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Battlestations: Pacific from Eidos Inc. and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, a sequel to Battlestations: Midway, is scheduled for release May 12, 2009. ArmchairGeneral.com interviewed Botond Szalacsi, lead designer on the new release, about what gamers can expect in the game.

Armchair General: Naturally, Battlestations: Pacific has naval and aerial combat as its main focus, but judging from the online videos, much detail has also been put into landscape elements. How will land-based combat figure into the game?

Botond Szalacsi: Battlestations: Pacific features controllable islands and other land bases and installations, such as airfields, radar stations and shipyards. With troop transport ships and paratroopers, players can invade and capture these locations. Players are only controlling the bigger landing ships, LST’s and the transport planes carrying the paratroopers as we felt that individual control of soldiers or smaller military units are out of the scope in this game. However, you can aid your landing party by softening up the enemy defences with artillery fire, strafing and bombing. Land bases work similar to ships – you can use the guns to defend the base against the invasion, send up airplanes and deploy ships if you have a shipyard present. In Island Capture (our chief new multiplayer mode) the game is about capturing islands and bases on them, defending them and using their airfields and shipyards to dominate your opponents.

ACG: Have there been any changes to the physics engine since Battlestations: Midway?

Szalacsi: Yes indeed, we substantially upgraded the plane, ship and sub physics in the game to a higher level. One of our goals was to increase the accessibility of the game while raising the level of realism that we had in Battlestations: Midway. Ship and plane control is now much easier to learn but still requires skill to master – you have to know roughly how a plane works to perform a perfect barrel roll in a dogfight! Ship and sub behaviour will be similar to those who are familiar with the previous game, but they were also raised to a higher level to ensure better playability and much-much better visuals – ships now shake when they are hit with a torpedo. They can break into two and sink that way. Big hits tear out huge chunks of metal from the ships, subs now dive and emerge realistically with a spectacular surfacing effect – just a few of the many improvements over the previous game.

ACG: In addition to the historical campaign, there is a "what if" campaign that assumes Japan won the battle of Midway and ultimately attempts to invade America. What can you tell us about this new wrinkle?

Szalacsi: For the first time in the Battlestations games, players will have full control of the Japanese faction and they will be able to fight for total domination of the Pacific Ocean. In this complete Japanese campaign, players will start from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and they will continue to conquer and seize the Pacific in a historically possible what-if scenario. This means that players are able to change the course of history and even win the war as the Japanese. I think that the invasion of the US Mainland was very, very unlikely for the Japanese war machine in the Pacific war, and the game reflects this properly with the missions and the Japanese story – but I wouldn’t like to spoil the ending of the game.

With the Japanese campaign our goal was to give players a different point of view, not just another campaign with different units, and we felt that it’s important to really win the war as the Japanese – there is no point in winning a game, and losing the war itself. And I have to mention that you will never play the same mission twice – missions are completely unique on both sides.

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