Digital Anvil was known as a developer of space combat games, and with "Brute Force" they set out to try something new, specifically a ground-based game. They also wanted to attempt a team-oriented game that would put the player in control of a squad of characters set amid numerous environments. The game was conceived from these few core ideas. Development should also be looked at in the context of a first-party Xbox game following the enormous success of "Halo". For one the game was meant to attract gamers who were fans of "Halo", but also sufficiently different enough. Secondly the developers wanted the game to be a showcase of what the Xbox hardware was graphically capable of. However the team did admit that they had no idea what the system was capable of when they first started developing for it.