Air Conflicts: Vietnam Ultimate Edition Interview

Yesterday we gave you a tiny glimpse of our chat with Peter Nagy, CEO of Games Farm, about Air Conflicts: Vietnam Ultimate Edition. Here’s the full interview with the improvements of this PlayStation 4 port  detailed and a tease for their upcoming project, Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms. Enjoy!

• What would you say are the main differences that make Air Conflicts: Vietnam unique from other games like War Thunder and World of Warplanes?

There are more differences than similarities actually. WT and WoW are multiplayer oriented games, based in WW2. ACV is story based game set in Vietnam War. In Vietnam, you can fly with jet airplanes and helicopters specific to this era unlike in WT and WoW.

 

• The feedback on Air Conflicts: Vietnam was quite hard, from both critics and gamers. What kind of improvements did you add to this Ultimate Edition in order to enhance the game?

We respect the feedback from the players and despite the fact that we did our best with original Vietnam, we misjudged some of the problems and underestimated some impact of some features to the gameplay. Some of them were the necessary compromises when developing for the previous generation of consoles in parallel. When being involved into the game development, developer often lose objective distance from the game and misjudge the gameplay – for which we apologize to the players.

We did our best to reflect as much of the feedbacks collected from the players as possible. Namely for example – we increased size of the maps where necessary, added simulation mode, controls customization, removed the annoying walls around the battlefield, replaced particle systems, added airplane destruction level, completely rebalanced the gameplay and difficulty and did countless of various fixes and tweaks throughout the gameplay. Furthermore, exclusively for PS4 version we added Vietnam side and PS4 specific features like ability to control the camera with the head tracking, featured unique Dualshock 4 features. Actually a lot of players already recognized the game as completely new game with significantly improved playability.

 

• We know that in this new release, players will be able to play as Nguyen An Toon, a legendary Vietnamese pilot. What can you tell us about the “Lost Letters” campaign?

It should feel significantly different. North Vietnam was underpowered, their air force was no match against US Air Force. So it may feel more difficult and underpowered. But we pretty much rebalanced the gameplay and difficulty to focus on this differences between both sides. Nguyen is fictional character – but there were pilots who lived through the similar story, even become friends after the war… Lost Letters is not an extensive campaign – but it should be notable that use of North Vietnam Air Force during Vietnam War was not very extensive and their usability was severely limited unlike US Air Force, which was backbone of the US war machinery.

So we did our best to pick up the most interesting chapters from North Vietnam Air Force – Flight of the Tiger, Cambodian Aftershock and others. We even included one interesting US mission – Mayaguez Incident – so I think there is something to look forward especially for those who have not played Air Conflicts: Vietnam yet.

 

• Not many games allow players to control forces against the USA and its allies. Do you expect some kind of backlash or controversy about this? Was it just a matter of showing another perspective, along with new gameplay opportunities?

We didn’t include that and received negative feedback for missing North Vietnam campaign… We like to show the different point of views – especially in war environment such new point of view may enrich the players‘ overview of the situation. Especially considering the controversy around Vietnam War I think it is important to show the point of view of the other side. There is scarce information from North Vietnam point of view, but we did our best to interpret it according to our knowledge… It is of course up to player to judge it!

 

• Will you release the Ultimate Edition on PC at some point, or maybe just the new campaign and improvements through patches/DLCs?

Some of the improvements for Ultimate Edition were already included in PC version. However, PS4 specific features were obviously not included, including the Vietnamese campaign…

 

• How was your experience as a developer with PlayStation 4? Will the game be running at 1080P@60FPS, and did you add any specific feature related to the DualShock 4 touchpad or light bar?

PS4 is great to work with. There is tremendous improvements compared to previous generations of the consoles in all aspects of development and performance. We are still fairly new to this platform, but the platform has a great potential and bright future indeed. Game is not running at 1080p@60fps as this is our first game on PS4, our schedule was quite tight and we much focused on the new PS4 features. However, the decent performance was achieved even compared to PC version…

And yes, we use some of PS4 specific features – head tracking for cockpit camera control for example, also DualShock4 specific features – lightbar, speaker to increase the authenticity of the gameplay experience.

 

• Is there a specific reason for not bringing the game on Xbox One as well? Do you plan to support this platform in the future?

There isn’t any specific reason – but  no decision was made on XBOX One support yet. This is however more question towards the sales department of bitComposer J. I think such support greatly depends on the feedback of the players and XBOX success – especially the feedback is hard to predict!

 

• What’s next for the team? Can you share a little bit about your next project?

We work on the Mac and Linux versions of Air Conflicts Vietnam and Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers – both of which will be released very soon. Both versions work well now, we are just tweaking minor details and preparing the game for publishing.

 

However, our current main project is from a quite different genre though – isometric RPG Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms . If you check the game you may find it rather intriguing and quite different to the airplanes games we did. In fact, you can play Shadows already on Steam in Early Access where you can also find some more information about the game. But one thing is for sure – our team spent years in the development of this new RPG project already and the game stands out of the crowd… Extremely positive feedback from the players and press encourages us to make this game still better and better…

 

• Thank you for your time!