What made that seem insane to me? Well, from a gamer's perspective that was unlike anything I'd ever played before. In most action games, vehicles and emplacements are pre-placed where the designer wants them to be used. Instead we allow players to call in those items (and more) whenever and wherever they wanted using Destruction on Demand. That feature by itself opens up a lot of gameplay choices for players.
Not only that, but we have a few other features that give players more choice. Fully destructible environments mean more options for getting rid of those dreaded Nazis. Squad commands allow players to use their squad mates in specific ways, either assaulting, suppressing, or special commands. Each of the different heroes in single player allow for different weapon choices. And, to top if all off, the entire single-player campaign can be played co-operatively as well! As I started understanding how all of these choices worked together, the more I appreciated the scale of what we were trying to do.
I was getting more of my head wrapped around this concept when we started coming up with the high-level designs for the single player missions. Basically at this point we had a story outline which gave the framework for the single-player campaign. For each mission we brainstormed some ideas based on that outline, and came up with some of the ideas for what players would do and see in each mission. From this brainstorm session, one of us wrote a design document for the mission. This document presented a detailed idea of what the mission's gameplay was all about. We created mission maps that showed where all of the key mission elements were and what types of gameplay we anticipated at each point. One funny thing that came out of this was that as we worked on these documents, there was almost a competition to see who could create the coolest looking mission map.
While our main focus in the design documents was with the missions' primary objectives, we also wanted to add in some optional gameplay in the form of medal opportunities. With medal opportunities we give the player some incentive to explore and replay missions. Some of the single player medals, especially early on in the campaign, are fairly straightforward and in your face, while others are harder to find (and even more difficult to actually win). The best part is that all of the medals show up as Live achievements... which gives more incentive to try to get them all. Plus, the Medals look really cool!
