Thank you very much for coming over and giving us the opportunity to try out the game. I played the demo to death and was using the speed runs for inspiration.
I really like how you take feedback on board, and I read that was how Echoes came about. Are there plans to implement a more traditional multiplayer mode?
Adrian Chmielarz (AC): The thing is that, right now when it comes to choice, you have a lot of deathmatch type games. You have 1000s of games and a lot of shooters obviously have Player vs Player. My feeling is they start to basically chase their own tail. You have to invest weeks, if not months to stand up to these guys that you are fighting against.
We thought, “What’s bothering us as adults with multiplayer gaming?” a) It’s very hard to set up a match for example. In Echoes mode, you play against your friend, but on your own terms. You know, whatever you want for as long as you want. It all comes down to the fact that, even though I appreciate that people are used to the fact that actually, t=hey pay for one game but expect three games: single player, multi player, co-op. That’s cool, that’s how it is.
But we would have to make one more game if we wanted to make Player vs Player. [Using the flail gun as an example from SP] You wrap that chain around a guy and you have six seconds to do whatever you want to do. Now, 6 seconds in multiplayer, if you are the guy with the chain wrapped around you, that’s an eternity basically. So we would have to redesign the weapon, make it completely different. And the same goes for all the thumping, setting on fire, kicking in slow motion, and we thought to ourselves, “wait a minute; we have really fun combat game that really works very well. Let’s try to build our multiplayer experience around this rather than look at the checkbox – is there Player vs Player and has the idea for Echoes and this kind of Anarchy mode.
You come from the background of Painkiller – multiplayer wise that didn’t take off massively. A lot of people thought it was too fast or too complex. How have you mixed a game like Bulletstorm that is fast but acceptable?
AC: With Painkiller we have proven that if we wanted to go for the pro kind of Player vs Player, we can do it. I mean Painkiller multiplayer was chosen for CPL. Only the best players in the world played Painkiller, so we know how to do it. For us it was a question of choice. We thought to ourselves, the skillshot system is good – the guy who, is no longer #1, but he was for a long time, spent 56 hours – one play through is 3.5 minutes. He spent 56 hours still discovering and mastering the play through and he’s not done by a long while.
We thought, this is pretty deep but at the same time sort of easy to discover - you can discover things yourself – this is not complicated but deep, then maybe our key mode should be about having fun – just a couple of friends crack open a beer, maybe once a week whenever you have the time – call your friends and just have a blast. But of course, I assume there will be a bunch of professionals that will go for the high score. We do have leaderboards for Anarchy so some people will play as a relaxing experience and some people will go pro.
Cliff Bleszinski (CB): Kicking around a soccer ball vs going pro right?
EPIC have been pretty good for tracking statistics in the likes of Gears of War 1 & 2 – has the same system been implemented for Bulletstorm and has there been many surprises from, we’ll say the demo, besides the guy playing for 56 hours?
CB: I can’t really speak on the stats yet as far as what’s hooked in, I’ll let Adrian talk about that in a second but I can tell you that we’ve become increasingly surgical about that sort of thing in regards to our products. And in looking at Infinity Blade and the number of hours played on Apple devices, the amount of hooks that are going in for Gears of War 3. We know what you shoot, what gun, where you shooting it and what you do with it, which is actually, when Gears of War 3 comes out is going to be very crucial data for placing weapons around the place after the game ships to make sure we optimise the players experience.
AC: So on one hand, we do track a lot of data – a lot of things. We know how many kills you executed with this particular weapon, you know, what’s happening there. But, on the other hand, on purpose absolutely 100% consciously, we have decided not to publish that data and just focus on a couple of truly meaningful things – what was your score, what was your time, what was your best one hit combo. So, you know, we could have made ten pages of that in the game, but we sorta decided to go Apple way. Remember when iPhone first came out, people were like, “this is missing, this is missing, and this is missing”. 99% of people did not care about this.
CB: And then Apple delivers the features later, and everyone’s like, “thank you so much”
AC: “copy & paste, copy & paste”. No, we don’t want to do that. But what we wanted to do, because we feel this is a pretty fresh thing that we are offering here – this is the skillshot system, and everything is pretty new. We wanted to start with something simple – these are your points, this is how you’re scoring, let’s focus on that first. Inspiration for the points on the E3 play through, it was really fun.
