Interviews// Bulletstorm's Creative Director, Adrian Chmielarz

You can never have enough bad-ass in your life, even if you find yourself walking away from huge explosions - preferably slowly, while taking off your Aviators – most days. This is why Epic Games was created to pump steroid filled extreme badassness into your life. To be fair, I was feeling pretty damn bad-ass whipping some meaty bloke into the air only to kick his face into a dinosaur mouth. I even got rewarded for my created efforts: Om nom nom - 100 points.

We've all been anxiously waiting to hear more on Epic's next evolution of bad-ass FPS goodness, Bulletstorm, and luckily I've got something that might tickle those taste buds: A nice juicy interview with the creative director, Adrian Chmielarz. He sat down with SPOnG to talk about Internet penis, being bad-ass and more importantly the various modes you'll find in Bulletstorm.


SPOnG: First off, tell us all about Anarchy Mode.

Adrian Chmielarz: Bulletstorm has single player, Echo mode and Anarchy mode. Anarchy mode is this co-op experience mode where you can... well co-operate with your friends (laughs). The inspiration for that actually was actually down to the writer for the game, Rick Remender. When I asked him ‘are you a gamer?' and he said, “Obviously yeah, I play a lot of games and it's often that twice per week me and a couple of Marvel guys just get together and play Horde or Nazi Zombies.”

So, I was like, “You're not competing online. You're playing together?”, and he said “I just want to have a couple of beers, have a laugh and have a good time rather than try to be the best.”

I thought that there was something important to note there. So, we decided to go for a co-operative kind of experience where you are actually rewarded for working together. The fun is not coming purely from the fact it's you and your friends but also thanks to all of the rewards we give you for playing co-operatively.

But at its core, Anarchy is basically this wave-based mode like Horde and Nazi Zombies. With that said, it's unique because of the skill-shot gameplay of the mode and we felt it was the right solution for us.

It's like when you take the first Gears of War: there was nothing really new from a multi-player standpoint. It was your team against theirs or last man standing but it felt fresh and new because of the cover mechanics. We thought let's not invent a weird mode on top of weird gameplay or new gameplay with skill-shots, let's give people something they know and understand but give them fresh gameplay mechanics. So yeah, that was how it was born.


SPOnG: And Echo mode?

Adrian Chmielarz: Well, we found that everyone got so immersed in single-player and that in the story players only scratched the surface in terms of skill-shots. So, we thought let's get the juiciest moments of the single player experience and strip them of all dialogue and cinematic and whatever. This is just pure combat and it's all about the size of your dick. Well.. urm...

SPOnG: It's fine. I have an internet penis!

Adrian Chmielarz: (laughs) Sure! Thing is, it's all about playing for points either against the world or your friends on your friends list.


SPOnG: How did using these skill-shots in multi-player come together?

Adrian Chmielarz: It's a couple of things. You have over 100 different skill-shots in single player campaign. One of the basic skill-shots was when you kick the guy first and once he's fallen into bullet time you then kill that guy with a machine gun.

Now, when you do that with your friend, meaning one of you kicks the guy and the other one finishes him, that is counted as a team skill-shot and you both get points for this action. We took the single player skill-shots and did team versions of them for Anarchy mode.

On top of that we have skill-shots unique to Anarchy mode. For example Deep Penetration is where you basically get two of you shoot and kill the guy at the same time. For doing so you get the ‘Deep Penetration' skill-shot awarded.

It was Double Penetration originally (laughs) but then we realised that it could be up to four people so we changed it to Deep Penetration. We also have unique skill-shots per map, for instance in one of the maps there is a giant head of a dinosaur. We added the “Om nom nom” skill-shot if you manage to actually kick a guy into the head of the dinosaur.

SPOnG: We're not going to be seeing any competitive multi-player at all then?

Adrian Chmielarz: Yeah, so one of the reasons I mentioned already was talking with Rick Remender but the other reason was, well for example, we have a skill-shot called Sadist.

So, to pull of Sadist you have to wrap the explosive flame chain around a guy which will make him immobilized for six seconds, right? Now you can do whatever you want with the guy, so you can explode the flame chain and the guy will die but if you actually switch to a different weapon and watch the guy struggle to get out and then headshot him, not only do you get a headshot skill-shot but also the sadist skill-shot.