Today, we’re previewing the scope of the Fireteam AI experience for the very first time.
Please remember all assets shown are currently a work-in-progress.
Unlike most of the “squad-based” tactical shooters that have come before us, Six Days is not primarily an indoor game, nor is it primarily an outdoor game. It’s both.
There are three types of environmental challenges you will encounter in Six Days:
OUTDOORS
You’re met with your first challenge not long after you step foot from the AAV—outdoor threats. Blink twice, and you’ll find yourself surrounded and pinned down by enemy fire. Six Days gives you the ability to increase your odds through Fire and Maneuver—the foundation of military tactics. When encountering an enemy who’s protected by cover, order your team to suppress the enemy. This will keep them pinned down while you assault or flank. Achieving fire superiority is very important in combat, and therefore very important in Six Days.
We’ll talk about this in deeper detail in future DEVLOGs, as well as bounding and other ways your team can help you stay safe outdoors.
BREACHING
Once you’ve closed the gap outdoors, players are presented with the most dangerous element of urban combat in Fallujah—breaching the fatal funnel. The biggest challenge with breaching is breaking through that very first door alive. Players have a variety of options for tackling this scenario in Six Days —command your fireteam to crack doors open, kick or sledge, split the team into pairs to enter from multiple directions, and more. Immediately after breaching, your Fireteam AI will flood the room to provide an even degree of coverage. But, you must reduce the risk of entry at all costs, and your decisions will be based on observation of the threat at hand. And Procedural Architecture changing up the buildings every time keeps you not only guessing, but also thinking very hard, about the best strategy to enter doorways.
ROOM CLEARING
If you survive the fatal funnel, the third challenge is clearing interiors with speed and aggression. Establishing a foothold is critical, and your team will help you do this by overwhelming the enemy and catching insurgents by surprise. Then, your team will spread across the room to cover entry points, while you figure out how to tackle the next room through a combination of team orders and your own skills. And then, you’ll do it again in the house next door, which, of course, will present a whole new set of challenges that keep changing on you because of Procedural Architecture. The good news is our Fireteam AI is equipped to help the solo player achieve mission success.
WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG?
Ever since Rainbow Six released 26 years ago, “squad-based” shooters have focused on either indoor or outdoor combat. While some squad-based shooters have offered both, their systems were always designed for either outdoor Fire and Maneuver or indoor Breaching and Clearing. Until now.
Six Days in Fallujah is the first game that seamlessly blends full-featured Fire and Maneuver with full-featured Breaching and Clearing. And, frankly, we had to do it this way because this is exactly what Marines and Soldiers faced, continually, every single day.
But keep in mind that one of the reasons there has only been one major new squad-based military shooter on PC during the last five years (Ready or Not) is because doing just Breaching and Clearing is very challenging, all by itself.
We have all the challenges of Breaching and Clearing, plus all the challenges of Fire and Maneuver. But neither of these is anywhere close to being as challenging as getting sophisticated AI to work well inside procedurally generated environments!
Frankly, when we say it like this, it sounds kind of stupid for us to have tackled something so ambitious. And, perhaps it was too ambitious. But, right now, we are in the final stretch of bringing it home.
But, as you’ve certainly surmised, we won’t be releasing it this quarter, as we had previously targeted. And, although we’re highly confident we will actually release it next quarter, we hesitate to announce a specific date because our previous estimates were wrong. So, we plan to wait to announce a date until we're certain this time (also, the last time we announced one of our big dates publicly, some of our competitors tried to mess up our release, so we're hesitant about giving them the opportunity to do this again).
In the meantime, we do plan to release a string of DEVLOGS so you can see what we’re working on and the progress we’re making towards its release. Plus, there’s also a bunch of other new stuff that will be in this next big release that we haven’t even begun to talk about publicly yet.
So, please hang with us. We might have been the quiet type lately, but there’s a lot going on that we’ve been bottling up inside.
Join the community conversation and offer us feedback on our official Discord server!
https://discord.gg/SixDaysGame
