War huh? What is it good for? It’s an interesting question posed by the late great Edwin Starr, but as the massive success of the long running raft of World War II shooters attests, it’s obviously pretty good for keeping thousands of idle thumbs waggling.

There’s obviously something incredibly attractive about being caught up in the world’s biggest wars, often as a one-man army and against all the odds, but as Call Of Duty 4 so brilliantly demonstrated, times are a-changing and WWII is as essentially a dead horse that’s been flogged one too many times already. While the genius behind Call Of Duty has brought its incredible FPS formula forward in time however, a brave young dev and publisher partnership in Kuju (responsible for the multiplayer elements of Call Of Duty: Finest Hour and Dark Messiah Of Might & Magic) and Ghostlight are rolling back the years to World War I, otherwise known as the war to end all wars.

X360 has been lucky enough to bag exclusive, early development access to not only the game, but also two of the leading players in its creation. Alasdair Evans is the lead producer at Ghostlight and Sam Collins is the firm’s head of sales. Obviously, as ‘another World War shooter’ our first question to the pair was rather easy – what the hell is TEAW doing to set itself apart from the rest of the war-based FPS fraternity?

“World War I is widely regarded as the most gruelling military conflict of modern times and we aim to recreate the unprecedented horror and terror in To End All Wars”, says Collins. “We are also including a very ambitious emergent AI system, which will uniquely orchestrate the action on three distinct levels. This will mean decision-making from individual soldiers, squads of troops and commanders. As all units will be making intelligent, realistic and context-sensitive decisions the action is constantly fluid and developing.”

Collins goes to on explain that a multilayered mission structure is also central to their efforts. During the course of each battle certain opportunities will be presented and it will be completely down to the player’s tactical ability and decision-making as to how the battle will pan out.

“You may come across a mechanic fixing a tank. The player can choose to protect him from advancing German units or simply ignore him. If the player chooses to help, they will be rewarded with tank support. But by deciding to stay and defend the mechanic you may lose men and fall behind on other objectives. It’s all about making key decisions in the heat of battle.

We believe that this unparalleled level of emergent AI and cause-and-effect gameplay is a key difference between To End All Wars and other first-person shooters and gamers will love it”, concludes a confident Collins.

Taking the plunge with a war that played out back when guns weren’t accurate, battles were often fought across the void between opposing trenches and night-vision goggles weren’t even on the drawing board is a brave (could we really say ‘original’ and get away with it?) move, but at first glance we’d expect most people to assume the reason there hasn’t been a WWI FPS already is essentially because, well, the weapons were pretty crap back then. Apparently though, this isn’t the case and although a certain amount of running aimlessly across no man’s land is a given, WWI laid the foundations of modern warfare and many of the tactics employed at that time are still serviceable today.

“World War I was the catalyst for huge advancements in technology fuelled by an arms race between the Allies and Germans”, says Collins. “Many weapons including tanks, artillery, heavy machine guns, sub-machine guns and armoured cars saw their first action in World War I. Even chemical weapons were used. TEAW will follow accurate timelines and these weapons will be introduced through the course of the war. Both sides realised that the old way of fighting battles simply wouldn’t work in this new environment – although it took millions of lives to demonstrate this. More imaginative tactics were implemented and alongside this more specialist skills were required from the troops. Again all of this is reflected in To End All Wars.”

TEAW’s missions are also expected to be diverse with regard to both objectives and their layout. Kuju is confident that no two battles will be the same and game maps will feature a massive variety of terrain so one minute you’ll be crossing open fields, the next sneaking into a fortified town. Bearing in mind said town will feature fully destructible buildings, the depth of gameplay promised should be far from stagnant and that’s even before you consider the open-ended gameplay angle the team are so keen to talk about.

“When you’re dealing with emergent AI, totally destructible environments and vehicles, and so many unit types and possible situations, no two players’ experiences will be the same. Although we obviously employ different NPC characters, narrative sequences, voice acting and other storytelling elements to open and close each battle and direct the overall experience, the player is totally free to experiment towards successfully defeating the enemy in each scenario”, said Collins, who then goes on to give a typical gameplay scenario which involved a church that was occupied by enemies and the options available to best them.

