Swordfish’s Julian Widdows sheds some light on the PS2 title Cold Winter
By Michael Lafferty

“Making a narrative driven first-person shooter using this level of technology has been a real challenge…”

Disavowed, imprisoned, facing execution – there have been worse days. Well, Ok, maybe not, unless you are the guys trying to hold Andrew Sterling, former SIS operative on assignment in China until the cover was blown. 

But someone does not want Sterling executed, and so they arrange for his cell to be opened on the eve of the Chinese New Year. Sterling, free, a few guards on duty – all the ingredients for disaster … for the guards.

Cold Winter is a PS2 thriller from VUG and Swordfish Studios. It is slated for release in early May. The game is one of intrigue, evolving plots and action. There are puzzles in the game, to be certain, and the levels have objectives that must be accomplished. (Please see our preview of Cold Winter .)  

Julian Widdows, Development Director at Swordfish Studios, took time to talk with GameZone.com about this action-thriller.

Question: The game has an undercurrent of political intrigue, and yet starts out in shooter fashion. How were you able to balance the two to create a compelling and immersive game?

Julian: As a team we enjoy developing games with strong narrative and this was certainly something we wanted to continue with ‘Cold Winter.’ As the story develops you’ll find it isn’t really overly political, it doesn’t focus on real governmental foreign policy or strategy and is firmly based in fiction, but nevertheless we hope people will enjoy the way we develop the narrative as it’s certainly something we consider to be an important part of the gaming experience.

At the outset we wanted to tell two stories in ‘Cold Winter’ – firstly Sterling’s story, the story the player experiences actively as he or she plays the game, and secondly John Grey’s story, a story that is experienced passively as the levels unfold and further cinematics are revealed to the player. The important thing for us with regards to the Sterling story was to allow it to primarily unfold as the player plays the game – we didn’t want the player to experience this third hand - we felt this direction would be more engaging, more absorbing, and would draw the player closer to Sterling’s character.

Of course we do have movie sequences featuring Sterling, but by using in-game dialogue and conversations between Sterling and the other main protagonists, Kim and Parish, we continue developing the story outside of the cinematic. This makes the player become very much a part of Sterling’s story and hopefully by dint of this more invested in it as it unfolds.

John Grey’s story is something different, however; John Grey’s story is one that is shown to the player as a reward at the end of certain levels – it initially makes little sense to the player, each cinematic revealing a little more of John Grey but not the whole and then, as the player nears the end of the game, comes the reveal – the collision of the two stories – a collision we hope you’re really going to enjoy. It’s definitely one of our favorite scenes in the game.

Correctly balancing these story elements and the core combat mechanic of the fps has been at the forefront of our minds throughout development. Whilst story is important to us we also wanted to be sure that it didn’t choke the player to death, and to this end we’ve gone out of our way to ensure that at no time does the player either need to nor feel obliged to read intelligence, watch cinematics, or indeed listen to dialogue. ‘Cold Winter’ can be played, enjoyed and experienced without any of this if the player desires. We are not dictatorial game designers – we want to allow the player to take away from ‘Cold Winter’ what they want to take away from it, and if this is combat, guns, death and glory and that alone then so be it. Let them drink and be merry. If the player enjoys game narrative, however, we have it in spades, through the in-game dialogue, the cinematics, and the intelligence items.

Q: Was there any literary or film character upon which you patterned the persona of Andrew Sterling? Was the storyline patterned upon any other sources?

Julian: There wasn’t really one source as such. With Sterling more than anything we always wanted to avoid the typical action hero character, although of course he has some of this about him, and wanted to give him at least some depth and complexity - an element of introspection if you like - that would allow him to develop as the game story unfolds.

In some senses we quite liked the idea of the Richard Kimble character in The Fugitive, although by necessity Sterling is more obvious and immediate than this. So no, Sterling isn’t really based on any one literary or film character. He’s a combination of elements we felt would best suit the dark world of ‘Cold Winter’.

With regards to the story, we certainly did a lot of research into the world of dark ops and Special Forces at the outset, including consulting ex-SAS soldiers and reading every book available on the subject. This research really helped us keep the dialogue believable and the game world consistent. The story itself, however, we developed with Warren Ellis, and is original. It’s all ours and Warren’s work. 

Q: What aspects do you think are essential in a game like this and how does Cold Winter realize them?

Julian: The most important thing with a shooter, and indeed with any game, is to get the core mechanic right. This has to be your first priority, because if you don’t get these core building blocks correct the rest of the game is not going to gel. It’s as simple as that. In our case it was the core combat mechanic that was essential in ‘Cold Winter’ – the controls, the weapons, the grenades, the blood, the AI, and the bot deaths. To this end we spent a huge amount of development time working exclusively on these systems - tweaking, balancing, tuning, and then reworking where necessary. This effort has paid dividends, we think. Just wait until you’re in the middle of a firefight with the enemy entrenched at the end of the street – grenades fly, smoke fills the air, blood splats up walls, viscera and limbs flip through the air. We think this core experience is unlike anything else on the PS2, and we’re hugely proud of it, and, of course, we really hope you’re going to enjoy it too.

