America's Army

America's Army
Taken from PCGamer
Written by Daniel Morris

Note: I hope I dont get in trouble for copying this...


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PC Gamer got a phone call from some high-ups in the U.S. Army. Top secret, they said. Big news, our eyes only.

And now we've got the world exclusive on one of the coolest PC gaming stories in years. The Army - as in the gosh darn freedom-fighting U.S. Army - is going into the games business. We became the first people outside of the military to see America's Army, a multimillion-dollar effort to create a "AAA" action game with the full auspices of the world's most powerful armed service.

Leading-edge technology. The awesome Unreal Warfare engine licensed from Epic Games. A massive investment in development, online support, and future content - a project funded through 2007. And all of it to be made available to you absolutely free of charge.

Intrigued? So were we, so we visited the Army Game Project to find out what exactly Uncle Sam has been up to in such secrecy. What we found was a PC shooter that might well rival anything available in a $50 box... and packed with the authenticity that only the Army could provide.

Are you ready to shoot it out alongside America's best?

The U.S. Army is well underway with its much-vaunted "Revolution in Military Affairs." Gone is the model of the Army as a massive force that wins gigantic conflicts with overwhelming numbers. Tomorrow's military is being built to win by being faster, better-trained, and more technologically proficient than any foe. Shrinking in manpower but expanding in budget, technology, and sheer scope of operations, the Army faces a tough challenge - recruiting America's best and brightest to provide the human assets that will form the brains behind "Force 2020"

Rather than plunk down giant sums for cheesy advertising campaigns, Col. Casey Wardynski had a novel idea: fund an ambitious computer game of commercial quality and make it freely available to the public. The mission was to develop a PC game that could more than hold its own against the industry standards, earning the attention of gamers in the Army's key recruitment demographic of 18 to 25 year old males. The goal for the game was to realistically model the weapons, tactics, and experiences of the modern Army, and to also build branding awareness of the service- in other words, the ultimate recruitment tool.

To make it happen, the Army set up a game-development shop not unlike any of the dozens laboring on big-ticket commercial 3D projects all over the industry. Hiring on civilian talent from companies like Maxis and Interplay, and also using the military's own Ph.D. candidates in computer programming, the Army Game Project set out to produce a game that could hang with any on the store shelves.

Guess what? Mission accomplished.

The result is called America's Army. It will be, along with Epic's Unreal Tournament 2003, the first game to deploy the advanced Unreal Warfare engine, bringing high-fidelity graphics and physics to the game world. Each of the 16 missions shipping in the 1.0 release (scheduled to go gold on July 1, and to be distributed widely via free CD-ROMs) is based on a real element of modern Army operations. Once you're killed, you'll be out of the action until the next round - another step forward for "realism flavored" tactical shooters.

"We're keeping it an action game," says Mike Capps, the civilian contractor who heads up the development on America's Army. "We're definitely making a realistic game that emphasizes squad tactics, but we don't want it to appeal only to a hardcore niche."

Initially, the game will be multiplayer-only. Its multiplayer maps will be supported by government-financed servers running 24 hours a day.

You start off by qualifying as a combat rifleman through a four-mission boot camp. Once you're qualified, you can hop on a server and ship out for duty.

Weapons are all painstakingly modeled from the Army's caches of real-world weaponry. You can expect the M16 to jam at a realistic rate (and you can expect the AK-47 to never jam - its claim to fame). The M209 grenade launcher fires its projectile in a lifelike arc, with a lifelike kill radius. And the SAW machinegun, while a lethally precise killing instrument when set up on a supported tripod, must be defended by riflemen when deployed in such an exposed manner.

Which leads to the game'snext realistic element: the need for proper squad tactics. "If you leave your SAW gunner alone, he won't last 10 seconds," says Capps. "The thing about Army tactics is, they work. So if you fight smart- with a SAW, a grenadier, and two riflemen - you'll be successful."

Capps' plan is to gradually introduce more and more demanding aspects of leadership and specialization. He foresees servers that auto-assign squad leaders based on experience and a "value guage" that will minotor a player's worthiness as a teammate. Also in his plans is a system of training for specialty qualifications. Once you've been through the Army's sniper school, you would appear on servers with a Sniper badge, making you a high-value addition to a squad.

As with every piece of the game, the focus will be on authenticity.We have the Airborne school in the game," says Capps, "and you have to qualify before you can do the airborne-assault mission, We showed it to some guys from the 82nd Airborne, and they were recognizing boxes that were sitting around in the training level - our modelers had seen them there, so they'd modeled even the boxes."

The plan is to release new content episodically every few months, with major new campaigns arriving every 18 to 24 months. The new missions will follow real-world headlines "as closely as is apporpriate." Capps also hopes to have a single-player campaign read in the game's second-genereation cycle.

While the initial release will stick to multiplayer squad-based shooting, the eventual goal is to introduce elements of the virtual battlefield, including vehicles and advanced weapons systems.

"The engine is very new and it's not quite set up for vehicles yet," explains Capps. "But we have lots of ideas about how to make them work. Hopefully our next version will incorporate tanks. But we need to be sure that the gunner is in the right place, the loader in the right place - it all has to be authentic."

Lt. Col. George Juntiff is the officer overseeing the Army Game Project. "It was a lucky assignment," he says "They asked me, 'Yu play computer games?' I said, 'Damn straightI play computer games.' So they looked over my personal jacket and decided I was the guy."

Juntiff is the first to acknowledge that there was a bit of a culture clash when the military first took on the formation of a game-developtment studio.

"I was coming in early in the morning, and there would be no one here," he says with a smile. "Then when they'd roll in, they had long hair and baseball caps, and guys were walking around with no shoes on. It was a bit of a culture shock."

Housed inside the mechanical engineering building at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the Army Game Project looks like any other development studio: guys slouching at their workstations, movie posters on the wall, and action figures covering the desks.

But this particular studio is just down the hall from a sonic-instrumentation lab with a big warning sign that reads: CAUTION: POSSIBLE HEARING LOSS." One can only wonder what gizmos the military is cooking up right by its PC games!

At press time, the Army is planning a huge E3 rollout for America's Army, complete with a Bardley Infantry Fighting Vehicle and roving squads of infantrymen, to properly announce the porject to the industry.

"We've got a game that stacks up with the competition, and it'll be free," says Capps. "So the challenge will just be to win people's attentiion."

Through specific distribution outlets are still being finalized, the Army hopes to make the CD-ROM as accessible to gamers as possible. We'll keep you updated as we get more details PCG

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Whew that took a long ass time to type... Enjoy.