Interviews// Bulletstorm's Creative Director, Adrian Chmielarz

If we just moved it to a competitive experience and someone flame chained you and you had to struggle there for six seconds while everyone was ganging up on you it wouldn't be much fun at all. We would have to do a completely different game for the multi-player experience if this was competitive. We thought that didn't make sense for us, we worked hard on the single player experience and echo modes but we wanted to have a multi-player too.

If you have that competitive spirit you can still be the best in your team. You can still have a higher level and be better than other players but if you don't really care, you're not that good or don't want that 14-year-old head-shotting you from 50 meters away then you can still have fun with it.

SPOnG: What stopped you from having co-op in the single-player mode?

Adrian Chmielarz: Exactly that competitive soul, we actually tested our single player for co-op experience as it's out of the box, so to speak, with Unreal.

I mean with Gears it's a co-op experience, right? It turned out that people, because of the points you get for killing, everybody wanted to be the first on the battlefield, the first to execute the kill. We worked our asses off to have story and the scripted events and all these beautiful graphics and nobody cared because they were just rushing through the game. I want the first weapon! I hit him first!

We just realised that it just didn't make any sense but everybody was expecting co-op. I think thanks to games like Call of Duty where if you want your co-op experience then they have a special mode for you. They also worked hard on their single story experience to immerse you in that world and take that roller-coaster ride and with that they actually opened up the door for us in a way that it's not surprising that we don't have co-op in the single-player.

Of course we'd be stupid if we didn't have any kind of co-op. You can get away with this if your game is thirty hours long! Assassin's Creed up until now was only a single-player experience but it was a long game, so it you felt like you got value out of it.

We still want to offer you dozens and dozens of hours of game-play when you get Bulletstorm. Single-player campaign is pretty long, a lot longer than we thought, so if you want this experience then you should play single-player first and then two worlds are open to you. You can play on your own terms with Echo mode or with friends in Anarchy.

SPOnG: Obviously there are many comparisons between Bulletstorm and Gears of War with their themes of manly men doing outrageously manly things. How is blending the story between outrageously bad-ass moments with compelling storytelling?

Adrian Chmielarz: It was challenging from the gameplay point of view from the meaning that you start out already bad-ass. You are the guy who is a former leader of one of the best commando teams in the world and right now you are a disgraced space pirate. You already can literally kick ass.

So, how do you take it from there and how do you get the story going and matching the gameplay where you need to get better? Because you need to get better, you need to feel more powerful at the end of the game. This was actually a big challenge for us but that is where Rick Remender helped.

We thought we had a pretty decent story but it's not like programmers write dialogue, we have people for that, but then Remender came on board and said that it's all shit (laughs). He's a very open man and gave it to us straight and he basically turned it round, upside down and it was a risky move because we already had a significant portion of the game done but it was well worth it. It's a completely different game right now, way better.


SPOnG: What is going to make Bulletstorm bigger, better and more bad-ass than Gears 3?

Adrian Chmielarz: You really expect me to?

SPOnG: Of course I do!

Adrian Chmielarz: Actually I have no idea! Because I actually love Gears and I told Cliff [Bleszinski] that I didn't want to see anything. I don't want to see images or trailers so I know very little about Gears 3 apart from the fact that they are extremely happy with it.

I'll never forget two years ago when I was at Epic, we were discussing some Bulletstorm design stuff and Cliff said, “Do you have any emotional elements in your game? Like in Gears when we killed Dom's wife?” and I was like, “Dude! Why!? I had no idea”.

But you know being bad-ass is in our DNA at Epic Games. In my mind I'm not competing against Gears. I want Gears to be successful and a bad-ass game because I want to play this as a gamer.

We're competing against first person shooters out there that have become a little bit stale and I have proof of that from focus tests or when I see people playing at E3 or even here, which is people got so used to certain style of play: "I need to stay in the back, my enemies are usually 100meters away, just two pixels in my crosshair..."

That is all fine and I love all these games but there is nothing else out there that takes me out of my comfort zones that gives me something new and fresh. We are competing against that is defined as a first person shooter game. What it means to play a first person shooter game!

SPOnG: Thanks for your time!