14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has revealed that they worked together with the creators of the documentary series Apocalypse, World War I, in the making of the Valiant Hearts: The Great War adventure video game.
The collaboration between the two parties permitted developer Ubisoft Montpellier to incorporate a lot of real photos from the documentary database into the game's encyclopedia. As such, while playing Valiant Hearts: The Great War, gamers will occasionally be treated with pop-ups with various historical facts, and with real-life documents that are relevant to the events taking place on screen.
"Through research quite early on, we found unique, unknown stories that shed a human essence to the otherwise atrocities of the time — stories of dogs in the trenches and how the men cherished them because of their innocence and the way that they were able to bring joy to the soldiers by playing with them and even help out in certain situations. This fits exactly with the vision we wanted to convey, that people are not inherently bad. And you can see this in the way the dog looks at the characters and how he interacts with them," Game and Level Designer Simon Chocquet-Bottani says on the PlayStation Blog.
The developers' dedication went beyond that, and they even searched for particular World War I locations and battles, in order to set some of the events in Valiant Hearts right in the middle of those conflicts.
Although the game offers a look into the fictional lives of everyday people during the war, following the impact of the great conflict on the lives of all those involved, all the action is inspired by the harsh realities of the time.
"When we started making Valiant Hearts, we immediately knew what sort of feelings we wanted the game to evoke. That has been our guiding principle throughout the game development process. We tried to make a game that will captivate you and take you on an emotional journey. We also wanted to make sure we stayed true to history, so we built the basis of our story around real events and real places," Chocquet-Bottani explains.
The need to present the realities of war from multiple perspectives prompted the team to create the four playable characters, each one of them with a distinct personality and with different approach to gameplay.
In addition to this, by presenting the story through the eyes of four different participants, the developer also managed to deliver a much more cinematic experience, with cliffhangers to drive up dramatic tension, and different perspectives that would deliver a more fully fleshed outlook on the entire series of events.
"We didn't want to present a black-or-white stance or point fingers showing that these are the bad guys and these are the good guys. We didn't want to portray the war like you'd usually find it, but rather tell the individual stories of a farmer, a student, a son, a daughter, and all of these families torn apart during The Great War," Chocquet-Bottani explains.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War is coming out today, June 25, for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC platforms.
