BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN
WRITER DAVID DOAK ON GOLDENEYE’S LEVEL DESIGN
David Doak smiles rather proudly when we ask him about the legacy of his innovative work on mission design and enemy AI for Goldeneye. “My favourite moment was meeting the original Valve guys at ECTS, a UK trade show, in 1998 and them joking that Goldeneye had forced them to redo a bunch of stuff on Half-life. They went on to do all right.”
When David joined the team in late 1995, plenty of the basic gameplay was in place. The controls were responsive, the core loop of ‘encounter enemy, shoot them, move to next’ worked efficiently and the audio and visuals gave solid feedback. “The obvious issue was that levels were fairly barebones,” he explains. “They had been constructed to test gameplay, though even at this stage, there were innovative features which staked out the ambitions for the game, like the alarm system in Severnaya Bunker. It could be triggered by a guard who ran to press a big red button or set off by the cameras ‘seeing’ Bond. The FPS paradigm of the day was Doom, which had you shooting monsters and collecting coloured keys to open doors and we really wanted to step away from that.”
Though David acknowledges that at its most basic, this involved reskinning the ‘keycard’ concept with decoders, covert modems and all manner of gadgetry, he was determined to vary the pace and rhythm of levels. “Severnaya Bunker 1 has a lovely, juicy density to it,” he enthuses, “a very simple, small space but, particularly on higher difficulties, there is a lot to do with juggling objectives, alarms and enemies. The Bunker 2 cell escape was pleasing to set up; the stealth came together well and was something that felt fresh, in a pre-metal Gear Solid and Thief world. And obviously Facility is a continuing source of chuckles that Dr Doak is in there…”
Yes, David makes a prominent cameo as the scientist/secret agent, though most of the team are featured somewhere in the game, whether as the faces of nameless guards or doing silly turns on computer monitors. Despite being satisfied with the variety of mission goals and interesting level design the team achieved, David is the first to admit not everything they tried quite came off. “Some level setups were exercises in damage limitation. For the more open levels like Runway and Depot, it was hard to construct meaningful gameplay and the results are patchy. And the Escort missions seemed like a good idea at the time. I mean, what could possibly be more fun that having your performance judged on whether Natalya would randomly throw her head in the path of a bullet or walk into an explosion?”
Notwithstanding a few misfires, the story mode was groundbreaking in offering the player choices. Should you go in with all golden guns blazing or use your license to kill sparingly? Guards could be sneaked past but how satisfying it proved to take out goons with a flurry of headshots.
The way your foes responded to your actions and the surprising, sometimes exasperating, interventions of NPCS all created the sense that this was a living, bleeding world.
“Refining the AI was largely a process of brokering deals with Mark Edmonds,” says David. “I’d make my case that a feature would allow me to script a more interesting setup, Mark would shake his head, explain how it wasn’t possible then go back to his desk and do some coding wizardry to make it happen. Legend.”