to have a much better idea of where they were and which way they were facing. Also it allows you to see your Hero character actually being a Hero in the game, along with all your customizations and emotes.
Last thing for this post is a quick mention of the lowest system specification we currently support:

• Operating System: Windows XP or Windows Vista
• CPU: 1.0 GHz
• RAM: 512 Mb (1Gb on Windows Vista)
• Video Card: 64Mb DirectX compliant video card with at least pixel shader 2.0 support
• Hard Drive space: 1Gb of space is required to install the game
• Internet connection: 256kbit Cable/DSL connection

When you are making a game, the system specs can move around quite a bit. Especially for the lowest spec. So this is what we are aiming for, but we may need to change them a little later.
Next time: Pitching the game to EA, and coming up with a name.

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