Get ready for the largest, most intense realistic squad-based combat game this year, as SOCOM takes their eighth game exclusively online for clan clashes of epic proportions. To get ready for battle, FHM chatted with Navy SEAL consultant for SOCOM and occasional video game cover model, Rob Roy, for the lowdown on how Sony and Slant Six Games made Confrontation the most SEAL-like game to date and how gamers taught this old SEAL some new tricks.

SEAL Training for Developers

Gamers like certain things that developers do a great job of putting into the games. We took them out in the field and said look this is the way we do it for real. We dressed them up in the gear, took them out with the weapons and showed them how to do different things and made them realize the importance of some of thing that are actually added into the game. Traditionally you see guys in the games run up with his back against the wall. We told them the reason you wouldn’t do that. Then taking them out there, showing them and shooting at them, they were like, ‘I see what you mean”. They understand how difficult shooting on the move is, and I think they’ve been able to add that into the game, because they experienced it, in a controlled environment, we weren’t shooting real bullets at them, but they still hurt.

Squad Up

Confrontation allows you to take all that stuff you learned from the past and you become the character in a group environment where you’re not controlling anybody else. You develop a hierarchy of whose in charge of the team as they move throughout the different scenarios and competing against other teams that are out there.


Remember Your Training

I’ve crushed a few people online on the beta version. They’ve been able to use a lot of things they’ve learned in the other game to play in the game: the stealthy-ness behind it, the way they communicate, and the support mechanism when you have more than one team. In this particular game, because you have a drop down menu, you say, ‘I want you to do this” through that new headset and then the guys do it, because they were all familiar with the same tactics that you used when you were playing the games prior to this. It’s a nice transition from the singular player mode.

Learn from Your Enemies

I played the beta version and I got spanked the first couple times because I was using some of the stuff I would normally use. You can’t move the way you normally would because you got guys that are doing different things in the game with the different weapon systems.
It has also helped my ability to see things a little bit differently and clearly. When you bring in different players and you see how they do they do things, you’re naturally going to get something a little bit differently.  You don’t want to have worry about in real combat, you go ‘hey what’d you guys come up with?’. This is one of those things where it’s good for me to actually see guys developing things I hadn’t seen before, or tactics, ambushes that they’re putting in their now.

Customize your Weapons

Do you know what I like about the way the game is now? For me it’s the attachments you’re able to put whatever you what on a gun, things that actually work with the gun: the fore-grips, the different types of aim points, things that will allow you to become a better shooter in the game. There’s not some gradation to the next level to get them, you can get them right which I think is actually really good. That’s what I like about the game. It’s like that for real, it just depends on personal preference and I think that’s a really good added addition to the game.