Manhattan-based Kaos Studios, formed by lead designer Frank DeLise around the team that developed the popular Desert Combat mod for DICE's Battlefield 1942, is currently heading into the alpha stage of its debut title, Frontlines: Fuel of War. Heading to PC as well as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Frontlines aims to take the nonlinear multiplayer mentality that is at the core of Kaos' heritage, without skipping the carefully crafted single-player experience of other modern shooters. Set in the near future as the Western Coalition of the United States and United Kingdom battle the Red Star Alliance of Russia and China, Frontlines is a team-based tactical shooter allowing players to choose various roles which can be improved from game to game. At a recent press event held by Kaos parent company and publisher THQ, I had the opportunity to sit down with Frontlines producer Joe Halper in order to get a sense of where the game is going, as well as how the past experiences of the studio and Halper himself have contributed to the game's design.

Shack: Could you describe what you do at Kaos Studios and how you got there?

Joe Halper: Sure. I've been with Frank DeLise for the last five years. We started out on Desert Combat together. I was one of the core team members. Previously, I was involved in military training--foreign and domestic militaries, all the way from the Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, Department of Defense, secret and top-secret. Game design was the basis of how I created training applications, and that's what got me into games. I started playing Battlefield 1942 when I saw a forum post by Frank and thought it looked like a cool hobby. Then, lo and behold, 9/11 happened and caused certain things within the military, and games became an addiction for me.

We had a good team, we did really well, and Desert Combat was downloaded over three million times, which was just insane. So we went from Desert Combat to creating Trauma Studios, which secured Desert Combat. We did an R&D project with DICE for Battlefield 2. That was very successful; a lot of the features that you see in Battlefield 2 were created by our team. We had a rigorous schedule and we built a strong core team.

From that, we were purchased by DICE and became DICE New York. We were a new studio and we created a new IP that was never released. We made a pitch, got it greenlit, then EA purchased DICE. One fish gobbled another fish, and so on. They wanted to move us to Stockholm, which we really didn't want to do. We started talking to THQ, and from that we pitched them the idea of Frontlines and created a new studio, Kaos Studios. It's a great place to be. We're so happy working with them, they really let developers do what they do best.

Shack: What do you think is going to set Frontlines apart from other games in the genre?

Joe Halper: Frontlines: Fuel of War is extremely intense and engaging. It's very cinematic but you still have this very open world, nonlinear gameplay. Another hook is the actual future generation weapons. We're not doing lasers or spaceships, we're doing technology we've extrapolated from real military designs. We've taken them and done our Kaos twist to make them a little more fun and exciting to play.

Our single-player game is very cinematic. We took the nonlinear action of Battlefield and the concentrated gameplay of Call of Duty and combined them together. We have this frontline game mechanic that keeps things centralized on a big open battlefield, and it works in both multiplayer and single-player. It keeps you where the action is.

Shack: I could see the frontline moving back and forth on the map while playing in multiplayer, but what actual effect does that have on the gameplay?

Joe Halper: In multiplayer, it increases or decreases the stress put on the other team. You want to push the frontline forward, and that gives you more weapons, more equipment--the more territory you have, the more you own. It really has an effect on the other side. Once it gets down to the final objective point--and they're either capture objectives, or kill objectives, or destroy objectives--there's a desperate measure that everybody takes to try and push it back.

Shack: And the frontline is used in every gametype?

Joe Halper: Yes. One of the maps is a small contained urban area, maybe seven or eight blocks, which makes it an assault infantry map. The frontline works well because it keeps that assault focused instead of scattered about, even over seven blocks. But in Oil Field, it's vehicle centric--as you move the vehicles across the terrain you could have two objectives to secure, four objectives to secure, whatever you want. When you're playing a game, you don't know if you want to defend the objective you just took or go try and get a new one. It's cool to see people hesitate and decide.

Shack: How does it affect single-player?

Joe Halper: It works in the same way. In single-player, you still secure these objectives any which way you want, and [the frontline] keeps it centralized. The enemies don't necessarily take it back from you, it's just something that you push for to get to the final objective of each map.

Shack: But as you do that, what's happening to the enemy? Are they getting demoralized, or...?

Joe Halper: The enemy actually increases and intensifies, but what you find is that as you secure these objectives you get other abilities, and there's a lot of replay value. There'll be one objective you can take out with an assault rifle, but there's another objective with some people who can help you take that first objective in a different way. There's a lot of gameplay variance. A lot of testers want to go back and do it faster or better. It enhances each campaign, with how to use the vehicles, how to use specific weapons.

The AI is very reactive. We actually focused on the single-player first when we started the studio. We knew we could do multiplayer, but we wanted a good single-player that wasn't just a bot war. We wanted the exciting, immersive action that happens in single-player, but without the linear, "go here, do that" part.

