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Bungie isn’t the only big-name studio represented at V1: Washington state is fertile ground for game companies, after all. V1’s CTO, Michael Gutmann, spent 16 years at Zipper Interactive, the developer of the SOCOM series which, prior to its closure in 2012, was headquartered across the road from V1’s offices. “Mike and I have been good friends since 2000 – he lives down the street from me,” Lehto says. “We don’t mix our peanut butter and chocolate very much; he runs the operational, business side of things, as well as driving the entire engineering team, while I run the creative vision. It works out really well.” Gutmann isn’t there for our visit: he’s taking part in a week-long, 450-mile bike ride across the state of Iowa. We’d have done it as well but, you know, prior commitments.
stick – but they’re not sure that carrot actually exists. They’re working hard to find their loved ones that might still be alive; they want to find and secure what’s left of humanity.
“They’re not like this tight-knit group of Navy SEALs. They’re journalists, they’re teachers, they’re metal-shop workers and cops. They have different agendas, political agendas and cultural upbringings. They don’t all get along great with each other. But they’re survivors, and they’re out there to help in the fight.”
This is one of several ideas Lehto had, and was working on, after he left Bungie. “I’d poke around – I did some story-building for a couple of other ideas – but this one kept percolating back up to the top to the point where I was, like, why don’t I just pursue that? It sounds really fun.” Originally it was envisioned as a spiritual successor to Myth: The Fallen Lords, the Bungie realtime tactics game released in 1997, which was the first project Lehto worked on at the studio. But as he developed the first prototype, “it quickly took a very, very different path. We wanted to try introducing a firstperson shooter mechanic into this universe, and see what we could do to invent, essentially, gameplay mechanics that no-one else is doing right now.”
The result sees you, as Shoal, piloting a gravcycle – there are several class types in the game, varying in weight, mobility and loadout – while simultaneously commanding a squad of up to four AI-controlled ground troops. The latter
come in four class archetypes, each with a bespoke loadout and a special ability activated using the D-pad and governed by a cooldown timer: grenades, slow fields, mortar strikes, ground pounds. “The way we’re developing the game,” Lehto says, “is thinking of you as the pilot, the gravcycle as your right hand, and your crew on the ground as your left. You are a unit together, not two separate entities.”
This is the core of the game, and in and of itself is full of possibilities. Shoal can lay down heavy fire to keep the enemy hunkered behind cover, then send the infantry around to flank. He can do the opposite, keeping the enemy busy while calling troops in trouble back to safety. Even established enemy types feel fresh with this setup: the time-worn FPS cliché of the foe who rushes you and explodes in your face requires not only that you burst it quickly, but that you keep both yourself and your squad at a safe remove. While the mere mention of tactics suggests a gentle pace, there’s a surprising zip to Disintegration’s combat. Enemies fight in numbers, the gravcycle moves at a fair lick and there’s always something that seems to need your urgent attention. “We try to keep the mechanics as simple as possible for directing them to locations or targeting specific units,” Lehto says. “We wanted to limit the amount of micromanaging you’re going to do, because you also have to play a shooter at the same time.”
“I DID SOME STORY-BUILDING FOR A COUPLE OF OTHER IDEAS, BUT THIS ONE KEPT PERCOLATING BACK UP TO THE TOP”
IT’S A RISK TO PUSH YOUR FORCES FORWARD DURING A BUSY FIREFIGHT, SURE, BUT THE ALTERNATIVE IS MUCH WORSE
K, SHOAL WAS WELL-KNOWN AND RESPECTED, AND WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO GO THROUGH THE INTEGRATION
It’s a fine foundation, and one Lehto’s team has built upon with gusto. Scenery is fully destructible, adding not only a great deal of spectacle but also even more tactical flexibility: sure, you could flank that enemy that’s pinned behind cover, but you could just as easily blow a hole in the wall it’s hiding behind. Though if that suggests you’re best off hanging back, the game’s health system pushes you forward. While a manual heal is available, when it’s in cooldown you’ll have to rely on the medkits dropped by enemies as they die; the brief puff of healing nanites will not only act as a restorative for anyone who walks (or flies, in Shoal’s case) through it, but will also greatly speed up their cooldown times. It’s a risk to push your forces forward during a busy firefight, sure, but the alternative is worse: when an ally’s robotic body dies, it ejects the armoured canister containing their brain, a timer warning you that unless you pick it up quickly you’ll fail the mission. Secure it and you’ll still have to endure a cooldown timer before they can respawn – and from what we’ve seen, things can quickly fall apart from there.
Over the course of the campaign, Shoal and crew will work from the Rocky Mountains in the far north through the Arizona desert and then to the west coast, where rising tides have formed inland seas. The final assault on Black Shuck will be set in Iceland, though V1 is in no mood to show that off just yet. From what we’ve seen, though, the game is surprisingly large given the modest size of the team making it. Lehto admits it wasn’t meant to be this way. “When we pitched to Private Division, we knew we were building a game with a smaller form factor. We were saying four to six hours. Well, now we have 13 missions, and probably a minimum ten- to 12-hour campaign for your average player. The multiplayer side of things has grown considerably too. The game has grown in scope, and some of that’s just because we can’t help ourselves: we love making this game. But we also understand that in order to really make a satisfying experience, to tell the story we want to tell, and to deliver on the multiplayer side, we need to give the player enough breadth and depth to make it worthwhile in the first place.”
