Sniper Elite: Resistance interview: Going even deeper behind enemy lines
1.6.2025
By Francisco Dominguez, Contributor
Resistance goes even deeper behind enemy lines, in pockets of insurrection organised by the French Resistance. Speaking with Epic Games, Lead Level Designer Beck Shaw says Harry is set to infiltrate the hilly Lyon district of Fourvière, conduct alpine dambusting assaults, stalk through castles, chateaus, and vineyards, and sabotage railway facilities harbouring Germany’s lethally equipped armored trains—all in the hunt for the Nazi Wunderwaffe superweapon.
Sniping and sightseeing have a lot in common. Thanks to the increasing size of Sniper Elite’s maps, reaching lofty vantage points reveals ever-more spectacular vistas as well as clear sightlines to tag and dispatch patrolling German infantry. Shaw looks to recreate jaw-dropping moments like one fan-favorite Sniper Elite 5 level set in Mont-Saint-Michel, a 1,000-year-old abbey on an isolated island (and inspiration for Minas Tirith in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings). “A lot of players remember that. I think a lot of Sniper Elite: Resistance levels have those ‘wow!’ moments as well,” says Shaw.
Perfecting the World War II sandbox
Thanks to the map’s size, Sniper Elite design has become more and more freeform, giving players maximum freedom to explore different playstyles and approaches to objectives through stealth, methodical sniping, or pure carnage from rocket launchers and grenade spam. “We create a bunch of points of interest around the level with objectives, then just let players approach them from any direction,” says Shaw. “One playthrough, you might go in guns blazing. The next, you might go really quiet and sneaky around the back and infiltrate the objective from a different angle. Then another playthrough, you might focus on sniping and try to take out as many enemies as you can before you approach that objective.”
Despite their size, Shaw says the vast levels deliberately offer limited protection for snipers so they can never get too comfortable, despite their best efforts to mask the sound of their shots with environmental noises or electric generator engines. “There's no one sniping spot which is completely in cover,” he says. “Generally, if you're in a sniping spot, you can probably be seen by another two or three sniping spots. So you need to be careful, you need to take a shot then move because once you take a shot, everyone's gonna know where you are, because there's traces on the bullets and bullet trails.”
Sniping in the games is realistic, but exaggerated to hit the bullseye between real-life accuracy and arcade shooting. The dense sandbox levels deliberately fall short of the colossal size seen in Call of Duty or PUBG, where shots are fired across such great distances that gravity would cause bullet drop.
“You do need to take wind into account [on specific difficulties], but it's not blowing in gusts or constantly changing direction, it’s fairly static for the playthrough," Shaw says. "So you can just get used to it and start quickly adjusting your shots based on what the wind is generally doing in the level.”
The series’ stealth gameplay has evolved over the years; it’s fully viable to play closer to traditional stealth action games like Metal Gear Solid, hugging corners, performing melee takedowns and dragging bodies to secluded alleys, or inducing carnage with medium range gunplay. This all comes with the added benefit of the newly expanded traversal options of SE5, exploiting abundant mantling, climbing, and zipline opportunities.
But despite many alternative approaches that may superficially appear more exciting, Shaw believes the Sniper Elite series has an ace in the hole to encourage the methodical sniping playstyle: the killcam. This gruesome feature, a gross but fondly regarded series staple, rewards lethal sniper shots with a slow-mo action replay with X-ray vision simulating the crushing physical damage inflicted by your bullet. The skull shatters, eyeballs puncture, or other body parts squelch—Shaw notes players often enjoy aiming for the testicles, simulated in detail and passing on the impressive effects of bullets ricocheting off bone.
It’s a particular reward for the exhilaratingly skill-testing aspects of sniping. Pulling off a 1,000-meter shot with no assists and gravity and wind turned on is a laudable achievement that deserves a display of explosive human fireworks. Missions can take hours to complete under more challenging (more realistic) circumstances, which is why Shaw doesn’t play on the hardest Authentic setting himself.
A problem with catering to every playstyle can be that players get complacent when they find a style that suits them. Sniper Elite 5 took players out of their comfort zone with the addition of the Kill List, adding a bespoke Hitman-esque unique custom kill to each level, where one target receives a particularly nasty death—like giving a notorious poisoner a taste of their own toxic medicine.
Along with more Kill List targets, Resistance adds the all-new Propaganda missions. When located, it restarts the level as a time-attack variant with new rules to rack up high scores for an online leaderboard. For instance, it could be stealth-only, gaining points for evading detection but gaining time with each stealth kill. It’s the latest example of how Rebellion entices players to explore the flexibility of their game’s playstyles to their full extent.
American hero, British studio
Harry getting his time to shine feels well overdue, with the series now entering its twentieth year. I couldn’t resist asking, since Rebellion is a British studio, why did they choose an American protagonist to begin with (well, American with German heritage)? This was a question before Shaw’s time, but he feels it was partly to attract American players, partly a clever opportunity to let the series use a broad selection of military technology from the U.S and British Army’s Secret Weapons Divisions.
