FPS developers have successfully adapted WWI in recent years. Did you think it was time for an RTS dev to do the same? Doing an RTS game set in WWI’s Western Front poses many challenges and that might explain why the RTS genre has been previously underserved in this setting. Trenches and the historically static front line make the traditional tropes of RTS gameplay difficult, but in The Great War: Western Front we wanted to highlight how trench warfare really redefined strategic thinking at the time, and how for players it changes how they approach our game.
Was it a difficult game to pitch? How did Frontier become involved? The game wasn’t a difficult pitch, we felt the idea of a WWI RTS was something that hadn’t been explored previously. When we got talking with Frontier, and the opportunity arose to work with the Imperial War Museums’, it seemed like a perfect fit to ground the game in real history. It’s probably not something you’ve faced before,
but how difficult was it to get the tone of the game right, given the nature of the conflict and how it’s perceived – especially in the context of there being a similar bloody stalemate in Europe right now? Ongoing present-day conflicts are something
that we’re very mindful of in our presentation of past warfare. Our focus with The Great War: Western Front is not to glorify or romanticise the battlefield, but to create a historically authentic WW1 strategy experience in which players are asked to make difficult choices, exploring how their decisions can (and do) have wider consequences.
Gamers like to noticeably advance in their RTS games, which is not a phenomenon WWI was known for. How did you approach solving that issue and are happy with your solution? Although the theatre front line moved relatively slowly during the Great War, on the battlefield where the
map covers a small area, the “front” moves quite a bit. A successful offence would push the enemy completely out of the battlefield. In the grand scheme of things, this would need to be repeated several times in order to move the theatre front line enough miles to register as capturing a region hex. This is the nature of WWI western front combat – there were very few strategic “breakouts” where advancement was rapid and unopposed over many miles. By combining the theatre and battlefield experiences in The Great War: Western Front, the player experiences both the slow- moving nature that the war was known for but also pushing the enemy off the battlefield map.
Were there any unexpected challenges you faced during development? Incorporating trenches in a genre that is dominated by open field warfare. The strategy and tactics with trenches are quite different than fighting in the open, the trick is to get the game systems and the computer A.I. to effectively work together in a cohesive battlefield.
Petroglyph rarely tackles real wars, which is perhaps a shame given how well The Great War: The Western Front has turned out. Mind you, we’d hardly call it “fun”.
Petroglyph had a big hand in the 2020 remastering of Command & Conquer.
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