Shack: So it's still a full single-player campaign?

Joe Halper: Yes, a full campaign. There's a beginning and end. You start out in Kazakhstan, and you move your way over to Russia, which is a Eurasian territory where the Red Star Alliance and the Western Coalition battle it out. You have a lot of environments; you have huts and villages, and you also have these urban city areas, open desert terrains, giant oil fields. It's pretty wild in how diversified it is.

Turn the page for more on Frontlines.

Shack: Speaking of people wanting to go back and try to get the most out of each objective, are you including Achievements for the 360 version that play to that kind of completionism?

Joe Halper: Well, in every 360 game you have to have Achievements, but as far as the specifics we don't know what they'll be yet.

Shack: Here we've got both the Xbox 360 version and the PC version. Are those going to be able to play together?

Joe Halper: No, no. You mean with Live Anywhere?

Shack: Yeah.

Joe Halper: No, we don't have Live on PC. We've got separate games on the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Shack: What do you do with the drones?

Joe Halper: They're based off real world drones. The reconaissance drone is this handheld helicopter drone. You throw it out, and it kicks back recon information to you and and your team, so your entire team can target enemy soldiers. You can see them through the walls. They show up on your minimap and on your actual screen. Besides that, you can use it as an assault drone by running into infantry and blowing up.

There are other drones too, based on real drones. The assault track drone is basically a gatling gun on tracks. Then there's the mortar drone, with a four barrel mortar. The cool thing is, you can place that as the corner of the room, hide somewhere, and use it as a diversion. Or you can use it a sentry unit. It's very cool and creative what some testers are doing with this things.

The Red Star drones are cool, too. We saw a video of some soldiers taking a prototype RC car, and they threw it up into a second story window. It didn't matter how it landed; it would always revert itself. We thought that was so cool, and we had to have it. Not only that, we put a twist on it and packed it with C4 so you can blow up tanks with it. Sometimes you'll see this big tank, then you'll see a little RC car chasing it.

Shack: You have basically a class system with the roles. How does that work?

Joe Halper: There are loadouts, and there are roles. There are six different weapon loadout options, and those are typical of first person shooters--there's the sniper, the shotguns, the rocket weapons, the assault rifle, and so on. Then you have four different roles--ground support [with explosives], countermeasures, drone tech, and air support. Those roles upgrade up to three levels for an RPG kind of twist. You combine those with any loadout, and you can switch at any time. As you use your role, you get points. It juices up your bar, and then you get to level 2. Playing in multiplayer, you can see the game intensify as people level up. You can see [an air support player] calling in cluster strikes, and so you know they're level 2 now. Then you see MOABs--mother of all bombs--blowing out entire territories, and you think, "Oh my god, they're level three!" It's something to fight for.

Shack: What can you do with the airstrikes?

Joe Halper: The airstrikes are cool. It's sort of like how snipers like to kill people from afar; the airstrikes are a similar thing. You can target any area on the map that you can see, using your targeting system. Target a corner of the map you can see, and you can call in an unmanned bomber to pull off a precision airstrike. You can get to rank 2 with the cluster bomb, and drop it in an area with a lot of vehicles and infantry. At rank 3, you have your MOAB. It's a fuel air bomb in the military right now. They've never actually used it, but you can use it in the game. It's a step below a nuclear weapon. It's a psychological weapon, it really does have an effect. Enemies see you're level 3 when you've got the MOAB, and they don't want to be there when it recharges.

Shack: It's got a pretty long recharge time, I'd think.

Joe Halper: Yeah, we're really working on balance. There are over 60 vehicles and weapons, all these levels. We have a huge team which includes a balance team from Relic, which is awesome, and the QA team from THQ. Just doing balance testing, to make sure this all works.

Shack: What's the involvement of [Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes developer] Relic, exactly?

Joe Halper: Relic is under THQ too, and we talk with those guys all the time. We have a couple guys who came over from Relic, a designer and an AI guy. I talk to other guys too, like [producer] John Johnson, who did Company of Heroes. They also have a balance team. It's a small group of guys and I can utilize them to balance our game. It's a service. That's a luxury of being related to these studios. You know how competitive this industry is. There can be a dinner conversation you have with another studio, and it can save you two weeks in finding a solution to something.

Shack: Speaking of THQ, one thing I've noticed is that while it has a lot of console games and particularly licensed games, it has been putting a lot into PC development. Relic does Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, there's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [from GSC Game World], Gas Powered with Supreme Commander, Iron Lore's Titan Quest, and so on. Your game is multiplatform, but it's part of a genre that's traditionally on PC. That many big-name PC titles is unusual in big publishers these days. Do you have any knowledge or insight regarding THQ's plans there?

