It's a grotty London December afternoon with leaden skies and howling wind, but thankfully we're hiding below decks on the HMS Belfast on the Thames. An apt location really, considering we're there to interrogate Klaude Thomas, producer on Eidos's Battlestations: Midway, a game that's suffered numerous delays but is now set to emerge on PC and Xbox 360 in early 2007.
Battlestations: Midway recreates the battles of World War II in the Pacific between the US and Japanese naval might, from the point of view of the battleships, the aircraft carriers, the submarines and the aircraft, Thomas explaining that "It's about the really big-scale battles".
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As the big cheese, players sit in the US commanders chair in single-player, in control of all these machines of war. While the game features a 2D command map giving an overhead view of the battle from which you can select units and issue them orders - move and attack, for example - the idea is that you hop into any of the 'units' under your control and, well, take control at the simple press of a button.
So you can, say, get into the cockpit of a torpedo bomber, fly the plane and execute torpedo runs, sail battleships and launch shells from turrets at the enemy and glub-glub beneath the waves in subs. To get in the thick of things. For a first-hand experience. You get the idea. Apparently, it's nigh on impossible to achieve victory by simply playing from the 2D command map, so it's into the hot seat you go...
The units in the game have a fairly accurate physics simulation don't they...?
Klaude Thomas : The approach the game takes is the units just don't have hit points. The ships have... taking ships as an example... they have compartments, they have a hull that, when it's hit, takes leaks wherever it's hit and then takes on water. A ship has pumps so it can pump out water. It'll ultimately sink, but it can list according to where it's flooded. Plus, each of the individual things, like the bridge, the engines, the turrets, are all individual targets as well so each unit is quite detailed.
On planes with multiple engines, you can shoot out an engine. They're all made up of components. The physics for that is emulated - not perfectly. But the aircraft physics is not totally arcade - you can do everything you can do in an aircraft. And the ship physics... you have proper listing and sinking and so on.
Why this level of accuracy as opposed to something more arcade-orientated?
Klaude Thomas : Because I think it makes the gameplay a lot richer. If you just had something arcadey it would have been shooting at this great big ship and it wouldn't have mattered where you hit, because you're just hitting it and doing damage. These ships are big objects and it wouldn't have been right to model them with just one 'number', it wouldn't have given you the gameplay.
Why have we've been waiting so long for the game?
Klaude Thomas : Well, it's getting the game right, working out the gameplay. It's difficult to find another game around that you can point to and say 'This is like Midway'. Okay, we can look at WWII aircraft fighting games like I-L 2, we can look at some games with submarines, but nowhere do you find the whole thing where you've got the action of being able to control a carrier or a battleship as a whole unit. And also you have the rest of the fleet around it.
I think Carrier Command from years ago.. In that game you had a carrier and you could launch things but you only had three units. But that's probably, as a reference point... You don't really have many reference points for Midway. In Midway you can jump from being in a submarine, to suddenly being in a Wildcat fighter plane, and you can do that at one press of the button, and the scene has to keep up and the control scheme has to be such that you don't get confused. But it does work. But if you think about what it actually means to be able to do that... it's quite a big thing.
Where's the game at now, in development terms?
Klaude Thomas : We're just finishing up. A bit of translation, we're working on post-release content, finishing touches really.
Can you tell us at the moment what the post-release content consists of?
Klaude Thomas : I think I can (laughs). We wanted to see some of the great units that didn't appear just in the Midway... Midway is about Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Midway. There's some great units that got left out of that though, like the P-38 Lightning fighter and the Japanese mini-subs (well they appeared in Pearl Harbor actually), but we wanted to make these new units playable and we wanted to create battles where you see these units up against the Japanese.
So these new units will have new missions?
Klaude Thomas : Yes, they'll have missions made for them.
Will this content be for both the PC version and the Xbox 360 version?
Klaude Thomas : Hopefully, yeah. I think it'll come out as a patch for PC and as download content for the 360.
Will it be free on the Xbox 360?
Klaude Thomas : I can't say on that. I think we'll probably have special versions of the game that give some of this stuff for free, but I think it may be Premium content, but I'm not sure. But it's going to be a very good pack, so if it is Premium content it'll be worth it.
Do you have future plans for the series, or does it depend on the success of this one?
Klaude Thomas : I guess it depends on the success of this one. The team has a lot of ideas about what they'd like to see in the future and there's a lot of great history we could go into. I think if players like it we'll make another one.
What's been the hardest feature to perfect?
Klaude Thomas : I'd say getting the balance right between the command map and the actual game, making the units potent enough that when you're in them you don't just get overwhelmed by someone else attacking you through the command map. That's really been tough.
Is multiplayer completely separate from single-player? Can you play the single-player campaign in co-op?
Klaude Thomas : You know, that would have been a great feature, and for the future perhaps. But right now you don't play the single-player campaign in co-op. The multiplayer battles are team-based - and that really does work well. In multiplayer it supports up to eight players. In Midway you're controlling fleets with multiple ships, and each player has multiple ships so eight people is a pretty large fight (laughs).
So how many units can there be in any one battle?
Klaude Thomas : I think you can have two aircraft carriers - yeah, we have missions where you have an airfield and an aircraft carrier - each of those can have four squadrons of planes up and each of those can have three planes in it, so that's 24 planes. Plus, you've got some kind of escort for the aircraft carrier - probably a couple of destroyers. So you probably have something like 30 or 40 units on your side. In fact, one of the things we encountered was that we hit an upper limit for how much stuff one person can keep under their command. We've found that what we want to do, what we may do in the future, is to make a co-commander AI that you can give orders to.
Is the technology there to have ground troops, for a D-Day version say?
Klaude Thomas : Well, that's one of the features that we wanted to have more of and I think we will have more of it in the future if we get the chance, is the landing invasions. I think one thing that would be really cool would be full-scale landing invasions.
