Interview: R.U.S.E. – RTS with a trick up its sleeve

Do you think you will continue to come up with new ruses after release, adding them in via DLC?

It was very difficult to find 10 ruses with the perfect balance, working in all situations, but we have some more stuff in our minds, so maybe.

Will the PC version have a suite of modding tools?

It’s difficult, but we’re thinking about it.

The levels look very tightly sealed. If you’re going to implement ruses on a region-by-region basis, I imagine the map as a whole needs to be quite carefully constructed…

Actually the way we did that is pretty much rocket science right now, because we used satellite data. So we have to find a way to build this simply for the community. The tools have to be streamlined as well… It’s striking how proficient the community can be, they want to do some stuff, but I can’t promise it for release. We’re going to think about it.

Once more unto the hexagon, dear friends.

Why have you made a World War II game?

Well there were several reasons for that. The first one is that it’s a setting where you have the largest battles known, with rather balanced nations. If you compare Iraq, for instance, it’s not really a balanced fight, so it’s less interesting.

Also, you had lots of different units. Most people know what a bomber is, what a tank is, what infantry is, whereas if you go to, I don’t know, electronic warfare, complex stuff with missiles, it’s not as natural. Or if you go to science fiction, with strange races and units, it’s not that obvious to understand. While World War II is very simple.

And the last and most important reason is that World War II is a great example of deception in warfare. With the Enigma machine which was broken down by the British, the Germans using fake MPs in the Battle of the Bolge, disguising as American MPs to misguide the troops on the battlefield. And we had all the other deceptions – the fact that the landing in Normandy was actually meant to take place in Pas de Calais.

So all of this is breaking the enemy’s code, using radio silence to make yourself invisible, using camouflage – all of these examples were the foundations for the design of the ruses we have in the game. So it was a great inspiration which we made into gameplay during the testing.

It works very well, but I think you’re quite bold to revisit the World War II setting given the apathy it tends to attract.

The thing is, we tried to mix a modern interface and menus and game controls and gameplay with traditional and historically accurate factions, missions and units. I would not say we’re trying to hide World War II in the game, but we’ve found a good mix of ‘Touch Generation’ interfaces with realistic and old-time units to control.

In keeping with the macro mindset, R.U.S.E. boasts some impressive draw.

R.U.S.E. does remind me a little of the Advance Wars games. I don’t know if you’ve played those, but the ‘CEO powers’ are similar in function to your ruses. Is that a fair comparison?

Maybe we took some inspiration from that, I don’t know for that one. But ‘the Blitz’ is obviously referring to Blitzkrieg, and ‘Psychological Warfare’ was also a huge part of World War II.

How ‘responsive’ are the maps themselves? Will NPC settlements ever fight their own battles, for instance?

It was one of the ruses we had in the plans, the Partisan ruse, where you could have some rogue infantry attacking the enemy. Again, it’s a matter of tuning, it’s got to work for both sides, how do you stop it, how do you start it… Maybe in the future.

Looking forward to it. Thanks for talking to us, Mathieu.

The game’s slated for a 17th September release on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.