Firstly, you could help a pinned infantry squad to capture the church and use the bell tower to observe enemy positions and take them out with a sniper. Alternatively, you could sneak around the church to reach your proper objective. Thirdly, you could perhaps aid a nearby engineer in fixing up a broken tank, which could subsequently be used to fend off the bad guys attempting to end you. Finally, though, you could simply retreat to your artillery guns and use it to blow the church off the face of the earth entirely. Good options, well, bar the second one (but only because it’s for lightweights).

We obviously can’t speak for you, but we were pretty blown away at the prospect of playing with so many possibilities on a mission-bymission basis. It sounds incredibly impressive, but surely it’s an impossible mission in terms of development? Not so, according to the games lead producer Alasdair Evans who says it’s all about breaking the games artificial intelligence down into three tiers.

“Firstly, there’s an overall ‘commander’ AI system. This assesses the positions of friendly and enemy AI units, looks at what they can see, decides what immediate or potential dangers are around, and what strategic areas of the map can be exploited. The commander AI will direct squads around the battlefield to defend against potential breaks in the line, or punch a hole through any enemy weak points.

The second tier is all about the squad and the instructions they must carry out. As they move around the battlefield and engage with the enemy, the squad analyse what they’re seeing and scope out cover points in certain ways.

A machine-gunner might be given priority to use the cover of a low wall. That way he has good cover, while being able to keep his gun trained on the enemy and use the low wall to provide a wide arc of fire to pin those enemy soldiers down. The riflemen with him are more mobile and accurate. They’ll focus on defending the machine gunner’s flanks and picking off any middle-distance dangers that the gunner may not see.”

What of the third AI tier? This brings things down to the individual level as it’s all about preserving the life of each soldier that makes up a squad.

“If a squad needs to advance across a field but it means that one man is put under great risk, he’ll look to preserve his own life first, and obey the needs of the squad second. This will create a real sense of individuality, with guys falling back to better cover as they see fit and generally acting as you’d expect a real soldier to – no scripted enemy behaviour, just highly realistic battles”, concludes Evans.

According to our research, Kuju is using a brand-new middleware AI system called Engenuity to aid development. From what we understand it’s one of the few solutions capable of handling such a complex AI system using the current technology that is available. The way Evans explains it, however, the real reason for going with Engenuity is because it allows open-ended gameplay without bogging the player down with too many squad and tactical commands. “It’s all about delivering the goods without getting in the way of entertainment”, he adds, which of course is by far the most important thing when it comes to gaming.

We know about the gameplay and the interesting work Kuju is doing with regard to AI, but what of the graphics, and more specifically the engine it’s using to power the game? Fans of BioShock and Gears Of War will be happy to hear that it has plumped for Epic’s Unreal Engine 3. Since it clearly doesn’t do things by halves however, it is tweaking the nipples off it so it can create expansive open-plan settings up to 2km square – something the Unreal Engine 3 hasn’t been able to do before.

Evans says: “We decided early on that it was important that the player experience a whole battle all at once rather than the usual trick of delivering a series of smaller, open areas, channelling them through arbitrary corridors to the next ‘open’ battlefield. That kind of linearity is a waste of To End All War’s awesome AI system and would prevent us offering our other great selling point – destructibility!” He goes on to make the boldest claim about TEAW yet – that it will be the first truly nonlinear FPS. To be honest that raised little more than a groan from the team here, since every other press release and PR spiel we hear involves some form of non-linearity and it always turns out to be smoke and mirrors. Evan’s clearly sensed our dismay and argued his point well.

“How many times have you played a firstperson shooter where you approach a corner in total silence, only to hear and see a battle kick off in front of you, but only once that corner has been turned? To End All War puts an end to that behaviour. We’re changing a gaming genre here and this game will set the bar higher in terms of what people expect of an FPS game, which can only be a good thing for gamers.”

If To End All War lives up to only half of Kuju and Ghostlight’s numerous promises, gamers will definitely be in for a treat when it arrives later in the year, we’re just hoping it doesn’t end up falling back into 2009. There’s still a fair few mountains to climb however, and as the screenshots clearly show, there’s a lot of work still to be done. Here’s hoping they can do it – God knows the genre could use a good oldfashioned steel toe-cap up the backside…

Russell Barnes