Joe Halper: Well, there are many studios within THQ. It's more that it's a specialization within the studios themselves. Relic does real-time strategy, and the home of that is on the PC. Company of Heroes was one of the highest rated games in the genre, ever. They did so well with that game, and that means a lot to THQ. But there's stuff in that genre that's starting to move to consoles, as consoles move up. But I think it's just because studios specialize in those titles, and those development cycles can be lengthy, so a lot of them are just coming out now. THQ is focused on all areas.

Turn the page for the interview's conclusion.

Shack: This genre is traditionally PC-oriented. Have you faced any challenges with the console transition or had to scale anything down?

Joe Halper: No, actually it's going really well. There's a lot of design work that went into catering to all the different roles and upgrades--sort of like an RPG--but fundamentally you keep it simplistic and keep it centralized. There are so many weapons and vehicles and all that information to communicate to the players, but I think we did really well getting that all onto the controller. The way the players level up the roles gives players a chance to learn as they go through. You pick a role, and you start upgrading it and learning it. It's a quick but an enjoyable experience. You figure it out quickly, then you start figuring out the cool combinations you can make.

Shack: Do you essentially have feature parity between the different versions?

Joe Halper: Well, the Xbox 360 version is 32 players--32 plus, we've said--while the PC version is at 64.

Shack: So when the game ships, the Xbox 360 version will be 32 players or will it have more?

Joe Halper: Yeah, 32, but it could be possibly more. It depends what we can do with Microsoft. Right now, most console games don't do that many, so we're creating our own servers for Xbox Live. As far as Live Anywhere, we'd love to do that, but we need to focus on just getting a good game out.

Shack: How do you feel about Microsoft's current PC initiaves--not just Live Anywhere, but all the Vista and Games for Windows stuff? Will that be an improvement?

Joe Halper: Oh yeah, it'll be really good. The PCs are always going to push the limits. It'll stick around. But the big thing is, with the consoles, people are realizing they can be connected in their living rooms. That's opening up a whole new genre of fans that's going to grow to be so much more, so now it's not just the guy with the PC hardware who can enjoy that experience. Everyone can tap in and have a fun experience.

Shack: On the PS3, will that essentially be the same game as the 360 in terms of gameplay?

Joe Halper: Well, they've got the Sixaxis controller.

Shack: You'll be supporting that?

Joe Halper: Yeah. We haven't announced anything yet, but with the vehicles and the flying drones you can imagine what we're doing, and it's really cool. It'll definitely be a very similar game to the one on 360 and PC, but we're doing things to make it stand out.

Shack: Sony early on announced support for mouse and keyboard gaming on PS3, but we haven't seen too much adoption in games. Will you guys take them up on that?

Joe Halper: We've been focusing on the core of the game, but if they do allow mouse and keyboard, awesome. And then on the PC you can use your Microsoft [Xbox 360] control pad, so you can go any which way you want. [laughs] Personally, my preference these days is the controller. I played only PC games for a real long time, but that's my preference these days.

Shack: Going back to your prior experience, how has your military training experience translated over into design for solely entertainment-focused games?

Joe Halper: I used to do 3D environments, but I was always into games. I was hired by a company that developed the Javelin training system, the M1A1 training system, simulators for chemical warfare, programs to train for F-18s, F-16s, C-130s, and all these vehicles. A lot of guys in the military are younger, and you want to get all their attention, so you use games. I researched games like crazy to learn the best way to interact with these soldiers. That got me really into analyzing reward systems, how you can get people into it--like serious games. But then some of the ones I did became more entertainment then training, and they were just playing the games instead of learning. [laughs] That was cool, but it's a serious industry and it was enticing when things started to take off with Desert Combat. I was also still doing contracts for the military for quite a while, and games were such a natural fit. This industry is actually a lot more competitive, though. It's a lot more around the clock.

Shack: It's a crazy industry.

Joe Halper: It's very crazy. It's very, very competitive. The government jobs are 9 to 5. Those are intense too, but this just pushes it up a notch. This is cutting edge, top of the line, push-it-for-all-you-can stuff that we're doing. I mean it's an open world first person shooter with vehicles and characters on PS3, 360, and PC, with a studio we just created.

Shack: You guys have really grown almost overnight, it seems.

Joe Halper: We grew 500% in just fourteen months. We went from fourteen core members, to pushing 70 or 80 people now in a short timespan. We really lucked out. We're very excited, looking forward to getting the game out there and starting the next one.

Shack: Got anything on the back burner?

Joe Halper: Nothing to announce yet. ...Okay, it's Barbie.

Shack: I can't wait. Good to talk to you.

Joe Halper: Good to talk to you too.

Kaos Studios' Frontlines: Fuel of War is set to ship for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 later this year.