Game director Quinn Duffy on balancing historical accuracy with gameplay

In his 14 years at game studio Relic Entertainment, game director Quinn Duffy has worked on a stream of strategy titles that have shaped the direction of the genre. From Homeworld through the original WW2 set Company of Heroes and the Warhammer-basedDawn of War games, each has revelled in both technical presentation and the faithful and nuanced representation of the worlds they are set in.

But the role of game director is still a relatively unknown and new one. In the movie industry, it's the title that everyone is familiar with and often a selling point for the end product. It's also a position that plays a pivotal role in the creation of the end product but can be approached with an enormous range of attitudes.

Wired.co.uk caught up with him to understand more about the role of the game director, his priorities when it comes to historical context or gameplay and how technology could bring more gamers into contact with titles like Company of Heroes 2.

Wired.co.uk: What's the role of the game director today?
Duffy:It's a role that's relatively new -- what you realise is that the teams are big, it's important to have an established creative vision and have someone who has gone through the process before and understands the impact of each discipline. Someone who can help with production and drive things forward -- that's my day to day role.

What's your key priority when it comes to the vision for the game -- fun? gameplay? Story?It should be really holistic. Part of that will be driven by passions -- in my case, military history -- and I want to try and do that justice. That means I'm doing to be dabbling in areas of making sure people are looking at the right references.

A lot of that is about tone and my personal feeling is that the authenticity and the history provide the context that is a value-add for gameplay. I love it when the gameplay has a background context that immerses me more in what I'm doing. Some games do it really well, some movies do it really well and I think that's an important part of the role.

Are there aspects that you think are particularly key for that, for example sound?Sound is vital -- it's 50 percent of the experience to have good audio and you see some companies do it so well, Battlefield for example. Company of Heroeshad amazing audio, this game has even better audio.

We did live weapon records -- you spend a lot of money to do that but boy did it pay off. It sounds so much more authentic. I love the expressions of kinetic energy. Audio and effects that make it so the shells feel like they're travelling 2000ft/ second. Impact, consequences -- delivering that requires amazing effects and audio.

How do you know when you've nailed the story?I'm not sure you do until it's in the hands of the consumer. When we started, we were really inspired by real Soviet combat journalists who were writing amazing stories from the front line and talking about the heroism of soldiers. And they talked about experiencing the "ruthless truth of war" and part of that is that you need to be unflinching.

We want to tell as much of the truth of the experience and give players our perspective on what we researched and our sense of the narrative on the Eastern front and hopefully they'll enjoy that experience. If it makes them look up things or become a little more interested in history, that's awesome.

Have you considered including some of those encyclopaedic elements that you see in games like the Total War series?It's very experiential. A lot of what we're interested in is just the tonality. It's not a Wikipedia entry, it's "what did that feel like?" What does it feel like when you have to make a decision and the consequences aren't pleasant? We put in a few mechanics like the "cold weather" mechanic where your troops can freeze to death. And sometimes you need to make that sacrifice. You need to capture a piece of territory that's far away and some of those guys are going to die on the way there. What do you do about that? Or there's one where casualties can still crawl around the battlefield and they'll be able to see your troops. So do you execute them? Those are little decisions and consequences that deliver a bit of that tone and that brutality. Hopefully players will think about those actions.

You can deliver narrative with those things in any aspect of the game -- even multiplayer. Every game in Company of Heroes had a narrative, first thing you do after playing is "did you see that?" It's less about winning or losing and more about the experience. That's something we want to continue with the new one.

Were there any examples in that area where you experimented but it didn't work out?It's amazing how much stuff you iterate one, how much you forget about and how much you go back and try again. There are moments of features likeOrder 227 where Stalin issued his famous "not one step back" and we tried to put it in multiplayer and not make it feel punitive but the balance wasn't right.

We might be able to in the future but we found it worked really well in the campaign but not in that new context. We have intensity, we have brutal combat and that felt like something we didn't need.

