Lucky Phil, as we call him, got to play Homefront: The Revolution’s co-op recently. He enjoyed it rather more than he was expecting and is all for more. That’s exactly what Dambuster Studios intend to provide after launch, with a year of support promised for the game, both single-player and co-op. Sitting down with Fasahat Salim, game designer on the project, Phil found out just what that DLC for Resistance Mode will be like.
How do you think Homefront will match up against the best FPS games ever made?
“Our co-op plans are to provide free content and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” says Salim, “We’re not creating mission packs or mp packs, we’re just creating new missions, wrapped in [their] own narrative story as we have for the others. As soon as we create the mission, we launch it into the game so people can start interacting with it straight away. That’s basically the plan for the next 12 months after release.”
A good goal, and one that should keep the community more interested than if it was just some slap-dash objectives with no involvement, or a hold-out horde mode update. Phil also asked about how this was being handled internally, whether a special team was set up to handle the co-op, while other did the single-player DLC, but that’s not how Dambuster works.
“To be honest, we’ve got a co-op team but at the same time a lot of people [who] have been working on the single player campaign [are] now working on the coop,” explains Salim, “as we get closer to release we share more resources so we share our art team, our designers, our coders. We all sort of jump in and jump out of the co-op. So we’re not really building a team to focus on coop, we’re basically treating [it] mission by mission and content by content, steadily drip feeding the whole thing.”
It certainly seems to be working. Want to see the co-op mode in action? Here’s the newly released trailer, which makes the shooting and exploring and moving around look rather good while still managing to have the worst voice over I have ever heard in a videogame.
Just be slightly less serious while explaining that North Korea has invaded the USA, please, that’s all I ask. The trailer comes with news that Dambuster are planning to release a full twenty extra missions over the first year on top of the twelve already in place on launch. Those are all going to be free too, making sure the community isn’t split ala Titanfall and co.
I’ll admit that between Phil’s preview and having seen a bit more of what the game has to offer, I’m starting to warm to the second Homefront game. It’s hardly reaching day one purchase territory, but it seems to have fought through its non-stellar prequel and endless financial troubles to come out the other side a reasonable-looking videogame. Frankly I’m still surprised it exists at all. Hopefully it makes the best of it come May.