Deep Silver and Crytek UK surprised the world when they announced Homefront: The Revolution, a direct sequel to THQ’s middling first person shooter of the same name. However, while the initial plan was to follow the first game’s linear approach, Crytek UK game designer Fasahat Salim revealed to Joystiq that plans changed significantly when it acquired the license.
“When we were working with THQ we were initially started on quite a linear, level-by-level first-person shooter. After we acquired the license, we jumped at the possibility of expanding on that. That’s when we came up with the idea of [focusing on] guerrilla warfare” and the team decided to move to an open world.
“It’s not only an open world. We can make this into an evolving open world. A space that responds to what you’re doing in the game. It’s not only the environment that changes, it’s the people that inhabit the space as well.”
“We were quite worried about what was going to happen to all of the work that we put into this game, but then we found out Crytek were actually going to go in and buy the whole IP, which is really exciting for us. All of a sudden, there was an opportunity to go way beyond anything that we had initially thought of when we started out.”
As for the guerrilla warfare tactics, Salim emphasized that the game won’t be out overpowering the Koreans as much as destabilizing their hold on the US citizenry. “We’re trying to encourage missions where the player has to basically hit the enemy quickly and try to get out, that is kind of what guerrilla warfare is all about. That includes things like sabotaging KPA infrastructure, assassinating or ambushing KPA. Basically we want to focus on hit-and-run type tactics.”
Homefront: The Revolution will be out in 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and PC. Stay tuned for more details.
