How have you expanded the extraction mode to support different playstyles like solo, squad-based, etc.?

Joe Cecot, Studio Multiplayer Creative Director – When we look at solo play, we aim to create a very interesting and dangerous world. We want you to respect the AI enemies. We feel like if people can just run around and do whatever they want, that we haven’t done our jobs. It’s that pacing of combat with AI that makes an extraction shooter really healthy. But if you’re a solo player, there’s no one to revive you.

We had this idea: what if there was a way that you could always get yourself up one time? So we added the tourniquet mechanic – when you spawn into DMZ, you have your health bars at max. You have 150 health. That’s the max you can go up. And we still have regenerating health — if you take a bunch of damage, hide in the corner, it will come back up to full slowly.

But if you go down completely and you’re down and you don’t have a self-revive equipped, you can use the tourniquet; you always get one. You pop that tourniquet and essentially you stop the bleeding. What that does is it gets you back up, but it gets you back up in a wounded state. You’ll need to find a med kit or bandage to repair yourself.

And what this does is it allows us to have the world be pretty hard. Our Lieutenants are pretty hard, pretty scary. And if you stumble across one as a solo player and they down you, you have a moment to be like, ‘Well, that didn’t work out. I wasn’t really paying attention. They got the better of me.’ And you can crawl back into safety, the AI move on. If you prepped properly you can go into the corner, bandage yourself up to get back to full health. And then you can either say, ‘I’m going to take on this fight again,’ or ‘I’m going to go get more plate armor and come back later.‘ So that’s one of the key things to help with solo players.

The stealth meter also helps the solo player control combat better. If I’m solo, I want to be able to control combat as I move through the world. When an AI starts spotting me, I get an audio cue and this soft indicator on the right that goes white to yellow to orange. As soon as that starts changing, I can pop back behind cover, I can hit the deck, and I can freeze that meter, and then it calms down and then they continue on their way.

That feature allows players who are playing solo to really control the space and choose when they want to engage and go loud. Maybe they never want to. Maybe they just want to creep around with throwing knives. I think the stealth meter really helps the solo player.

And we’ve made a ton of improvements for proximity chat we’ve upgraded the engine a bunch now where proximity chat has falloff with distance, has directionality, depending on where you’re facing, which ear it’s coming in, and then it also has kind of reverb depending on the interior that you’re in, so that they feel more like they’re in the world.