REVISITING THE COLD WAR FROM A POLISH PERSPECTIVE, PHANTOM DOCTRINE UNITES THE WORLD AGAINST A HIGHER POWER
A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE IS OFTEN HEALTHY. WE LOOK ON OTHERS THROUGH OUR OWN EYES, NOT TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THEIR EXPERIENCE. We judge those we aren’t fans of by the standards of those we are. We look at history through a predefined lens – one which doesn’t take into account the experiences that millions of others have had in other parts of the world. Phantom Doctrine isn’t a game aiming to change the very notion of how the West sees the Cold War, but coming from a Polish developer, it’s always going to have an underlying difference to the end product.
Paweł Kroenke, narrative designer on Phantom Doctrine, makes it clear the turn-based strategy title’s USP isn’t just ‘made from a different perspective’. “We didn’t aim for, ‘Okay, let’s make the Cold War, Eastern-style’,” he says, “This is a game about operating independently, as the player, so your organisation is not tied to any political identity – or to any ideology, in fact. You’re fighting a global conspiracy, one so big it transcends national borders.” Phantom Doctrine doesn’t throw the player into a fight between East and West like might be expected. “It’s a fight about spies, who are not nice guys, against a global conspiracy, backed by even less nice guys. it’s really vague, and post-modern maybe.”
At the same time, the simple fact is Phantom Doctrine comes from a Polish studio, from a team made up of mostly Polish nationals, and it wasn’t too long ago that Poland was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Kroenke admits this unique perspective is sure to have had some impact on the game: “Because most of the guys on the team are Polish, and most of the guys lived in the Communist era, they all have old history and stories in the family – and those stories are about what people didn’t like,” he explains, “But it still has a tint of this Eastern perspective on the whole thing. It’s maybe not the main focus, but I still think you will see something that we just wouldn’t think about because we haven’t lived in the West. At the same time, I think it will be viewed by the Western player, because it will be ‘weird’, as ‘this is unusual, this is not how things work here’.”
That change in perspective is sure to get more eyes on Phantom Doctrine than it might otherwise have achieved. While CreativeForge Games did achieve modest success with its previous turn-based strategy game, Hard West, that certainly wasn’t enough to whip players into a frenzy about what was coming next from the studio. Fortunately, Phantom Doctrine is positioning itself as something just different enough to catch players’ attention, while at the same time mixing in a bunch of familiar aspects – familiar to those who played Hard West, and certainly familiar to fans of the XC
