Frank talks frank
HEXUS.gaming hooked up with Frank Delise, manager of Kaos Studios and lead designer of Frontlines: Fuel of War to ask him a few questions on their upcoming FPS, which they claim "will take players to the next generation of combat. "
We'll have more details on the gameplay shortly, but for now, check out what Frank has to say about the infantry and vehicle-based first person shooter.
HEXUS:
Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and how KAOS studios came about?
Frank: Previously I started a company called Trauma studios back in 2001. Previous to that I was a 3D artist and a designer for a company called Autodesk where I designed 3D models and animations. So I travelled the world meeting game developers, like Westwood and other big game companies helping them with their workflow and product design. In 2001 I decided that instead of helping these developers I wanted to make games. I thought long and hard about what was missing in video games and thought that there were no modern military games, everything was mainly associated with World War I and II. So I started making on the Tribes engine, for a modern military game that was focused around the Desert Storm war. Shortly after Battlefield 1942 came out and since I was familiar with 3D programs and how to make tools I started looking at what was needed and building the tools to make a game on top of it.
Click for larger imageI got a group of 20 people, kids in college and other game companies that wanted to work with me. We created this Desert Combat game which ended up being downloaded over 3 million times and was a huge percentage of Battlefield sales. It was one of the first faced paced modern military games.
Then Digital Illusions and EA hired us to work on the next Battlefield, Battlefield 2, where we came up with a lot of new stuff and shortly after that we became part of DICE. When EA bought DICE we decided to split off, I headed for New York with the vision of creating a new game company. So, we joined up with THQ because they allowed us to keep our own creative identity, have our own studio, our own culture and make want we wanted to make. So that’s how Kaos was formed. We started off with 14 people and now we have 75 members on the team.
Click for larger imageHEXUS:
Let’s talk about Frontlines: Fuel of War. Isn’t it just a re-creation of Battlefield 2 with a couple of new features?
Frank: Well, we are part of Battlefield. The way we look at it is that everyone’s going to have access to vehicles which is why people are comparing it to Battlefield, but we’ve totally changed it. For one we have an engaging single player mode and multiplayer has the whole Frontline game mechanic, so it’s a completely different feeling. So you move the front forward rather than any random capture the flag type scenarios. All the objectives are contextual so team work is much more involved, you have to blow something up, repair vehicles and steal things. So it’s actually the best of all types of FPS rolled into one, with increased depth, RPG elements, unlocking roles and RTS elements. We’ve done a lot of genre blending. It has bits of Battlefield, bits of COD, bits of RTS and is big on skill based gameplay. We really wanted to strive for fast paced and intense gameplay. We’ve changed the level of speed so it fits someone between Battlefield and Unreal.