Q: Does Cold Winter stretch the capabilities of the PS2 in any way? What is the deal with the different announcers available in the game? Does this have a serious application, or just a way to have a little fun?

Julian: ‘Cold Winter’ stretches the capabilities of the machine in so many ways. First and foremost there’s the physics system – absolutely everything in ‘Cold Winter’ is modeled physically, including grenades, explosives, rag doll characters, the chunks of destroyed objects. If you can see it, and interact with it, it’s physical. Throw a grenade into a room and the objects contained within are scattered around, the limbs of your enemies are ripped off and sent bouncing off the walls – it can be a tad gruesome but it’s so much fun. See a table? It’s physical – you can tip it over to use as cover; you can move it to a better position; you can push it flat to give yourself a clearer firing angle.  

Integrating physics this deeply on the PS2 is no mean feat, and has required continual profiling and performance analysis – it’s been a massive job, but the rewards are obvious. ‘Cold Winter’ just feels so right. And then there are the beautiful effects, the lightmaps, the AI…….

The different announcers allow the player to choose the voice of, well, the announcer in the multiplayer game – there’s no serious application to this. It just adds a little variety.

Q: Tell a bit about what the online options will allow players to do?

Julian: The online game has always been about ease of access coupled with powerful editing. At its most basic level it allows players to both join and create games quickly and easily, but also adjust game parameters to create the exact experience they’re looking for. We always wanted this immediacy of access coupled with powerful game mode editing – this was always part of the design and something we feel is very important for the online game. We don’t, therefore, have a dozen different games modes, each a subtle variant of another, but have opted for six modes we know to be fun and enjoyable, giving the player control over all the options within the modes in order to let them create the exact experience they’re looking for.  

If a player just wants to get into the action, therefore, they can select a game from the list of games currently running, dive in and get playing. If a player wants to create a game for themselves they can choose a mode, choose a level, choose a weapons loadout, and then start the game. It’s really that simple.  

If the player really wants to tune the experience, however, there are a huge range of options that can be adjusted – Team Play can be enabled; Weapon Damage can be adjusted from Normal to Realistic, 50% or Lethal; Friendly Fire can be turned on and off.

By means of an example, the six modes are Deathmatch, Flag-tag, King-of-the-Hill, Domination, Last Man Standing and Headmatch: If you wanted a very strategic experience, you might go for Domination with team play on, damage set to realistic, and weapons limited to pistols and automatics. If you wanted a brutal slaughterfest, you could choose Deathmatch with damage set to lethal and only explosive weapons. A more balanced game would be Deathmatch, with teams, normal damage, using the Western Arms loadout.  

More than anything else we want the player to be able to create the experience they want – we do not want to dictate as to how people should spend their time playing ‘Cold Winter’.

Q: What can players expect in the hardest challenge level of this game?

Julian: The hardest level of the game, Elite, is something else. Having played the game for literally thousands of hours it’s how myself, the team, and VUG’s QA department enjoy playing ‘Cold Winter’, and in some ways it’s how the game is ultimately best experienced, with the caveat that it’s definitely not for the first timer.  

Firstly it’s a far more tactical experience. You have to use cover more efficiently and more effectively; you have to preserve your ammo, grenades, and combined items for the really difficult fights, and you have to be very cautious. One wrong move and the enemy soldiers will soon have the upper hand with grenades flying in and troops flanking you from both sides. Because of this you have to really consider your fire positions and angles – you have to think before you act.

Blundering into an encounter just does not cut it on ‘Elite’ – each time you move you have to aware of the cover that’s available ahead of you, your options for retreat should it all go horribly wrong, and the likely fire positions the enemy might take. And because your playing style has to be different, so the playing style of the enemy changes – because you’re more cautious, they have more ground to use and more time to use it in, and this allows them to move through cover move efficiently. The joy of ‘Elite’ is not just that it’s harder, but it’s actually a very different play experience.

Q: How many levels does this game have and how many countries with Sterling travel to? Are the cities/locales patterned after real-life counterparts? 

Julian: There are 16 levels, six different environments, each of which is based on a real world locale, but is not actually a real place. 

Q: When you were creating the audio tracks for this game, what was the goal and how did you go about accomplishing it?

Julian: When we originally designed ‘Cold Winter’ we knew we wanted a classy (not classical) audio score that was harmonious between cinematic and in-game. We wanted to create multiple themes that ran through the game, rather than one single theme, and to this end the cinematic scores very much drove the direction of the in-game music. In essence, Mark, our composer, always imagined that the score would be more like a film soundtrack than a game soundtrack. The goal was to have music which would stand alone, have justifiable emotion and react effectively to every frame of movie, every second of game action.

Q: What elements of Cold Winter do you think were the most difficult to create and which have given you the biggest sense of accomplishment?

Julian:  All of it, really. Making a narrative driven first-person shooter using this level of technology has been a real challenge and a massive learning experience for us, and because of that simply having the game complete will give us the biggest sense of accomplishment. Now, all we hope is that the people we write these games for enjoy playing it! That’s all of you folks, by the way.

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