Interview with Blackmill Games, developer of Isonzo
Feature
Discussing the new "Caporetto" expansion and the development process for Isonzo
What's it like bringing a new weapon into the fold, from a game balance perspective? What considerations do you have to make in regard to like the rest of the weapon pool? Balance-wise?
Thomas Jager:
Yeah, this is a challenging part. I think also, because how we did, how we do factions in his also is different than we do. In Verdun and Tannenberg, we have had different kinds of squads. And this is more like, adding a faction involved adding almost 50% of new material in the game. [Compared with the pre-existing amount of in-game content.] So it also meant unleashing a whole new array of weapons. And yeah, I think that adding the Germans was interesting because we had some parts we, of course, sort of iterated upon.
But we also, we also did changes in how we looked at the weapons in Isonzo so that we wanted to carry over to the Germans. I think we had a little bit more of a balanced approach to them. To make sure for example, that yeah, rifles had an obvious benefit over pistols. This is always the trickiest part, by far: balancing this part with the historical authenticity. Of course, our rifles are mostly one-shot kills. The damage falls off over distance, but not, you know, by that much. But for pistols we did take, I don't know if you’d say some liberties, but we do want to make sure that pistols feel different. Maybe in real life, a bullet at 100 or more meters from a small caliber pistol would still be lethal. But if we do that in our game, then every weapon feels like a rifle.
Dan L:
You don’t want everything in the game to feel like a one-shot kill. Realism can only go so far.
Thomas Jager:
Exactly. Some pistols have magazines. So so they are fairly fast. You can fire them faster and reload them faster. Our goal is to ensure all the weapons [remain] interesting options. But yeah, I think we often do air on the side of caution, and the side of history a little bit where possible.
Thomas Jager:
we have the Reichsrevolver, which is this super archaic revolver. To begin with, I think it’s the only single-action revolver we have currently in the game. So you have to cock it after each shot which makes it this crazy thing in a player’s arsenal. It's a horrible weapon to handle. So we did make it a bit extra powerful [to offset] the uncomfortableness of using it. It's very slow. It's very bulky. it reloads super slowly, one by one.
Jos Hoebe:
Yeah, if you're done firing the revolver, you reload with a little stick you use to get the bullets out. So it's very cumbersome. It does fire 10-millimeter cartridge black powder shots. So it's very archaic, and people will like using that stuff purely also, because of the sort of prestige value you get from it, as dealing damage with that weapon feels great.