14 DAY TRIAL // A fresh Sudden Strike game is about to arrive from Kite Games and Kalypso Media. From the looks of it, Sudden Strike 4 continues with the same design and gameplay familiar to the fans of the series and promises to improve upon all aspects.
It’s been ten years since the previous installment, so imagine the surprise of the community to learn that the franchise is still alive. We talked with Christian Schlütter, a producer that worked on the game to find out if it remained faithful to the recipe and to learn what we can expect.
Softpedia: People might not realize that the first Sudden Strike game was launched 16 years ago. In fact, many of the new players might have the same age. It had a specific art style and general design that made it unique. How well do you think you managed to preserve that originality in the new game?
Christian Schlütter: It’s always a challenge to bring such a classic, beloved franchise back. When we started developing Sudden Strike 4, we took a good hard look at what made the original games so unique and so fun to play. We set ourselves the goal to “keep the core, polish the surface” and I think we managed that by maintaining the tactical, thoughtful gameplay and historical authenticity of the old games and transporting it into a state-of-the-art 3D engine with stunning visuals, engrossing audio and complex physic computations.
Softpedia: The original Sudden Strike practically established the concept of RTT (real time tactics), meaning that it focused on strategy and not on building bases and gathering resources. Sudden Strike 4 aims to follow on the same path. Would you say that Sudden Strike 4 can fit into the same category and was that a goal of the development team?
C.S: Absolutely! We wanted to preserve the feeling of having to watch out for every single unit, that every vehicle and soldier is important, and that each campaign map feels like a large puzzle to solve, making you think carefully about the tactics you choose. Sudden Strike 4 is definitely a real-time tactics game at its core. No base building, no tank rush, no turtling!
Softpedia: One of the best things about Sudden Strike was that it featured a more realistic approach to war. Soldiers would get killed by stray bullets, tanks had weak spots, and you couldn’t really do any damage to them with the infantry without an anti-tank weapon. Sudden Strike 4 also prides itself with realistic warfare, but how far does it go?
C.S: I think we go just as far as the old games. We had the goal to provide as much realism as usability allows. By that I mean that we would be as realistic as possible, unless something did not feel fun to play, in which case we would have to change it. In the end, we really didn’t have to do that very often, so Sudden Strike 4 really does try to be as authentic as possible. Take sloped armour for example, a certain way of producing tank armor that was heavily used by the soviets and some late-war German tanks. The idea is that an armor plate sloped at the right angle will deflect an incoming projectile, even if it would theoretically have had enough power to penetrate the armor.
And it worked very well in most cases, producing some of the most successful tanks of WW2. The effect of sloped armor is very hard to pinpoint and simulate in a strategy game - but we wanted it to be portrayed as well as possible, and so Sudden Strike 4 employs an intricate armor system that simulates front, back, side and top armor separately, and als takes deflections and sloped armor into account. That is why you will see some projectiles bounce off the armor of some tanks in some situations in the game.
Softpedia: Sudden Strike is scheduled for release on PC, Linux, Mac OS X, and PlayStation 4. Real-time strategy games don’t usually land on consoles, and the ones that do are difficult to control. How are you overcoming the inherent problems of using a controller in a strategy game on PlayStation 4?
C.S: Creating a strategy game for consoles is a challenge, yes. At Kalypso, we do have some experience with strategy on consoles after launching successful titles like Tropico 3-5, Grand Ages: Medieval and Dungeons 2. But a fully-fledged WW2 RTS is a different beast, for sure.
We went through a lot of different control schemes, and in the end, we realized that thinking outside the box really helps. If you just try to map all the keyboard commands to the controller, you will probably fail. You need to understand that the console is its own ecosystem with unique players.
For example: The first thing that PC players will do in an RTS is to group their units in control groups using CTRL+1,+2, etc. On a console, you don’t have these keys, but you also don’t have this tradition. Typical console gamers would not try this at the beginning. They would need other means to control their groups. So what we did instead was to give suggested groups at the beginning of each mission.
We already know which units you’re going to have in each mission after all, as this is an RTT game. So why not give you these groups directly so you can start playing right away? You can still change them with a press of the R3 button, but unlike the PC version, you don’t have to do an initial setup. The game does that for you. Thinking from a console players perspective helped tremendously in the development of Sudden Strike 4.
Softpedia: Speaking on platforms, it’s nice to see that it’s also coming to Linux and Mac OS X. Did you start development with all of these platforms in mind? What’s the engine used by the game?
C.S: Sudden Strike 4 was achieved with the Unity engine. It is a very versatile game engine that allowed us to implement and test gameplay elements rapidly, and can also deploy to a multitude of platforms, including the ones we were aiming for.
Softpedia: The PC version is also coming with Steam Workshop integration and you expect the community to build mods for it. What kind of mods are you expecting? And also, are you providing some sort of SDK to make the work of the modders easier?
C.S: Modders will be able to create their own maps and scenarios. They will also be able to change all values of all units to their liking. We hope to see a lot of interesting battles of WW2 depicted via custom made maps. There is an awesome modding community for the Sudden Strike series out there and we hope to give them the freedom to create what they want. Basically, the modders can create maps the same way that our own team does it. It will be complex, and there will be a steep learning curve, but it will also offer a lot of cool possibilities.
Softpedia: There hasn’t been any mention of DLCs. Are you planning on releasing DLCs in the future for Sudden Strike 4?
C.S: I cannot comment on that yet, but of course there are a lot of WW2 battles and scenarios that could be depicted.
Softpedia: The studio mentioned that over 100 units will be available in the game, including stuff like Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger or the T-34. What are some of the more exotic units available in Sudden Strike 4 that you won’t normally get to use in other RTS games?
C.S: We have some units that are exclusive to specific missions. For example the Sherman Rhino tank, a variant of the US workhorse Sherman tank that had claws at the front to upheave the hedgerows found in Belgium and France while the Allies pushed through the Bocage area towards Germany. We also have some units from the non-playable factions in the game, for example, the Hungarian 43M Zrinyi assault gun and the Polish 7 TP light tank.
Softpedia: The multiplayer mode hasn’t been detailed all that much. What can we expect to see in Sudden Strike 4, in terms of multiplayer?
C.S: In the multiplayer of Sudden Strike 4, players compete for flags. Holding those will generate resource points which enable the players to call in reinforcements from special buildings such as train stations or harbors.
Also, players choose which doctrine they want to play, making the multiplayer of Sudden Strike 4 kind of class-based. One player might play the literal tank with the armor-focused commander, while another scouts with infantry and the third one supports with long-range artillery. Quick matches are possible, along with long-lasting positional warfare.
Sudden Strike 4 will arrive on August 11 for PC, Mac OS X, Linux, and PlayStation 4. It will be available through Steam and PlayStation Store.
