Make no mistake: Crossfire, the debut game from That’s No Moon, is a big deal. The carousel of reveals at Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest rarely pauses long enough to fully lay out the stakes behind each game and the ambitions of each developer, but for the Los Angeles-based team, the stakes are high and the ambitions are lofty.
That’s No Moon is made up of veterans from Infinity Ward, Naughty Dog, Bungie, and Sony Santa Monica, as well as new talent with fresh ideas and the fire to realize them. This is all funded by Smilegate, the South Korean giant behind the Crossfire franchise, which enjoys a player base of millions in Asia. But Crossfire is perhaps best known elsewhere for a swept-under-the-rug Xbox version of the first-person shooter, CrossfireX, that included single-player campaigns from Alan Wake and Control developer Remedy Entertainment.
Smilegate seems intent on realizing the global potential of Crossfire, and having That’s No Moon make its own Crossfire game is the South Korean company’s latest attempt to plant its flag. While it might sound like a game is derived from business considerations rather than creative ones, That’s No Moon’s Crossfire is still the exact project the developers have always wanted to make, they said, built on ideas the team has always had.
Those ideas, boiled down, are to create a narrative-driven game that delivers a grounded, military story with the prestige of movies such as The Hurt Locker. That’s No Moon’s Crossfire will focus on two characters with clashing life experiences, ideologies, and objectives, who are forced to overcome the odds by relying on each other. That’s No Moon’s take on Crossfire uses a third-person perspective, rather than the game’s usual first-person approach, to reinforce those narrative objectives, eschewing the optimized-for-fun design of most modern shooters. The hope is that the grueling combat scenarios happening on screen will be mirrored by the emotions of the players.
That is a misty-eyed way of saying Crossfire is going to be difficult. The team describes its combat as having the kind of lethality ordinarily reserved for military sims and some extraction shooters, but in the framework of a game that its creators hope will have the broad appeal of something like a Battlefield and the narrative impact of The Last of Us.
“In film, you have these prestige movies that are military-themed or war-themed, things like Dunkirk and All Quiet on the Western Front,” said chief creative director Taylor Kurosaki. “These films use the pressure of war to reveal a character’s true nature. And in games, it’s bifurcated. You have your military games, which are not taken super seriously, and then you have these prestige, narratively-driven games that usually are not in that setting.
“For us, we’re combining two things that we really love: action-adventure [and] using the pressure of war [as a narrative tool]. So we do feel like this is something that is novel … We wonder why it is in film that you can have these prestige movies in the war genre, but yet in games, there’s prestige and there’s war, but they’re never one and the same.”
It’s a good question. Although franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield have certainly tried to tell more grounded stories, the Michael Bay-esque blockbuster action-movie nature of those games means they ultimately end up as entertaining power fantasies. That inevitably leads to stories that see world-changing events get sorted out by cool dudes with rad guns. When it comes to big-budget video games, these are the military experiences in the majority. I can only think of a handful that, pardon the pun, stick to their guns and try to leave players with an emotion other than adrenaline-fueled elation. The poster child for the kind of game That’s No Moon wants to make is undoubtedly Spec Ops: The Line, which is beloved for telling a story that delivered an emotional punch heavy enough to keep it in conversations 14 years after its release.
Although Kurosaki acknowledged Spec Ops occupies the same space that his team wants Crossfire to, they noted that they didn’t specifically look to it for inspiration. Nevertheless, the similarities are there, most notably in the way both games aspire to intertwine the agency of gameplay and emotion of narrative to leave a lasting impression on the player. In Spec Ops, the player is asked to take a military action that, in most other games, is dished out as a reward for efficient killing, but is instead a pivot point that unveils the true horror of warfare.
That’s No Moon, however, doesn’t seem to be aiming for one moment that pulls the rug out from under the player. Instead, it wants the player to truly feel the pressures of war and the way it can impact the people in it through a more realistic, brothers-in-arms journey.
“What Spec Ops has that our game has is that inherent pressure you get from war. But the thing that we have loved in what you would normally see in these action-adventure games is really more of a sense of heart and charm, comradery, a bond,” said Kurosaki.
“We would never say, ‘We’re making a game that’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced ever before,’ because usually when people try to be so different, we don’t know what to make of it,” Kurosaki said. “I love thrillers, but I don’t want to just see a cookie-cutter thriller. I want to see a very highly executed thriller that’s doing some new things. One that comes to mind is Zodiac, a really good version of a thriller that’s playing in that familiar genre and doing some things differently.
“So for us, [we’re] taking that war genre and this action-adventure and saying, ‘Our soldiers don’t have to be tough and gruff and all of this.’ These are ‘real’ people who, from a character standpoint, might have something more in common with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or Midnight Run or The Odd Couple than with, I don’t know, Michael Bay or whatever. That’s the heart space that we like to play in, because if you’re going to put aside your differences in order to survive–in order to overcome this existential threat–well, it’s not just so that you’re alive. It’s what being alive represents, which is love and care and sharing a laugh.”
Those kinds of emotional journeys are full of ups and downs, and Crossfire isn’t shying away from the hopelessness and frustration that pull people down and the achievements that help them rise up. There are no easy victories in Crossfire, according to That’s No Moon, and after seeing gameplay, that certainly seems like an honest assessment. In the three runthroughs of the mission I saw, the person in the room with the controller in hand died twice, and the successful attempt was not pretty.