Do you think your context of that real historical attention to detail could help attract more of the mainstream audience?There's a lot of people who are tangentially interested in history -- they watched Saving Private Ryan but not much more -- but if we can give them a gameplay experience, maybe they become more interested. And that concept of it providing context, whatever we do is almost setting-agnostic but it really does need to be contextually supported.

It's interesting that you have a game out there sitting alongside theCall of Duty and Battlefields but with a slightly different tone -- but what's your audience? How do you reach that more mainstream audience who may not be finding your game in the same way?You're seeing a reconvergence of technology at the moment and the distribution of games on the console, PC, phone, tablet, I think those are going to start to reconverge.

Fewer devices with more shared functionality - something like a Call of Dutymight not work well on a touchscreen tablet but strategy games feel like they might. That might be somewhere that we can start to see the blurring of that PC/console schism. And if you're building a good game, you hope people will find it. It's a really confusing time for the industry, to be a developer or publisher because nobody knows what's next.

A lot of the divide between consoles and PC feels like it comes down to the interface - especially with strategy genre -- Do you think that's an area that really needs to evolve?I'd be really excited to play a strategy game on a tablet. The new ones are certainly powerful enough to run the previous generation of games and maybe in the near future able to handle titles like Company of Heroes 2. They're quite incredible and it's a very tactile experience.

Maybe you can't fully simulate a mouse driven interface, there's a lot of thinking to do on the design side about how you power a game to do that but it feels entirely possible. With Relic strategy games, wherever our audience goes, we should go -- we should be prepared for that. So I'd expect our future games will be on more than one platform.

Are you tempted to go and try those little app-based smaller games?
I'm not personally -- mostly because I love the kind of games we build, I love the challenges and the big teams. I've worked with small teams but I'm still in love with the surroundings, the presentation.

A lot of people say "it's really just about the gameplay" but I'm not one of those people. I love gameplay systems but I love the way we support them with these amazing visuals and that takes time and effort -- and money.

All developers have teams to trial gameplay and refine it but do you find data is playing a bigger role here too?We generate more data than we can effectively use and that's a challenge. Every game at work generates large numbers of data files, excel files etc. We've used all kinds of different visualisation software too.

Gathering and analysing metrics is a full time job for a couple of people. And so that's always the risk when we do something like a beta --if we're going to generate useful info, how quickly can we actually analyse it, turn it around and put it to use. But it can be incredibly valuable for future planning, for understanding what's actually happening. On forums you may get the pulse of something but what people say is happening and what's actually happening are two different things. You need the data.

In the past, we've collected terabytes and terabytes of data but companies like Google have shown metrics can be used to drive success here. And Google wouldn't be Google without the metrics so we need to emulate some of that.

Are you exploring bringing on people in some of these new areas and roles within the company? How is that evolving?We've worked with some of the local universities in Vancouver and they've done presentations working with some of our data. It does take a different mindset and skillset and you try to learn these things in my position. I've got experience but in the future perhaps we'll increasingly need to justify our decisions using analytics.

We'll see -- these are big investments and it might become a case of understanding more and more what we're building, more about the market and data supports that.

What kinds of things influence you externally in your role?Lately I do a lot of book-reading. My reading list for this game is massively extensive. A lot of times you read a whole book and there's actually a one or two sentence anecdote where you put a sticky on it and say that's inspiration for a whole mission, a whole encounter, a whole gameplay system. But I love that kind of research.

For a game like Company of Heroes 2, the passion and the interest is vital. If you have a team without that, it will reflect and the consumer will see it. There's a direct connection there.

In that vein, with Kickstarter, you see some people even from really big studios just launching something because they love it -- would you have a dream project you'd want to launch or see on there?It's a really interesting approach and it proves in some cases there really is room for a niche and perhaps publishers will look at that and see there's still demand and maybe they can take chances on some of them.

Talking about analytics and data, if a million people have invested a couple of dollars into one of these projects, that can say there's an actual market out there, PC gaming isn't dead, it never was and these massive games show there are still a lot of gamers out there.

Publishers are risk averse -- if you can prove to a publisher you've got a lot of investment, a prototype, maybe we'll see some more interesting games.