Phantom Doctrine gives player "as much control as it can"

CreativeForge Games recently brought their espionage game Phantom Doctrine to the Churchill War Rooms in London, and while we were there to see it in action we talked with narrative designer Paweł Kroenke about what exactly we'll be doing in the game, including the fact that the damage dealt in-game isn't random like it may be in others of its kind.

"We're basically expanding on the feature that we already had in Hard West [their earlier game]," he explained. "We want our games to give the player as much control as they can, so we are showing you the tactical conditions, we show you the capabilities that you have, and it is up to you to use them in an optimal manner. So you basically adapt to the situation at hand, and the game informs you how it will behave at any one time. There is no randomness here - it's just strategy and tactics, so if you ever make a mistake it's not because it's some random quirk of the engine, it's because maybe you miscalculated somewhere, and we feel this is the fair way of approaching strategy."

We then asked about Hard West in particular, and what lessons the team learned moving forward into Phantom Doctrine. "We want this game to be, first of all, bigger, richer, and have more content," Kroenke said. "We also wanted the missions to surprise you a little more, so this time around we have a lot of content that is not exactly randomly generated but it is placed differently depending on the type of mission, and it is slightly randomised just to surprise you a little bit. So placement of enemies is always different, even if you start the mission several times, the placement of objectives can be different, the placement of security measures on levels can be different, and so you won't get the exact same tactical mission twice when you play the game."

Do you like what you're hearing about Phantom Doctrine?