Chatting With Creators – War of Rights By Campfire Games

It's been a while since our last interview.

This time around, we're shining a spotlight on War of Rights, a peculiar project by Danish studio Campfire Games. War of Rights aims to be the most accurate game on the American Civil War, and while obviously they intend to make it fun, there's also an educational aspect that the team is trying to promote here.

It's going to be a multiplayer FPS with a huge scope - as you'll read below, there will be battles featuring hundreds of players.

The team is seeking funding on Kickstarter, so you may want to support it if the project finds your interest.

• Can you tell us a little bit about the team's peculiar passion for this time period and specific conflict (the American Civil War)?
• It’s a period that’s always fascinated me so when we decided to begin developing an atypical game compared to the many modern shooters that saturate the market, it really was an easy choice. Quickly, we found other likeminded people to join us, most of them with knowledge of the period and the thing really just snowballed from there.
  I think the American Civil War continue to capture our imagination is due to the sheer scale of the conflict and the fact that these people fought using Napoleonic era tactics with vastly superior arms which resulted in some of the most brutal warfare ever to take place. The war is also still very much a hot topic, which is interesting considering it’s a 150 year old conflict. This makes it an interesting subject for a game we feel.

 

• Being an accurate shooter set in that time period means having to account for things like very slow reload time. How do you plan to draw players accustomed to much faster shooters to War of Rights?
• Yes, you’ll be able to shoot about three times a minute. This is going to be quite well balanced with the way the rest of the game is set up we feel. We feature an authentic damaging system so every shot to the center of your body will be fatal. This doesn’t mean you’ll be instantly killed, however. Since our map sizes allow for huge distances between the armies and because we have accurate ballistics meaning slow muzzle velocities and high bullet drops over distances. We’ll also feature flip up sights on the rifles in order to allow the player to compensate for long range shots. War of Rights isn’t meant to draw the usual fast shooter fan crowd. It’s meant to attract the historically interested gamer, wanting to know more about the Civil War fighting or even the gaming reenactor!

 

• The bayonet's use might be vital as mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign. Can you tell us something about the melee combat system? Do you allow for things like parry and counterattack in War of the Rights?
• The Civil War saw about as many percent stab wounds as the first or Second World War did. This was due to the usage of rifling which increased the deadly distance of the arms considerably compared to the old-fashioned muskets. This doesn’t mean that bayonet charges didn’t happen though, and War of Rights will surely feature a melee system to support it. The first version of the melee system will be a simple one. With the speed of the attack and parry depending on the total current stamina of the player. Later one, we’ll expand it to a melee mode with different attacks and parries.

 

• The battlefields of the Maryland campaign have been recreated almost 1:1, according to you. How big are the maps on average in km, and how many will be featured in the game at launch?
• Each map is 4x4km in size. We’ll feature all four major engagements of the Maryland campaign at launch, including: Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, South Mountain and Shepherdstown.

 

• How many game modes are you planning to have in War of Rights? Also, what kind of player count can we expect to find in these fights?
• We’re planning to launch with two overall game modes. One being Skirmishes, which will also be the first one to be released via early playtests to our backers. Skirmishes is a set of smaller engagements in designated areas of the main maps. This could for instance be Burnside Bridge, or Miller’s Cornfield. The player count in Skirmishes will be between anywhere from 32 to 64 players.
  The second game mode, our main mode is called Historical Battles. This features the entire map and includes a moving frontline with objectives all based off of what objectives the soldiers had 150 years ago. We’re currently working on our own server code for this mode in which the target is several hundred players.

 

• You're using CRYENGINE, which is somewhat of an unusual choice for an indie studio. Why did you choose it over the other engines and what was your experience with it so far?
• When development began more than three years ago, there wasn’t all that much choice around to be honest. We had the choice of either picking a very early version of Unity, an ancient version of Unreal Engine or the vastly superior CRYENGINE. It was an obvious choice for us. In the meantime, things have evened out somewhat more, but we’re still very pleased with our engine choice.

 

• CRYENGINE recently implemented a form of Global Illumination or SVOGI; Miscreated was the first title to use it. Do you plan to have this working on War of the Rights?
• We’ve been using that technology ever since it was released by Crytek. It is still on an experimental level according to Crytek and it does get some rather hefty changes from update to update but it’s very much worth it.

 

• With a release date planned for November 2016, it seems a given that you'll make use of DirectX 12. Did you already plan which features to use and what kind of performance improvements War of Rights may have with it?
• Crytek has yet to announce anything regarding DirectX 12, but yes, we do intend to move to it whenever the engine supports it. We expect it to lighten up the CPU draw call work quite a bit.

 

• You're clearly focused for a PC release first on War of the Rights. However, what are the odds that console players might see this game available for purchase on PlayStation 4 and/or Xbox One someday?
• Right now, we’re only focusing on a PC release and no console version is planned.

 

• Thank you for your time, and good luck!

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