Rebellion takes their weapons very seriously. The series has grown a core audience of World War II devotees who appreciate their dedication to accuracy. They make use of the Royal Armouries’s unparalleled knowledge and sizable collection of World War II armaments. The studio’s audio and animation teams often fire a selection of real-life WWII weaponry to recreate audio samples from various distances.
“They get nice cracks from a long way away, but some closer shots are nice and loud and boomy. I think the department's working and they're going to have a lot of fun." Shaw pauses before remembering an important clarification: “And they do take a lot of care with the weapons as well!”
One of his favorite new examples in Resistance is the M1 Garand, a U.S semi-automatic rifle General George S. Patton once called "the greatest battle implement ever devised"—perhaps admiring that same satisfying ping on firing the last round that Shaw enjoys too. “A lot of World War II history nuts will say it's probably one of their favorite sounds as well from the guns,” Shaw says.
The French Resistance setting opens up a collection of new weapons drawn from the real Resistance’s armory. This includes the Berthier 1916 rifle, which serves as one of Harry’s primary weapons. This older bolt-action surplus weapon was an effective jack-of-all-trades firearm used widely by the French army and the resistance units due to shortages of the newer, more reliable MAS-36.
Where they deviate from reality (and significantly so) is with the expansive degree of gun customization. Whereas some historical weapons like the British No. 4 Mk1 featured in Sniper Elite 5 were paired with a specifically calibrated scope that shared a serial number, Sniper Elite games now allow players to mix and match to their heart’s content. Guns all act differently, but they can be tailored to your preferred playstyle: For example, run-and-gun players with a noisy weapon may desire a bigger magazine to prolong the destruction.
Long-range duels
The Sniper Elite games boast an impressive range of multiplayer options. Campaigns can be played as two-player co-op, with 16 player PvP and co-op survival modes too. Few series have been better suited to include a certain multiplayer feature popularised by Dark Souls: invasions. Introduced in Sniper Elite 5, the asymmetrical PvP addition swiftly became many players' favorite mode, and its return in Resistance goes without saying. Players can join the Axis and significantly up the challenge for Harry by trying to gun him down and directing enemy AI to increased alert states in strategic positions.
“The Axis players generally can use the AI to their advantage,” says Shaw. “They can encourage the AI to spot the Allied players more, but also on the flip side, the Allied players can just sit and wait and try and figure out where the Axis invader is. There's a lot of cat and mouse there, and I think players enjoy the challenge of trying to track each other down. If you manage to give them a slip, they might walk past you and then you can shoot them or stab them in the back.”
This feature demanded a new way to approach their levels—for two snipers, not just one.
“If there's a high vantage point, there'll be another vantage point on the other side of the map which can see that, so you aren’t immune from any location,” explains Shaw. “We take the invading players into account now with the level design and ensure that it's a balanced match between the two teams."
Not just another modern shooter
World War II as a setting has seen its popularity decline since the 2000s, when Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor stormed the box office and Medal of Honor and Call of Duty were WWII FPS bestsellers. Now CoD has moved to other periods, and Medal of Honor is a distant memory to most.
For Shaw, the scale of the conflict means the period still has a lot to give. 20 years into the franchise, Sniper Elite has barely scratched the surface: They’ve been to Italy, France and Northern Africa, with Germany and Russia featured in the earlier games. The locations, scenarios, and weapons and technology at various fronts mean Sniper Elite can find fresh material for a very long time to come.
The setting’s appeal lies in how war was a more human affair in this period, before remote drone strikes and reliable satellite feed imagery were organized in remote military command centers. “It was the last war where things were a little bit more grounded and personal, the last time you had a single soldier behind enemy lines, causing havoc and causing sabotage,” says Shaw. “The fans really enjoy that. It's not just another modern shooter. A lot of mechanics are more grounded, and I think they appreciate it's not a super fast run and gun.”
One of the greatest assets of the World War II setting is the Nazis, easily history’s favorite punching bag as Indiana Jones and his eager fists reminded audiences recently in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
“You can just do what you want to them. It’s guilt-free, isn't it?” says Shaw. However, the team has been careful to reflect the reality of a war where many enemy combatants didn’t want to be fighting either. Harry’s binoculars initially tag enemy locations and alert states, but prolonged scouting reveals more: their weapons, the items they hold, and their true selves in the form of biographies.
“Those bios really add another layer to the enemies,” says Shaw. “Giving the players that conscious choice, what they want to do with each enemy, also encourages more play styles and different playthroughs. You might read every bio and say, 'OK, I'm definitely killing these people because they're horrible.' But these guys, you might just knock out and leave them to live another day because they aren't super horrible. They don't want to be here, like most people probably didn't want to be there.”
With Harry Hawker on the case, they won’t be there much longer, whether that’s because they’re retreating after another devastating subterfuge operation, or because they're just another victim of a skull-cracking Berthier shot.
Sniper Elite: Resistance releases on the Epic Games Store on January 30.