What is Day of Infamy About?

Day of Infamy is a game about war. Shocking, right? Day of Infamy, a first person shooter that, get this, is based in World War 2 is, wait for it, about war. Truly an insightful thought.

Well, maybe it’s still not something you haven’t thought of, because you probably haven’t played this game, but I’m going to talk about it all the same.

There are, of course, many games that are about war. There are games like Call of Duty, frequently in the FPS genre, that are meant to make you feel like the single super soldier saving the day; there are games like Hearts of Iron than look on the grand strategy of a war on the global scale; there are even games like Spec Ops: The Line that reject the tropes of the modern FPS and scorn the people who play them. I could spend an entire book just listing games like these; the flow of war games is endless and there are so many ways to do it. It’s just a natural fit for a game that wants guns and a reason to shoot them (it’s especially helpful if you’re shooting Nazis). Many games, of course, go much farther than this and actually explore war, but that isn’t always the case.

And so, somehow, that brings us to the question of Day of Infamy. If you haven’t played it (which is rather likely), it’s not too difficult to wrap your head around. Most games are two teams, 16 versus 16, one side the Germans and the other either Americans or Commonwealth, and a team either has to capture or defend points, or both. What kind of experience does this game want to give you? Although it’s a game about military battles, I would argue that it’s not about military tactics; the teams are meant to be 16 each in the battle mode and I can barely get a five man Counter Strike team to work together on a good day. The game’s map and system design don’t really allow for a huge amount of creativity in this area anyways.

So, if it’s not about the tactical side of war, perhaps it’s on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, something closer to the Call of Duty experience. This would be feeling of being one man taking on the army, racking up kills and getting all the way up to prestige just to do it all over again. I think this is closer to what DOI is aiming for, but I think a lot of its design actually discourages this kind of thing. First of all, it’s impossible to be a one man army. If you look at the map design, any important point, and even some places that aren’t all that important, have way too many entrances for just a couple people to defend effectively, especially when there are 16 people on the other team trying to rush in all at once. Take, for example, on the map Foy, the house at point B. To explain if you haven’t played the game, the basic gameplay is centered around capturing points on the map, in this case with the Wehrmacht defending and the US attacking. On this map, There’s a house in a field with cover at different points approaching the house, the house being the point to defend. To enter the house, on the US side, there’s a door entering into a garage and a yard surrounded by a wall with two entrances into the yard from the US side and one entrance into the house. On the German side there are two entrances, both through a walled off courtyard, one a large space going to the aforementioned garage and a door entering the house. The thing about the German entrances is the American soldiers have relatively easy access to them as well, with a road leading right up to the courtyard on one side with lots of open space on the other with mounds of dirt for cover. This means that just for the house itself there are four entrances, each cannot be defended while defending another. Keep in mind, this is a game that encourages heavy use of powerful grenades and rockets, and most shots are a one hit kill. What this means is that it takes sometimes up to 7 or 8 people to effectively defend a single point. And now image you’re on the other side trying to take a point with 7 or 8 enemies on it, and another 8 or 9 surrounding it. You’re never gonna make that on your own!

Another barrier to this kind of Call of Duty experience is how restrictive the loadouts are, and the nature of the radio-commander dynamic. For one, on many maps, almost every loadout slot is needed. These are rifleman, assault (SMGs), support, and a few others. Within these there are very restrictive loadout slots, meaning that if you want both a smoke and a grenade, someone’s going to have to carry the smoke for you, depending on the class. But what I really want to focus on are what are perhaps some of the most unique classes, the commander and radio. The way these classes work is that the commander can call in fire support that can drastically affect the flow of the battle, from calling in bombing runs over an entire section of the map, to bringing down artillery for either massive damage or massive smoke cover over an entire point. The catch is that to do this, the commander needs a radio, and he can’t carry one. And so, to do what is some of the most important stuff in the entire game, he has to work together with another player, both of them relying on the other not to be an absolute idiot (it happens) and the rest of the team to make sure they aren’t killed before they can call something in. The team, in turn, relies on the commander and radio not to be complete idiots and call in the right stuff, or sometimes call in anything at all (again, it happens).

And there, I think, lies what is the actual point of Day of Infamy. The team. Intricate map design, restrictive load out slots, the classes themselves, pretty much everything that makes the game what it is, force players to work together. The point of the game is to feel like you’re an intricate part of one cohesive unit, and give you the sort of bond that that entails. Even if you look at some of the more superficial design choices we can still see this. Look at the incessant chatter that comes not from your teammates, but from their player models. There is what is quite frankly an impressive amount of voice clips that get automatically played at every opportunity, from the beginning of the round rallying cry, to a full conversation whenever you regroup to respawn another wave for your team, all the way to the radio man getting onto a point to capture it, alone, and saying to himself that command reports that someone’s capturing the point. And they have unique voices for every nationality, from Canadian forces to Indian forces to British forces even to the German forces, all in German! In an entirely English game! That is an extreme amount of effort going into one superficial little thing, but I think it’s all meant to sell this one experience of being a team.

Day of Infamy sets itself up to deliver on one experience, the experience of being one cohesive army unit. Of course, it doesn’t always deliver on this, in fact, I don’t think it does very often in a noticeable way, and not every design choice serves this goal, but I think as a whole, that’s what this game is aiming for. Almost every mechanic that can force you to work with others pretty much does, and sometimes that works, but sometimes it’s just annoying. Whether it works well or not, I think it makes for an interesting game nonetheless.