IT IS NOT A CRITICISM TO SAY DISINTEGRATION BOTH LOOKS AND FEELS LIKE A BUNGIE GAME
“AS NEW PEOPLE HAVE COME ON BOARD, EACH OF THEM BRINGS A SPECIAL FLAVOUR TO THE GAME”
It is not a criticism to say Disintegration both looks and feels like a Bungie game. The old ‘30 seconds of fun’ adage runs deep; combat is both fast-paced and tactical; and the need to push forward to heal and reduce cooldowns is built on the same idea of overcommitment as reward that made us fall in love with Destiny. “It’s inescapable for me,” Lehto says. “It’s in my DNA: that art style, the kind of action that is particularly interesting to me and I think would be interesting to others as well. When we were first pitching the game around, it was both an attractor and a detractor. When I pitched it to Microsoft, they were like, ‘It looks a little like Halo’. I said, ‘What do you expect? I was the guy who made Halo’.”
He really did. While he’d been working remotely for Bungie on Myth: The Fallen Lords, it was when Lehto moved his family to Chicago and joined the studio properly that he was tasked with working with Jason Jones on the foundations of what would become Halo. Ironically, it was also originally intended as a successor to Myth – “It was literally Myth with sci-fi dudes on the ground” – but things changed as the pair started experimenting with a thirdperson view and more of a focus on action. A concept artist had built the first version of Master Chief with a slender, anime-like frame; Lehto redrafted it and, nine iterations later, had crafted what would become one of the most recognisable silhouettes in videogames. He also designed the Warthog, the Pelican, the Forerunner structures and half the missions. He continued to work on Halo right up until he shipped Reach as creative director. Understandably, then, Disintegration reminds us of Halo. That is no bad thing. Indeed, it’s a core
part of the appeal. But it is far from the sum of it.
“It’s got its own character that we worked really hard to develop,” Lehto says. “As new people have come on board, each of them brings a special flavour to the game – be it characters, design mechanics, or even on the engineering side. It’s really something that I embrace here at the studio, making sure that everybody is invested and involved. We build the project together.”
That’s made clear during a studio tour – if you can call it that; it takes three minutes – after which we ask where Lehto sits, expecting him to show us a plush corner office, or at least a window seat with a view of the forest that surrounds the studio. He points to a standing desk in the middle of the floor. Lehto encourages the team to be open, and passionate, in discussions about the direction of the game. “Sometimes, when that happens, especially the younger folks, the way they verbalise constructive feedback doesn’t come out so constructive sometimes.” He tells us how Joe Arroyo, the first of his DigiPen hires, took him to one side after a heated debate. “He goes, ‘Marcus, I’m really sorry’. But I think of us just as peers; that’s the way we are. I’m not his boss.
“There’s no fear in the office. At Bungie we actually had that culture of fear with some people, especially as it got bigger. I didn’t like that part of it; I strongly disagreed it with it. It’s another reason for why I wanted to just kind of break out on my own.”
Further justification for that comes in the form of Unreal Engine, which allows for rapid iteration and is a world away from Bungie’s powerful, but famously cumbersome, in-house tech. There are no overnight build times here, and both Lehto,
and the former Bungie staffers he’s brought on, delight in Unreal’s speed. “One of the first things they do is they walk in the door and say, “Okay, Marcus, what’s the process of actually getting this level up and running, or bringing this asset I’m working on into the game?’ I’m like, ‘You just import it and can play it right now.’ They think I’m joking. They totally freak out. It’s great.” Epic’s engine isn’t perfect – Lehto points out that it has legacy code stretching back to the UE3 era, and V1 has developed its own tools for certain things to sit on top of it – but it’s clear that without Unreal, Disintegration would likely be a very different game.
It’s certainly played a vital role in empowering a small team to aim high. Lehto is clearly proud of the fact that Disintegration has been made by a team of just 30 people; it’s not necessarily something that end users will care or even know about, but given that his Halo: Reach team topped out at around 250 people, and Bungie is now three times that size, Lehto’s pride makes sense. And it’s resulted in a game that feels particularly timely. When Lehto is walking us through the multiplayer component, we ask if it features a progression system. He says no. Two years ago, that answer would have been suicide. Today it is a breath of fresh air in the context of an industry that continues to serve up theoretically infinite service games to increasingly time-poor players. A 12-hour campaign, and a multiplayer mode that won’t punish you for not playing every night, feels like a welcome change of pace.
It’s also perfectly in keeping with what we’ve seen so far from Private Division, the Take-Two publishing label that is seeking to revive the middle ground between small-scale indie gamemaking and the lavish, risky excesses of bigbudget development. Disintegration might just be the game that best showcases Private Division’s mission: it’s a big game made by a small team, comprised equally of veterans and novices, turning out something that is at once traditional and forward-thinking. It’s also, seemingly, a game in which the kids don’t always win. Sign us up.