Visceral Games' 10 rules to making a good online shooter

We have a high-level goal for each mode – for Hotwire, for instance, our vision was ‘high-speed pursuit’. We wanted to capture the thrill of films such as Gone in 60 Seconds. Every time we made changes we went back to see if it was pushing us in the direction we wanted the mode to go in.

Traditional, symmetrical modes are preferable – it’s much easier for the players to get their head around the rules, as everyone’s doing the same thing no matter what side they’re on. But sometimes asymmetrical gameplay can capture a theme more faithfully. When I think about cops and robbers, I think of Heat and Die Hard, and asymmetrical modes can deliver that fantasy so much better.

If you break down what Hotwire actually is, it’s Conquest with moving capture points. That idea came from a collaborative design meeting where we invited everyone. This idea came up, and we thought, ‘Let’s try it!’.

We went through ten iterations of Hotwire. We were convinced at first asymmetrical was the way to go – because why would a cop want to steal a car? But actually the symmetrical version worked a lot better, because all everyone wanted to do was steal cars and drive around. We decided it made most sense to rewrite the fantasy to fit the game’s form; now the police are ‘repossessing’ the cars.

We originally had a mechanic in Heist where you’d slow down once you picked up the bag – we wanted to giveyour teammates a chance to catch up with you, and the idea was that you’d feel really cool. But in playtesting, players hated it – they found it frustrating and we learned that people were actively avoiding the bag.

Our maps have to be fun both on foot and in a vehicle. That’s challenging, but working with DICE on BF3taught us a lot about how maps should be paced out. Infantry aren’t going to want to run 300m to capture Point F. So we build into our maps what we call infantry honeypots – a cluster of capture points within 100m that are easily within the reach of on-foot soldiers. They’re surrounded by more sparse areas for vehicles.

At the edge of these honeypots, there’s opportunity for tactical warfare. Infantry can use these as ambush points, but if the defending team aren’t properly organised, you can just storm in with a tank.

Hotwire works best in maps with long, straight roads, and large, expansive areas. Because of that, it can’t support all of the maps. We’re not going to try to force a mode to play nice with a map that doesn’t work.

We thought, ‘Why don’t we let players get to choose what they want to play with first? Wouldn’t that encourage them to explore more instead of making them do something they didn’t want to do?’. That’s the origin of our flexible progression system, which lets you hone in on the things you want to do.

Public betas give us all the data we could want to make sure we’ve got the weapon balancing right. It’s a chance to see how our creations work in real-world situations.

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