Rogue Company is a fun, competitive, and accessible shooter that’s crossplay across all major platforms

First Watch Games has former Halo world champion Scott Lussier as a lead designer. How has that helped shape the development of Rogue Company?

First Watch Games VP of Gameplay Mick Larkins: Having come from the competitive console scene, Scott emphasized early on that Rogue Company plays just as amazingly on a console controller as it does on a keyboard and mouse setup. He directed his focus on mechanics that matter to high-level play, which shaped a design built for great player-versus-player gameplay.

Why did it make sense for Rogue Company to be a third-person 4V4-focused game?

First Watch Games Lead Designer Scott Lussier: Throughout development, we experimented with a variety of team sizes. After many months of deliberation, we decided to move forward with 4V4. The decision can be boiled down to a simple but difficult question, “What team size creates the best experience for our game?” What we enjoyed the most about 4V4 was the ability for our playtesters to always have an idea where the enemy was or where to expect an enemy. The more players we added, the more chaotic the battlefield got.

Rogue Company has interesting and relatively compact levels that often offer a lot of verticality and cover. Can you talk about your approach to map design?

First Watch Games Level Designer Joey Simas: When designing maps for Rogue Company, we pursue an exciting balance of action-packed moments and tactical decision making. As a third-person shooter, we try to encourage movement by giving players a lot of space and choices to make in any given situation through the placement of cover and the map's overall layout. At the same time, we want to keep combat spaces simple enough that you have a good idea where an enemy might come from with a bit of map knowledge. For every power position, there is usually a counter position that you can push up to and get the drop on an enemy. This sort of push and pull to combat helps create exciting engagements for our players. Beyond cover and layout, we try to find fun gameplay hooks and unique locations that will bring something new to the game with every map release. 

The gunplay has been praised for being snappy and responsive. How did you nail the execution here?

Lussier: From day one of development, we knew gunplay was king, meaning Rogue abilities are designed to complement and/or augment our core gameplay. By making this decision, we took on the challenge of delivering a world-class third-person shooting experience. Third-person shooters tend to have a large amount of reticle bloom and lower amounts of vertical recoil compared to first-person shooters coupled with minimal camera shake. We wanted to challenge the industry norm by simulating the first-person weapon feel in a third-person game. This meant our guns needed to have more recoil, recover from kick quicker, punchy camera shake, and could be mastered by our players.

Considering most of Hi-Rez’s past games have used Unreal Engine 3, what made Unreal Engine 4 a good fit for Rogue Company?

Larkins: Epic and Unreal Engine have been great partners of Hi-Rez for the last 15 years. Unreal Engine has always been a leader for rendering, core game architecture, production workflow, support, and many other critical factors needed to make compelling games that work across multiple platforms. Over the years, we've extended the engine in ways that helped us make great online games as a service. Unreal Engine is constantly evolving to include new, powerful solutions, which allows us to remain focused on making awesome games.

Engine Technical Director Chris Ranney: We had a previous UE4 title called Hand of the Gods that allowed us to develop processes and technology on UE4 before we started on Rogue Company. This, combined with our previous experience using UE3, allows us to quickly get the ball rolling on UE4 when Rogue Company started development. 

Rogue Company runs well across multiple platforms. How did you keep performance in check?

Ranney: We have a number of systems for automated monitoring and benchmarking, but those only go so far and are supplemented by additional testing. We tend to focus on making performance great on the least powerful platforms first, then scale things up for more powerful platforms.

Rogue Company is optimized to run at 4K resolution at 120 FPS on Xbox Series X and the studio has said it plans to add ray tracing down the road. What excites you most about developing for next-gen platforms?

Ranney: We already had a game that we knew performed great at 4K on Xbox One X, and for the most part, the power jump for next-gen was able to carry us to 120 FPS without major modifications. The 60 FPS mode currently has power to spare and gives us leeway to add newer, more performance-heavy features down the road such as ray tracing.