The tank section of the game is based on the earthworks that were built along the Iran/Iraq borders during their war. There's quite a lot of action in Tehran, and through the Middle Eastern architecture, it does look very similar to Iraq. Oh yes, certainly some of the urban stuff. This may sound like a stupid question, but are there moments in Battlefield that have reminded you of genuine missions you've been on? The team just wanted everything to look right.
I worked with the stuntmen and actors in the motion capture studios, showing them how to hold their guns. And it's all about brevity – military language is not as formal as we think it is.Īnd I spent time with the designers and artists, looking at the aesthetics – the right use of weapons, different ranges of fire, operations in urban and desert environments. The point of that is, if you start with a moment of doubt, when things get worse, doubt becomes failure. No one says, "Well, we'll try to get to X by 9am", it's all about you will do this, I will do that, this will happen. Military speak is very progressive and positive. And my first job was helping with the writing, coming up with plausible bridges between missions, doing some of the dialogue. The first things EA Dice showed me were the scripts – and they had a sense of character, of emotion, of connection.
You've got to have a lot more than just shooting in games now, you've got to have that sense of engagement. But when the call came from EA Dice, I went out to Stockholm and the guys there just seemed to get it – they wanted to progress the story-side. Normally, when you're approached by a games company, they just want you to jump on at the end as a marketing tool, or do a bit of motion capture. You haven't been heavily involved with a video game before. He has also written a tie-in novel, Battlefield 3: The Russian, which explores the activities of special forces operator Dima, who appears as a non-playable character in the game.īut what has he really been able to draw from his covert missions in hotspots around the world? And has his work as a security adviser helped in the task of describing war to a bunch of coders and artists? We spoke to him last week, to find out. The decorated ex-soldier worked with EA Dice through the last year of development on Battlefield 3, helping with mission design, dialogue and motion capture sessions. Famed for his explosive SAS memoir Bravo Two Zero, and now the author of dozens of fictional military thrillers, Andy McNab is a pretty good person to go to if you're concerned with creating an authentic combat game.