MF: How will players determine who will assume the commander role for each team?
RL: Players elect to become Commanders when they join the game, and are then selected at random by the system. When a Commander is mutinied by his own troops, another random selection is made from the remaining candidates.
MF: You’ve mentioned that competitive multiplayer modes will go beyond standard Capture the Flag. Can you talk a bit about some of the different multiplayer modes?
RL: The game will ship with Warfare and Deathmatch modes.
Warfare is the full, undiluted Nuclear Dawn experience, with two commanders, full building paradigm, unlockable advanced weapon kits, and a lot of mayhem, while Deathmatch will be a more familiar Team Deathmatch-style experience.
Two more gameplay modes are planned out for Nuclear Dawn, but they rely on the elements that we’re going to implement with our free DLC expansions, and therefore, will be released later on.
MF: What incentives are there for FPS players to follow the Commander’s lead rather than “run and gun?”
RL: There is the immediate incentive of receiving substantial extra points for following commander orders. Heeding a competent commander’s orders is something that skilled players will soon learn to do, as it offers a bird’s eye view of the action that a single player cannot have.
Then, there is the less immediate, but no less learning, process of constantly losing to the players who do understand the Commander/Soldier dynamic, and cooperate to bring the frontlines forward with every action.
Nuclear Dawn’s Commanders are not the helpless organizers that too many games allow players to ignore. While players can still enjoy themselves fully without ever cooperating with their commanders, the true key to fully unlocking your Faction’s destructive potential is to work together.
MF: Will there be a single-player campaign? If so, how will those be divided between the troop and commander roles?
RL: We have no plans for a single-player campaign in Nuclear Dawn. The entire game structure and design revolved around multiplayer combat from the very beginning, and producing a single-player campaign alongside that would have distracted us from giving Nuclear Dawn the absolute attention it deserves.
That said, one of the upcoming planned DLCs is a massive AI update, with both soldier bots and Commander AIs, who will allow players to set up single-player Warfare matches, to both train for multiplayer matches, and challenge the computer.
Nuclear Dawn’s game world is rich and deep, and we fully intend to revisit it for future game experiences, but for now, the broader IP has to wait.
MF: Thank you, Robbert. We’re eager to get our hands on Nuclear Dawn, which is set to release this September for PC and Mac.
