Star Wars: Battlefront designer on the ‘daunting’ challenge of Star Wars combat

Designing any game, such as a first-person shooter, flight combat, or vehicular assault game, is a tough job. It calls for a gentle and calculative hand, which has to carefully nurture a fragile ecosystem of design elements that can break the entire experience at the slightest tweak.

Now, imagine taking all three of those ecosystems, cramming them into one game, and expecting the hybrid experience to hold together.

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That’s what Niklas Fegraeus, design director on Star Wars Battlefront, is responsible for doing. Last week, I had a special private play session with the title. During the event, I got a chance to sit down with Fegraeus and discuss his history with DICE, his philosophy on play design, and managing such a huge and complex game.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: So, how’s it going?

Niklas Fegraeus: It’s going well. We managed to get it really stable and pretty fun; I’d say. People seem to be liking it, and I am on cloud number nine so far. I’m just nervous for the launch and what people might say.

GamesBeat: How long has Star Wars Battlefront been in development?

Fegraeus: It’s been like, um, a little over two years. I don’t remember exactly when the contracts were signed and finding teams. I think it was two, two and a half years.

GamesBeat: You were with the project since the beginning right?

Fegraeus: Yeah, yeah!

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GamesBeat: What were you working on before?

Fegraeus: Oh, I’ve been at DICE since 2004.

GamesBeat: Ah! OK.

Fegraeus: Yeah, I was originally hired as an animator back then … but then, very quickly, like within a year, I switched to design.

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I worked as a weapons designer, gameplay designer … and over the years I finally started working as a features designer. I got my first project (as a feature designer) with the Vietnam expansion pack for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. After that, I did the expansion pack for Battlefield 3 and 4. And then, Star Wars came!

GamesBeat: Did you come into this industry … wanting to become a designer?

Fegraeus: No. No, I had always wanted to be an artist. Ever since I was a kid, I drew a lot. I made paintings. I made movies out of stop-motion animation. Then, while I was at university … I went to art school … but I’ve always been a gamer.

Maybe in some ways too much. I’ve always been super committed. I sometimes say that I play every game out there and … [laughs] if that’s not factually true, then, it is very close to the truth.

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I play all genres of games and just enjoy it so much. So, it was basically me, being an animator, and whining about game features not being good enough. [Laughs] Or, something like that. And eventually, they told me to just shut up and have a go at it.

GamesBeat: What do you think you prefer more? Animating or designing?

Fegraeus: No, I really found my place in design because it allows me to use art and use design. I’ve actually done some programming as well, and I was in an orchestra once. … I played music.

So, I have these connections with all of these areas of what makes a game. You know, all the way from art to code. And as a designer, I get to combine them … to work within all those aspects and create an experience out of them. It’s like the best thing in the world for me.

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GamesBeat: Right! Would you say gameplay design is a lot like musical composition?

Fegraeus: Yeah. I’m actually not native. My first language isn’t English. So, I don’t know if I have the right definition of ‘composition,’ but it sounds right because we are compositing all sorts of things together into one experience.

GamesBeat: So, what was the first game you were a designer on?

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Fegraeus: That would be, actually, Battlefield 2. That was back in 2005. I wasn’t a part of the design work in the pre-production, but I did take care of some weapon design toward the end of the project. So, I did the basic weapons balancing and bullet-spread calculations and such. It was basically my first design job.

GamesBeat: So, how did the idea for Star Wars Battlefront spark up?

Fegraeus: I don’t really know the specifics because I wasn’t a part of the negotiations with Disney and [Lucasfilm]. But, what I do know is when the contract was signed and EA was given the green light to make Star Wars games, I … along with my team, was asked to make a project.

And Battlefront was right there and perfect for us. I remember some people talking about how a combination of having the Battlefield developers take on the Battlefront project was a match made in heaven. And I completely agree.

GamesBeat: So, why do you think they said it was a match made in heaven? What components do you bring?

Fegraeus: I think when people talk about … how well we can combine large aspects of gameplay into a functional, holistic, thing. That’s something DICE is known for, and I feel we have the tech and experience for that genre of games. … We are experienced with first-person shooters and our ability to render worlds very well are also some of the things people think of.

And I would agree. I think that’s very true.

GamesBeat: It’s like, “I’ve got to balance the flight combat experience. I’ve got to balance the vehicle gameplay. I’ve got to balance the first-person shooter aspect.” It just seems overwhelming to me.

Fegraeus: It is! It’s incredibly difficult.

You know, there’s no magic bullet. There’s no scalable thing that helps unlock the doors. It’s so much work and so much deep analysis of super large systems. It’s quite daunting, actually.

I am really happy to be a part of a team with such high ambition that DICE represents. Just, you know, feeling like, “Yes! We can do this! It’s super, super difficult. But we can do this!”

That sort of attitude.

And, of course, it takes time to perfect formulas and find the right solutions. But, it’s quite incredible when you get those things to work together, and you can talk about moments that happen, which are quite emergent for what they are. Which is a testament when things do work together.

GamesBeat: So, what piece of a game like this … is hardest to balance?

Fegraeus: Right, from a balance perspective, I think the hardest thing is planning around player ingenuity. Where they can take one thing and turn it into a bunch of other things. There is so much creativity and cleverness out there that people make amazing things when they get their hands on a system.

And I think the hardest thing to balance is to foresee and know how much … how wide of a use, a system can have. And making sure certain aspects of that thread [don’t] ruin things for everyone else. That’s really hard, and that’s where a lot of time is spent testing and so forth.