This lethality is in large part because of the way Crossfire eschews the conventions of third-person shooters, which have largely been dictated by the design sea-change brought about by Gears of War 20 years ago. Instead of sliding behind waist-high boxes and blindfiring over them, That’s No Moon has built a cover system more grounded in reality, where your cover is whatever you can get behind and use to break the line of sight of your enemies. The studio has crafted a movement system that has a level of fidelity they say has never been achieved before and, to my mind, I agree. It is highly dependent on thousands of animations that allow the game to accurately and realistically move around, through, and between whatever is around you.
In the mission I saw, “whatever is around” happened to be a whole bunch of rocks of different shapes and sizes, which Layla, one of the two protagonists, carefully navigated with a goal of staying hidden for as long as possible. What most people expect from military shooters is heavy-footed, breathless sprinting, and sliding from point to point, but what Crossfire has is instead quiet, careful movements, where advancing at times requires Layla’s body to be contorted as if she’s playing Twister. It’s more Sam Fisher than John Rambo.
A better point of reference, however, is Metal Gear Solid 5 and the fluidity of Snake’s transitions from standing to crouched to prone, and then his ability to shuffle around, and aim on his front or back. Imagine that, but then inject thousands of additional animations that are carefully connected together. Because the range of movement is so much more advanced, that has allowed That’s No Moon to build environments in a way that aren’t staged around housing a singular style of combat flow; if you’re crouched behind a rock, hands against it, head ducked down, but your ass is still sticking out, the enemies will see it and shoot it. Cover is no longer a binary of either in it or out of it, and that makes fighting battles much harder–more war-like and less superhero-like. That is what That’s No Moon is hanging its hat on–it wants to be the next step forward in third-person action games and the way cover-based combat is designed.
“I do think that there is an appetite for more challenging games,” said game director Jacob Minkoff. “I remember we went through a big phase in the industry where everything had a casual difficulty, and then we went through a new phase where people are like, ‘I don’t just want the game to basically play itself for me. I want something that’s going to challenge me and make me learn how it wants to be played, and then I will feel satisfaction. I will feel elation when I overcome it.’ And I feel like the whole industry, specifically single-player, has really pushed more in that direction of satisfying challenge over everything that is beatable by choosing the casual difficulty.
“I believe very strongly that the pressure placed on the player being in emotional parity with the pressure that is being placed on the protagonists makes the player more invested in the story. Those characters are experiencing life-threatening challenges, and therefore the player should feel like, ‘Oh my God, that was really challenging to overcome and I did it and I feel great.’
“And yes, there’s certainly going to be a challenge in communicating to people that this game is tuned to be more realistic … But at the same time, it is more accessible than traditional [military sims].
“With our adaptive cover system, we’re taking what in a more traditional mil-sim game would be mouse-scroll wheel selection of different stances or number-key selection of different stances and we are creating a system that automatically does it for you, which inherently makes that mil-sim element much more accessible to a wider audience than the traditional mil-sim interface would be,” Minkoff continued. “Same thing with the inventory management. It is a mil-sim-light version. It gives you that tactical experience, but it handles a lot of the management for you.
“So my hope is that people [will] understand the intent of the game and that people will see this as not a game that is in opposition to their expectations, but a game that gives them accessibility into a type of tactical, emotional experience that is in line with the genre and milieu that they like, but that perhaps has been too obtuse, too impenetrable, and now this gives them an accessible version of it.”
The big question for me, and what will no doubt be crucial in whether That’s No Moon and Crossfire are able to elicit the intended response from players and instigate the intended change in the industry, is whether the message reaches the player clearly enough for it to be understood. There are many hurdles to overcome, and one of the biggest is having a game that looks like what everyone likes to play, but plays like the game only some can play. If the difficulty of the rest of the game is on-par with what I saw, Crossfire is sure to be a divisive game, and in that divisiveness, the ideas can be missed and the message can be lost.
“We can try to make the experience that makes everybody say, ‘Oh my God, what a unique experience. Wow, I can’t go back to the way other games have done cover-based shooting after playing Crossfire.’ That’s certainly what we would hope to do, but we can’t control the future,” Kurosaki said. “All we can do is make the best game that we can and the game that we want to play. And that’s always been our strategy. We make the game that we want to play, and hopefully people play it and love it.
“The biggest win for us is going to be if people say, ‘I love single-player, character-driven games too. I want them to exist.’ Sure, multiplayer experiences are incredible, co-op experiences are incredible, but I also want to be in a world where I can play an authored story that has a point of view, that feels charming, and I want to be able to give those seminal experiences that we had growing up playing the games that we played to the next generation of players.”
“We have to take risks because we are a brand-new studio,” Kurosaki said. “No one knows who we are. We don’t have that brand equity to just say, ‘Make another one.’ And honestly, if we just wanted to make another one, we’d probably be at one of our former employers and not here. What I know we won’t do is we won’t go back to making boxy, rectilinear, old-school, third-person, cover-based shooters. I remember the first moment I saw the first Gears of War, it was like a revelation. And that surprise and delight, I want people to have that surprise and delight again.”
Either way, both Kurosaki and Minkoff know the future is uncertain. Ultimately, however, Crossfire will be the game they envisioned, for better or for worse. It’s up to the player to see what they see in it and identify whether Crossfire is a moon, or a space station.
