I worked on BZ2 at Pandemic in 99-00 and setup the forums, and I don't remember this fellow in particular (tbf I can't remember anyone's names), but I recall we had a lot of trolls so I wouldn't doubt he was there. It's been quite a treat to see how passionate the Battlezone community has been over all these years. Anyway, AMA.
BZ2 was one of my favorite games for quite some time after it released, just a blast to play. I had been really into BZ98 before it, and didn't think a sequel would be able to match the magic, but I ended up playing more of BZ2 in the end. Anyway, it's nice to be able to say thanks to one of the devs for all the good times!
Any particular interesting stories about BZ2's development that you recall? Always interesting to hear how games like this come together, so much of the time it seems like more luck than anything!
I worked on 3d modeling/texturing and mp maps, though my time was divided between BZ2 and our other game Dark Reign 2 and other duties, so I was never full-time on BZ2. Of the games I worked on during my 3 years at Pandemic, BZ2 was my favorite.
I was very young when I joined Pandemic, having interned my senior year of high school and then joining full-time that June. It was a wonderful company to work for and had just broken free from Activision 6mo prior so there was a lot of early startup company culture being built. Witnessing how to build a company the right way was very informative to my later career.
Iirc I think we got a bit ahead of our skis with BZ2's engine rewrite, and in retrospect should have treated BZ2's tech as more of an expansion of BZ1's instead of a whole new game. The engine caused a lot of headaches and bugs, and it taught me early in my career that rewrites and new tech aren't always the right decision.
I think the decision to be more ambitious was due to the rapid transition in graphics going on in the late 90s, it was the age of early graphics accelerators like 3dfx Voodoo & Riva TNT. Hard to hit a moving target.
BZ2's codebase had quite the lineage, pieces of it transmogrified over the years from MechWarrior 2 -> Interstate 76 -> BZ1 -> BZ2 -> Dark Reign 2 & Star Wars Clone Wars. Getting ambitious while also dealing with the legacy bits I think contributed to the many early bugs. I wasn't an engineer but did futz around with the particle system which was one of the new fancy parts that got more attention.
BZ2 came in hot for Christmas 99, it wasn't exactly ready and needed a lot of patching over the next several months. If we'd had been less ambitious with the tech I believe it'd have been a decently polished release and had more success, since art, design, and gameplay were not behind. I remember feeling sad we were releasing before it was ready, and the lesson that better planning and tech choices were the way to avoid that feeling.
Unfortunately Activision wasn't a great partner for us as a publisher, there was some bad blood as they didn't like that we'd broken off as a studio rather than stay under their wing, so they didn't do much to promote the game. We were pretty pissed with that. Same thing happened with Dark Reign 2.
As far as design goes, towards the end of 99 I dove into making BZ2 maps, building Ground Zero and I think a few others. Later the engine became known as the Ground Zero or Zero engine, not sure if it was named after the level or just chosen independently. I remember being particularly motivated to work on BZ2 because I really loved the game and it was getting close to release. I had some freedom to decide my time as DR2 was going through a rough spot, so I just decided to throw myself into BZ2.
There were some multiplayer maps I didn't get to finish, including one that was basically a big 3d asset I built in Softimage that was a rock formation with multiple levels that would have really pushed the boundaries of what was possible in BZ2 maps. I'd have loved to see that come together in time, tho I'm not sure what the AI pathfinding would have done with it - I think I designed it specifically for PvP tho. Once BZ2 was released, attention immediately turned to shipping DR2, which had gone through some team turnover and needed a near complete redesign in 6 months. I wound up making all the multiplayer maps for that, and having a great time with that team.
I hope to write up more war stories at another time. It's been 25(!) years now since release. Crazy.
It's a pretty unique hybrid genre game, you don't really get a lot of first person + RTS experiences, I think that's the big enduring appeal. It also gives you a lot of vehicle types to pick from, which became Pandemic's signature game style as seen later in Mercenaries and Star Wars Battlefront.
Part of the appeal of being a hybrid genre game is that there just aren't really many of them, because after the 90s games kinda settled into some pretty well-defined genres. You have 3rd person action games, FPS, RTS, RPGs, etc, all pretty cleanly delineated, and they all start getting judged based on those genres conventions.
