Cliff Bleszinski & Adrian Chmielarz Interview - Bulletstorm Feature

Created by Painkiller developer People Can Fly in conjunction with Epic Games, Bulletstorm is in many ways an attempt to rewrite the fusty FPS formula that currently constrains the modern shooter. Featuring comic ultraviolence, over-the-top Sci-fi weapons, and a colourful array of adolescent invective, Bulletstorm sets itself in dramatic contrast to the somewhat po-faced competition.

Epic is of course most famous for its Microsoft-exclusive Gears of War series, but its recent endorsement of Sony's NGP handheld, coupled with the imminent multi-platform release of Bulletstorm, seems to suggest that the developer is re-establishing its horizons. At a recent event in London, TVG spoke with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski and People Can Fly founder Adrian Chmielarz about the current state of the FPS genre, and the unique direction their new title is taking.

TVG: Let's just start by talking about what Epic's role was in the development of the game and how you guys got involved...

Cliff: I mean there's the Genesis story, of how Spider-Man got bitten, and then Bruce Banner and those f#%*ing gamma rays man... I mean the long story short, was that we were fans of Painkiller and the craziness of the DNA of PCF and what they brought to the table, and we'd had the success of Gears, and then Gears exceeded what we wanted to do and we just didn't have the bandwidth, and PCF was able to help out with that; and it turned out great - they did some great multiplayer maps and helped tweak the controls - I mean just shipping a PC game in this day and age is err.. a challenge in and of itself. And then, PCF was at a point where they were doing several prototypes for publishers, and publishers were like 'Do a vertical slice' - and that's always my joke, because if I hear somebody say the words 'vertical slice' one more time I'm gonna punch 'em in the nuts - that's the most overused phrase ever.

So they had a few demo's and we were like okay those are cool, but what do you guys really want to do? What makes the most sense? And they started just cycling and iterating, and we were able to kind of like, keep them over here away from the publishers saying, 'Well you should do a game with AK47s and monkeys because clearly the demographic says you want that,' and then we started to get some nuggets of awesome that were coming out of there... and um.. what we want to always ultimately kind of - I don't want to say - the lesson that we wound up learning from Gears was that proof of concepts and prototyping are an extremely useful process; so PCF would propose a weapon and we'd be like okay then, do a proof of concept, and what it would be is you know, five white boxes with all the different ways the weapon would work in there, and then we'd see that and we'd be like, 'Wow this is great, what about x, y, and z,' and we'd try these other things and then they'd be like, 'That's cool!' or, 'then we could do this' and then there's this great lobby back and forth, volleyball style right, where good stuff wound up just sticking and kind of accruing and ultimately out of it all, we wound up with these great body moves that were the first step of kick/leash/slide and then the unique weapons that I think are some of the most unique we've seen since Unreal Tournament and Painkiller, combined with a scoring system that then allows you to use that as a currency. Then that wound up kind of tying into this amazing skill-shot system that kind of evolved, because [turns to Adrian] you were saying that it wasn't even in the initial plan right? It just came out of iteration... and panning for gold, which is how I believe the industry finds it's best err... bits.

TVG: Do you feel that we're at a point now where we're getting a lot of same-y shooters coming out? Would you say that's fair to say?

Cliff: Well, we love military shooters right? I mean, I made a joke earlier, I don't know if you heard that, about you know... playing military shooters...

[Cliff joked earlier: "I hope Bulletstorm sells, or you're all going to be playing military shooters for the next 20 years"]

They're popular and they'll always be around the same way Madden and FIFA will always be around, because there's a predefined rule set of understanding war and watching BBC and CNN and all this stuff with everything going on in the world today. Um, that said, I want a gun that shoots a flare that can send somebody flying, and a flail gun that can wrap around right? And I think PCF's brought a lot of new stuff to the table.

Adrian: The problem is not that the military shooters exist - that's great, I love them, I play them - the problem is that there's nothing else. So if you go to the cinema right, it's Friday evening, you have a broad choice: this is a horror, this is a drama, this is your summer blockbuster kind of movie; but when you want to buy a shooter, whether it's actually science fiction or whether it's world war two or modern times, it's all military... at least the majority of it. So this is our proposal, to sort of broaden the choice.

TVG: So the game is in some way sort of a reaction against that, would you say?

Adrian: Yeah, in a way yes. But it wasn't like we really wanted to do a military shooter and thought 'Ahh let's not do this, let's do something else because other people are doing this'; if we really wanted to do a military shooter I think we would've found a spin on that. But, it's in our DNA to be over the top, to be crazy, to go on this roller-coaster journey, and choosing the theme of pulp sci-fi allows us to well, get a little crazier right, because we can get more creative with weapons. It's a sci-fi world so nobody knows what's going to happen in the 26th century, you know - flail guns will be very popular- still it needs to make sense in the context of the world, but we could go a little crazier so hence all the crazy stuff that happens during the campaign.

TVG: Yeah obviously we've seen quite a few of the weapons so far. Are there any that didn't make it into the game - any weapons in particular that stand out?

Adrian: Err, no. Because actually, creating weapons for Bulletstorm was a very, very, very challenging process, because our idea for it was that we don't want this typical progression, where you start with a knife, and then you get a pistol, and then you get a shotgun, and then machine gun.  In Bulletstorm every single weapon is not only equally useful - so the choice is up to your personal preference - but also needs to be multi-functional, meaning that even with the very first weapon in the game - the PMC - you can do so many things. You know, the guy's running, shoot him in the legs, he'll trip over, finish him with a head-shot... so designing a weapon that is cool to use, is different to something else that is already in the game, and is multi-functional - that's an incredibly challenging process. When you take a military shooter, you know, an average one, then you have a gun... the difference between guns is what? Reload speed, maybe the iron sights are slightly different...

Cliff: Maybe a little more kick...

Adrian: Maybe a little bit more recoil, yes. But when you challenge yourself to do all these different weapons and they really need to be different in functionality, and multi-functional, and useful, then it's a very hard process.

Cliff: Yeah I think we went deep on multi-faceted unique weapons rather than wide on rifles.

Adrian: Yeah.

TVG: So there's no competitive multiplayer is that right?

Adrian: Oh there's something that I'd like to call asynchronous multiplayer which is the Echoes mode; because as the demo has proven when we released that it really... you know, some people got really extremely competitive right. The guy that's number one - was number one - spent...

Cliff: What, he lost his place? What's the new score?

Adrian: Err.. 23,000.

Cliff: Oh s#*t [laughs].

Adrian: Oh yeah I'll tell you all about it in a second, but... he played the demo, which on average takes him three and a half minutes to go through this level... for 56 hours. So my favourite kind of Tweets actually - we talked about this internally a little - are yeah, there are a lot of Tweets like, 'Yes Bulletstorm - amazing game' and I'm happy of course, but the best ones for me are, 'Okay you know, it looks like shit but I'm gonna download it just in case,' and it's like, 'Okay I'm playing, I played it once, it actually was a little better but you know it's okay, nothing special, I'm gonna give it another go,' then it's like, 'Uh, I'm starting to get it' and then you know, two hours later to his friends 'IN YOUR FACE!!! I'm number one!' so these are the best Tweets.

Cliff: Yeah he's going to be knocking on your window.. 'Can I have some more, more... please?' That was my sushi point right? It's like the first time you have sushi you're like, 'Alright I guess I just ate a raw fish' and then a couple of months later you're like, 'Aaarghhh! Gotta have it.'