"Homefront" is out next week, THQ's "Red Dawn"-esque (no, seriously-- John Milius penned the story) first-person shooter set in a near-future world in which a Korea united under the rule of Kim Jong-il's son invades and conquers the United States of America. While a marketing fanfare has risen up around the game's narrative, the character progression-based competitive multiplayer mode has also been turning quite a few heads in preview sessions. Developer Kaos Studios detailed in a recent interview how the work that's been done will help the game's online play avoid the pitfalls of exploits and incessant camping that fans of "Call of Duty" and similar shooters tend to complain of.
To combat campers, Kaos upped the number of killing tools that players have at their disposal. "What we've found is that if there's a sniper who's doing pretty well, players will get annoyed by him and want to take him out," multiplayer level designer Erin Daly told CVG.
"So they'll be able to spend their own Battle Points on, say, a recon drone and mark him or an assault drone to fly over there and try and kill him with. They can even buy an airstrike and specifically target him, because you can guide a missile down right into his position."
Battle Points are earned in-match as you play, and can be spent on anything from better weapons to vehicles. There's also the Battle Commander system, which adds a risk/reward component to building up killstreaks. As you pick up a string of unbroken kills you earn star rankings which unlock character-boosting buffs. The flipside is that the higher your ranking, the more intel the enemy team has on your location.
Or, to put it more simply: if you find a nice hidey-hole and squat there, amassing 20 kills in the space of two minutes without going down, the enemy is going to have a good idea of where you are... and they will come after you, since higher star rankings represent a greater threat.
Daly also believes that THQ's use of dedicated servers for the game will be very valuable in stemming off any cheating, specifically with those who uses lag switches and the like to disrupt the flow of the game and give themselves an advantage. When no player is hosting the match, lag-induced cheats are an impossibility.
Certainly there will still be both campers and cheaters. Glitches will be discovered and exploited, and later patched. This is just the way things work. But for those who take their online play seriously, it is always encouraging to hear that a developer is keyed into these particular concerns and taking steps to address them.