The communication system in Hell Let Loose
This analysis I made couple weeks ago about the military simulation FPS Hell Let Loose, was an exercise on one of my game design courses.
I found interesting to share it there.
I’m a game design student from Paris, I’m a passionate gamer always looking for some new stuff to learn. But let’s talk about this World War 2 simulation game and his communication system who is different than the others.
1. About the game
Hell Let Loose is a multiplayer Hardcore FPS where the player evolve in a huge 50vs50 warfare. Players have to generate ressources to setup spawns places to take the advantage during the fight (we are going to talk about it soon to understand exactly why this communication system exist in this video game).
The game was developed by Black Matter Pty an australian studio, and edited by Team17 who also edited Overcooked and The Escapists 2.
Hell Let Loose started by a Kickstarter phase in 2017 with an amount of almost 200k$, The studio also brought the game on next gen consoles a month ago.
As we can see the player base is growing every months but have most of the time troubles to reach 5000 players, it can be a problem sometimes for a multiplayer game but it’s keep living so far.
2. Inspirations and Competition
Hell Let Loose isn’t the first military simulation video game, we can find highly inspirations from older games like Red Orchestra, Arma series and Rising Storm.
Squad is maybe an inspiration and also a competitor for his voice communication system and his gameplay, but the direct competitor of Hell Let Loose is definitely Post Scriptum with the same World War 2 setting and his hardcore FPS gameplay.
I invite you to watch some gameplay if you still didn’t, to understand at which level of realism and hard difficulty gameplay i’m talking about so far.
3. How the game works ?
First we need to define the strategy gameplay wanted by the developers. A game is composed of some interest points, along the game 2 teams are fighting for a position.
To have enough ressources to deploy spawn points everywhere they want, players need to construct nodes. There are 3 types of nodes : Ammo, Fuel, and infantry, this last one is important for players to generate the spawn ressource that will allow squad leaders to deploy a garrison (everyone can spawn on it), and outposts (only squad members can spawn on it).
And to finish about the main gameplay before exploring the main theme of this article, we need to understand that each team is composed of a commander (only one seat on the class selection). Each team is also composed of some squads, each squad have a squad leader (who is able to create garrison and outposts). Each squad leader need to command 5 others soldiers.
Many classes are available to set a strategy for each squad.
4. The communication system
A. Vocal chat
The vocal chat has been designed like a military hierarchy, the commander can communicate with all of the squad leaders, and each squad leader can speak with his 5 soldiers. The information have to move from one person to 49 other people. A proximity vocal chat is also available during the fight that allow players from other squads to give instantaneous information.
The commander have a wide vision on the battlefield with the map. He is able to see some pings (visual communication) and informations that other soldiers don’t have.
For example, the commander receive the information from a squad leader about an ennemy position who started flanking the team. The commander will decide a new strategy about that problem and will assign a squad to defend the position. The designated squad leader will relay the information to his soldiers and they are going to move to the position.
We can see that the communication flow is moving as a pyramid and as a miltary hierarchy.
B. Visual communication (pings and markers)
The communication in a game is not always about vocal dialogue. In a multiplayer we can have the situation of a player that don’t have a microphone, we will talk about it soon because it can completly ruin a game especially in a communication based game.
A commander can see everything that is marked by a player during a game. His job is to command and choose which squad is going to attack or defend a position, he need to have a complete wide vision on the game.
From another angle a squad leader can see markers from the commander and other squad leaders, but he can’t read markers from a soldier who is not in his squad.
With that, we can read the communication pyramid from the opposite side.
For example : if a simple rifleman soldier spot an ennemy squad in a grove, he will give the information to the rest of his squad and to his squad leader at the same time. Now the information is going to move from the squad to the commander and the rest of squad leaders. The commander will send another squad near the position if support is needed.
In this case, the information is going from the simple soldier to the team commander, from the bottom of the pyramid and right to the top.
5. Why this system has been designed ?
A. For who ?
To understand why this system as been designed as it is, we need to define for which type of players it was designed. Hell Let Loose is a hardcore first person shooter, so on a first intention we will have in mind the prejudice of the hardcore competitive player who wants to win absolutly every fights.
So be sure about it, I decided to join some community discord and ask people what were their habits as fps games players, or their expectations on communicating with other people on a video game.
These are two replies I received during an interview.
The first one explain us that it seems obvious that a simple soldier can’t speak with a commander. Same reply for the second answer, the player said that the communication system looks like a realistic military command system.
So, with this 2 people we can see that they are more looking for a realistic experience than a simple first person shooter. They are looking for a social interaction that other games don’t have, they still want to win but not without planning and imaginating a strategy with the vocal and the marker system.
This other reply confirm what we said above :
This player explained me that he plays Hell Let Loose to win only with a strong strategy by using the communication system, so I asked him if an inactive player or a group of players can ruin a game.
He answer that it was the worst scenario for a game in Hell Let Loose, and it’s the same as people who are active on chat but don’t want to listen the commander’s orders.
With all of this examples we can define the type of players we can frequently met in Hell Let Loose with the Richard Bartle’s diagram :
This type of players are way more interested in a smooth communication between squad orders than a victory without pushing the vocal chat button.
Most of the person interviewed were telling me that they were bad at shooting in fps games and they don’t want to train aim shooting as e-sports players do. They are searching for new strategies and type of attacks or defenses to beat their opponents.
B. Why ?
After defining for who this system as been designed, we can now ask us the question “why?”.
First, we can find a consistency with the hardcore gameplay that Hell Let Loose push forward. The player is more looking for a realistic experience so that consistency with the historical setting and the gameplay is working well.
Secondly, the strategy is way more important than purely shooting in the game. As I said above, the player isn’t the best aimer of the e-sport scene, he is looking for victory by the strategy side.
Also, the developers decided that the game will have non official servers to let players of the same country play together. It’s an advantage for developers because the community is doing their own moderation on servers, and they are earning money on server rental.
6. What is working ?
We were talking about how this system works and why it has been designed like that, but we need to know if this communication system is currently running well during games.
The first enemy of this communication system is the bunch of third party vocal and writting chats like discord, teamspeak, mumble, etc. During interviews players told me that no one of them are using discord or anything else during HLL games, because no one want to be in a vocal channel with 49 other people. The in game vocal chat who split squads and leaders is way more effective as they said.
Also, players like this system because they are finding a consistency with the setting where they are playing.
7. What is not working ?
To conclude, we can find some problems with this system, the first one is that if a squad is totally inactive (vocally not physically) the commander can’t elaborate a full strategy.
Also, the communication system is pretty muddle-head on the first time playing, one of the players I discussed with told me that on the first time playing Hell Let Loose he just uninstalled the game after half an hour, because he was totally loss. The game don’t have any serious tutorial, there is one little on the developers’ website but only in english.
So this sytem is hard to master as a new player, it’s not made to be played by everyone.
We can also noticed that the language barrier is a huge problem for european countries. The solution of this problem are the non official servers, french players are playing between them, same as german players and other european contries. It can be a solution but it’s splitting players, and that’s a problem for a multiplayer game.
8. Conclusion
This work was a good exercice for me to improve my english writing level and also on the game design side where I took the initiative to ask the game fanbase about a mechanic. It reminds me that games are made for players. It’s always great to listen to them.
This article was first an oral exam for school, and it was challenging to translate it and to write it.
Thanks for reading I’m also open to feedbacks, and on all of my networks :
http://arthur-joanin.fr/
twitter : @ArthurJoanin
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