We had the demo ready for E3 – actually, we haven’t told anyone about this so here’s your exclusive…So we had the E3 demo ready, and it was part of the SP campaign, you know – the park – and we were really happy with it. And somebody said, “You know, let’s show the score at the end”. “But it’s the SP campaign” – “never mind, just for the fun of it, let’s just show the score, number of kills and number of skillshots – three numbers, nothing else”. OK, fine. And we did that – and two things happened – first, our guys who were running the booth – actually started to delay everybody coming in groups because in between groups they were actually competing for that score. And the second thing that happened was people were playing and they actually, once they were done, they didn’t leave. It’s done, the run is over but they were standing there, looking at their monitor, waiting to see what would happen – what’s going to be the score.
CB: Just like the old arcades right? Let’s see you beat my score.
AC: In the end, that number is the only thing that really matters, the points that they have. That’s why we focus, even though we track that much data, we only show those things.
When it comes to the idea of skillshots, in what order was it designed? Did you come up with the idea of we want to set people on fire, and this is the weapon to do it, or was it a case of, we want this weapon in the game and this is the skillshot?
CB: Is it a top down order or bottom up….From what I could ascertain from working with you guys, it was a situation of making stuff that was really cool. We talked about the skillshot system, that wasn’t ever the original plan for the game. It was a situation where PCF had come up with these great verbs – these actions of kick, leash, and slide – they started coming up with these unique and cool weapons and that was cool. And then, Adrian…
AC: Started adding objects to the environment
BC: Yeah, adding objects to the environment – people were playing with their enemies instead of just killing them. And Adrian realised like hey – why don’t we reward people for this, why don’t we give them points for this, and then continue that machine and that loop of the game and allow it to be a currency. Once all those bits got hooked in and then the machine started going chugga-chugga-chugga, and then they could design to it and started coming with all these custom kills and coming with all these unique ways – how many skillshots?
AC: 135…but I don’t know the real number because learning skillshots is easy but linking them – getting 4 or 5 skillshots on one guy, that’s where the secret is. The beauty of the system is that our idea of sorta lose control over this. We just give you the tools, and what you do with them we don’t know. And it’s happening…It really made me happy that the top players released their videos on YouTube showing them scoring 20,000 points. And they were doing stuff, I never thought about. And I was like, “ooh yeah, that’s a great idea”.
The first tweet I got from one of these good players was one of the best posts I ever got. One guy got 16k, and the other guy got 16k and posted a video. The first guy tweeted me back saying, “we got the same score, but he’s playing completely differently, and now I’ve learned a few tricks to up my game”. That was the idea – it’s very scary to lose control over the game because of the amount of combinations and permutations but it allows you to have your own moments in the SP campaign, something that will happen only for you. And the ability to own that, and think of ways to get new points, makes it a puzzle shooter – new genre.
CB: It’s a beautiful moment when a developer has everything released into the wild and has a, “I didn’t even think of that” moment. That’s the grail of what everyone goes for with emergent gameplay.
Have ye any personal favourite skillshots, either in SP or MP?
AC: The one I love is “Burn”. It may not have the funniest name – it is a charge shot from shotgun, but it is very expensive – I think the most expensive ammo in the game. It’s this heat wave that annihilates everything in its way – cover or no cover. I love the way that you pay for it but if you’re clever enough, you can get a return. The thing that I like about it is that you enter this combat zone – there are four guys, one with a sword, others with guns and you just *pow*, one button – skeletons. So this is like an Indiana Jones moment where the guy has a sword and he just shot him. So this is the feeling I get when I do the Burn skillshot.
CB: I like thumping people and then using the flare gun charge shot. *whistles* *pow* - sometimes they’ll just go off in another direction and other times…what will happen when I’m playing Anarchy mode is that someone will thump and I’ll get one of the guys as others are trying to trap shoot them and then they’ll go flying off. It’s a great cooperative, yet competitive at the same time – just fireworks man, I love it.
Are there plans for DLC at the moment?
CB: It’s one of those things that would absolutely make sense. We’re in a digital world where you need to continue to support your product and remind people that it exists through DLC, but we’re not ready to announce any plans right now.
Last question, is unrelated to Bulletstorm, but is there a chance of Jazz Jackrabbit making a return?
CB: It’s one of those things; the little bunny is near and dear to my heart. I like to joke that we’ll do it in our spare time, of which we have none, because we’re busy with Gears and working with partners in other projects. We did have a little demonstration for the Unreal engine being available on iOS – the old top down, mini gore version – that’s the game we kinda looked at with Jazz shooting at turtles and stuff like that.
And when I tweeted that, “there was something Jazzy coming out”, and it turned out it was that, the fan base was enraged that there wasn’t a proper Jazz remake. I would love to do it at some point if we could find an appropriate partner and the bandwidth to do it. But you never know. You’d have to almost reinvent the character action platform game in a certain way for this post-modern era that we have now. I’m not quite sure how to do that yet.
Thanks very much for your time. Was a pleasure to meet ye
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