Verdun Interview - Back To World War I

As promised yesterday, here’s the full Verdun interview with Matt Hergaarden, COO of M2H. We talked about their setting choice, their experience with Steam Early Access, the future of Verdun (a multiplayer FPS, in case you were wondering) and more. Enjoy!

• First of all, Verdun is one of the very few WWI shooters out there. Why do you think WWI is generally neglected in favor for WWII, or even other conflicts such as Vietnam? 
• Well I think WWI is more or less overshadowed by WWII and other conflicts. Also since it is fairly long ago if you compare it to WWII and Vietnam those conflicts are more ‘interesting’. As for WW1 as a game I can imagine that most developers would be holdback by the relatively static warfare and a small range of weaponary. Also in WW1 there was not really a battle of good vs evil like you had more in WW2, which of course makes it better for a game story to base on. We however see no such problems and embrace those differences to make a unique game and the only WW1 multiplayer standalone shooter currently available.

 

• Rumors have been circulating about Treyarch’s next Call of Duty being a sequel to World at War. Do you think historical shooters are about to make a comeback, after a few years of hiatus?
• Well, at least I am pretty confident Treyarch will not make a WW1 shooter since the war just offers too little content for them. As for historical shooters in general I don’t think they were ever gone since we still see plenty of games approaching the theme but if you are referring to AAA games, they definitely stepped away from the theme. I don’t think the AAA titles will return to historical shooters but stay in the modern theme or the future since that offers much more possibilites for them instead of being restricted to certain weapons and events.

 

• You originally launched Verdun on Steam Early Access in September 2013, a year and a half ago. What was your experience with Early Access as a developer?
• Early Access has been great for us since it allowed us to get funding for more help on the game and also to get instant feedback on changes we did from a user perspective. We tend to update a lot sometimes each day, getting instant feedback on those updates really helped us steering the game in to the right direction before releasing it.

 

• You’ve recently released an update to the graphic engine, which has been ported to Unity 5 with PBR activated. However, some users have been complaining about graphics actually getting worse since the update - is that some kind of bug that you’re looking to fix?
  I have not really heard such complaints, I think you were referring to the performance which has had a hit but is now almost back to stable values again. The PBR update did make the game look much better and since we have not even tweaked all the assets, it will look even better in the future. For the next update for instance, we also switched to linear color space which will the PBR pop out better. As for a comparison look at the game now and look up some images from Verdun a while ago, you won’t even recognize it sometimes!

 

• Private matches have also been added, allowing players to manually setup clan matches, for instance. However, do you have any plans to actually add clan rankings/leaderboards in order to foster competition within the community? 
• For now this is done by the community itself as there are already initiatives for Verdun competitions. We currently have no plans to add rankings/leaderboards ourselves but we would really like to. In the early days of Verdun this actually was a fundamental part of the game but it has proven to be too much work. It would be something that we would look into after launch.

 

• What kind of additional updates/features do you plan to introduce to Verdun throughout 2015 and beyond?
• We have plans for extra maps and extra squads which bring their own unique weapons and abilities. After that we might look into expanding the game to beyond the Western Front.

 

• Do you have an ETA for the release of Verdun on consoles? Also, are you targeting both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One or just one of these platforms?
• We have no ETA for the Console release as we are still fully focusing on PC version. My guess would be that it would come on console within a year after PC release but you never know how things work out! As for target console our main target is PS4 but if we have a console version we might look into XBOX One also, since it does not require much extra work from our side.

 

• Do you believe you’ll be able to keep everything as is from the PC version, or perhaps there may be a few cuts on consoles?
  We think the content on a console version would be the same. There would only be minor changes with controls and interface to cater to console obviously but other than that it won’t change much regarding actual game content.

 

• Thank you for your time!