Interviews// Bodycount

Codemasters' Bodycount is getting a lot of people talking, and for good reason - it hopes to flip the First Person Shooter genre on its head with large campaign maps, utterly destructible scenery and a futuristic universe that aims to get sci-fi fans salivating at the storyline.

I had a few matches in the game’s co-op mode - which you can read here - and then spoke to art director Max Cant, who amongst other things can’t wait to get started on a sequel. Read on to find out exactly why...


SPOnG: One of the big unique features of Bodycount for me is the cover system, but it takes some getting used to. Do you think players will take to it well?

Max Cant: I think it’ll be fine. I mean it’s pretty intuitive once you’ve done it for 20 minutes or so. I don’t think people will have any trouble getting to grips with it. You can choose whether to strafe by holding down the aim trigger down halfway, and that’s kind of down to everyone’s personal preference. I tend not to strafe a lot myself - I always like to run towards cover, pull the trigger all the way down and then lean out to the side.

It becomes second nature pretty fast. One of the things that we found is that once you’ve played it and got used to it, and then you go back to play something that doesn’t have it, it feels really clunky because you can’t lean, peek or spy on anybody. You feel a bit short-changed. I just hate sticky cover anyway (laughs).


SPOnG: Is the cover feature something you’d like to see implemented in a lot of FPS games in the future?

Max Cant: I think it should be. I don’t mind if everyone put it in their game because I just think it makes for a more realistic, believable thing. I mean, if I run up to that screen over there, I’m not going to become adhesively stuck to it. I’m going to naturally try and peek around the corner and hope there isn’t someone there that’ll blow my ear off. So yeah, I think anything in a First Person Shooter that matches something that I would do in real life, that doesn’t break the illusion for me, is a good thing.


SPOnG: You’ve mentioned that Bodycount belongs to the ‘Kill with Skill’ style of games that Bulletstorm has been known for re-introducing this year. Do you think this is the way forward for First Person Shooters? Have things become too serious in the genre?

Max Cant: Yeah, I think there’s a danger that a lot of things have become too serious, for sure. A lot of stuff tries to give the illusion that it’s giving you this ‘more realistic’ experience where it isn’t at all, really. I mean, a real soldier doesn’t go down the street, pick up enemy ammunition clips and use them. That doesn’t happen.

I think at the end of the day it’s been really liberating to just say that we’re not making something real at all. It’s let us go off and try to find new, more satisfying ways of putting gameplay in there. It’s also freed me up on the art direction side of things, to do something that isn’t just based on a photo or photographic textures.

But I wouldn’t specifically pick one or two elements and say that’s the thing to do. I’ve worked on stuff in the past where you do a game that’s different from everything that’s out there, and then slowly the industry turns a trend to follow something like that.

So I think there is a lot of opportunity for people to put the fun back into First Person Shooter games. You mentioned Bulletstorm, Brink and those kinds of games - where people are starting to get a similar idea. It just doesn’t have to be a gritty man with or without a beard, standing in Afghanistan or not-Afghanistan, in a grey world, knee-deep in rubble, killing a man who did something bad, so we’re told (laughs). It can be about other stuff.


SPOnG: With the destructible environments, does that make it more or less challenging when it comes to designing the game?

Max Cant: I don’t think it makes it more challenging. In a way, it becomes more intuitive with what you’re doing. When you start making a game that’s quite open-world - or at least more free-roaming than the average First Person Shooter - you allow for the fact that the player is going to go in all sorts of different directions.

You’re going to be going round a lot of corners of buildings as a result, so there are a lot of emergent rules that you begin to work out. If I’m in a game where I have a lean mechanic, I don’t want to walk to the edge of wall and see nothing to hide behind. So a lot of that walls have 45-degree propping that encourages the player to go past the edge of the wall, to crouch down and edge their way around. But then that gets more complicated as you have to include such things for every kind of environment.

Once you have a general footprint of where you want the buildings and structures and flow of things to be, it’s not hard to give people an interesting traversal experience.


SPOnG: Bodycount’s been called the spiritual successor to Black, and Stuart Black has had a lot of involvement with both titles. He’s since moved on to City Interactive - is he still involved in the project in any way to see it through?

Max Cant: I don’t know what he’s up to at City Interactive - I know that he’s working on an alternate World War II game... As for Bodycount, no. That was a clean departure.