GamesBeat: Being more specific, though, like what component in Star Wars Battlefront has been the biggest pain to design around though?

Fegraeus: I think for Battlefront, the hardest thing is the asymmetry thing. Where the Empire is incredibly strong in terms of what they are in Star Wars [narrative]. They have these powerful machines. They have these legions of troops and super deadly ships.

Where as the rebels you identify as the freedom fighters trying to resist all of this. It’s a David versus Goliath thing, but it still has to be balanced because it’s a game.

Just getting that to work without it minimizing, [he puffs out his chest and raises a fist] “Yeah! I’m the Empire!”

Or [hunches down, both fists raised to punch an imaginary bully looming over him], “Yeah! I’m with the Rebels! Come get me!”

If you want to get super specific, it’s vehicle versus infantry, speed versus stationary … that’s one thing that is really tricky.

GamesBeat: I notice with this game that, comparing it to Battlefield, there seems to be some simplicity in the controls and such as well.

Fegraeus: Well, it depends on what you mean by simplicity. The controls themselves, are, you know … I think most people who play first-person shooters would be quite comfortable. They’re what you’d come to expect from a game like this.

But when it comes to how we introduce systems, it’s quite approachable. We don’t throw too many advanced things at you immediately, we feel this is more about, “Hey! Just jump in and have fun!”

We aren’t going to require you to spend a gazillion hours in order to not be mocked by the Internet. [Laughs.]

At the same time, there is a lot of depth to be found on the other end of that scale.

GamesBeat: Hmm?

Fegraeus: I think the term “easy to learn, hard to master” is a term we’ve used throughout our development to describe how we want it to feel. Like, you should be able to jump in quickly, and you should be able to control things quickly, and you should be able to understand things quickly.

But, when you do, you also begin to see the facets and the layers that are there. You start to realize, “Oh! Oh yeah! I can combine those, and oh, that’s what happens!”

So, my hope is that most people feel like, “Yeah! I can get into this. I get this!”

But then, as they play, they will go, “Ok! Now, I see where this is going. I can develop here and here. I can do this in different ways.”

GamesBeat: So, I just want to clarify that I brought simplicity in controls up because I was playing the X-Wing tutorial.

Fegraeus: Yes.

GamesBeat: And I noticed that the controls automatically were not set like a normal flight stick. Up is up. Down is down.

Fegraeus: Right. It’s not set up like a simulator flight stick.

GamesBeat: And there was the lock-on situation. It didn’t seem like it mattered once I got lock-on. I mean, I still had to keep them on the screen, but once locked on, my bullets would track. I was thinking to myself, “Huh, I wonder if they did that to make it simpler for people to get in and start shooting opponents down?”

Fegraeus: The main thing is, actually, this is from being inspired by the films. When [Darth Vader] is chasing Luke in the trench, and he has that lock on thing that beeps, and when he has him he says, [in a menacing voice] “I have you now.”

So, we got inspired by that and wanted the same sort of feel. So, when you are in a TIE Fighter and you see this thing lock on like, “Doot! doot! doot! doot! doot!”

But, it also provides an easier time for the pilot. I mean, they don’t have to pixel shoot.

But, to your point, you still have to aim at them. You can’t lose them. Because if they just fly away, and you can’t keep your [crosshairs] on them, there’s no way you’re going to win that. You have to keep on them.

So, it is improvised for dogfighting.

 

GamesBeat: I didn’t notice a squad based kind of design around it like I saw in Battlefield. I also didn’t see something that said, “OK, you’re going to play this specific class.” That seemed to be something taken a little bit simpler as well. But maybe I haven’t played it long enough to see this evolve.

Fegraeus: What we have is more of a free-class creation in that sense.

I mean, yes! You can arrange certain things into certain pockets, so if you play this, you’re called something like that, and if you play this, then you’re called something like that. And it becomes what you call classes, and that’s great because it gives players a strategic option.

But, it’s also great to be able to create that yourself! And that’s what we’ve gone towards. We basically have these things that you can unlock and that you can then combine yourself and create your own play style.

I don’t know if you’d call that simpler or just varied or different. I think it’s very interesting how player agency will play into that kind of creation. I think that’s just one of those cool things that people will be able to toy with.

As for the squad thing, what we have is something called the “partner feature,” which basically means that, instead of focusing on a big chain of command, which is one way of doing it, we wanted to focus on you and your friend. So, it’s just you and your buddy in battle. We can fight for the good side, fight for the bad side, and this is your partner.

So, we have lots of features in the game that strengthen that bond. Like, you can use your partner’s unlocks even though you may not have them yourself. You can play the split-screen stuff with your partner, so on and so forth.

GamesBeat: [Cringe] What’s your favorite Star Wars movie and why?

Fegraeus: Oh! [Laughs] Yeah! I was just asked that!

So, I, of course, have seen all the … six Star Wars films. Although a seventh is coming. To me, Star Wars is a big thing. I like all the films, but my fondest memories are of course from when I was a kid and watching the original trilogy.

And I remember really falling in love with the first film. I was too young to see it in the theaters, but I watched it on VHS over and over and over again.

Then, the second and third film came out, and Star Wars became just this three-film thing for me. So, when it comes to finding my favorite one now, I think it comes down to The Empire Strikes Back. I mean, we’re comparing gold to platinum here, but to me, The Empire Strikes Back has this really nice arc if I were to put my professional hat on and analyze it from a movie perspective.

But, in my heart, it’s more about the greater adventures of Luke Skywalker and his friends.