Bulletstorm. A Success?

Bulletstorm! If you've not heard of Bulletstorm, you deserve to be whacked upside the back of your head with a mallet. Bulletstorm was created and developed by those crazy folks over in Warsaw, Poland. An extremely colorful first-person shooter experience that changes the way you play the game, when it comes to FPS games. So, was the game a success or was it a flop? Looks like we'll be talking about this and in the end, you can form you're own opinions.

Bulletstorm is a collaboration between the just mentioned crazy folks from Poland People Can Fly studios and had a little bit of help from Epic Games Cliff Bleszinski and finally the game published by one of the biggest and one of the industries dominating developers and publishers Electronic Arts. (Now loved by the people who hate Activision, and no longer hated by the people when they once loved Activision) All three worked extremely hard and took a gamble on a new IP that had some loving every moment of it, but majority growing tired of it and pawning it off. The result were some pretty lousy sales. So, what went wrong? Or did nothing go wrong?

There are several things that happened. We'll go ahead and start with 'People Can Fly.' Now, we don't exactly know the mentality of People Can Fly. Likely they're extremely proud of their work. Really, you've got to give it to People Can Fly for their effort. They were going out on a limb and really taking a gamble with their style. It wasn't the typical FPS game were you'd run out into the middle of the field and gun down as many as you could and hope that you'd survive. You would take cover when you could and then you would try and kill with style. You could buy upgrades and it all worked out really well! It got great reviews from media sites. The problem with the game, is that it became the same old thing after a while and it really didn't have a story that kept you at the edge of your seat. It felt as though the story had been written by a fifteen year-old. While playing through the game, I actually had asked myself several time: "So, do people actually talk like this?" I found it interesting in the same thought, that People Can Fly found their own creative work so over the top, that they'd created an option enabling not only the gore to be turned off, but the language of the game as well. Some people are pretty tolerant, but there becomes a point when it gets really old. So, we've got to give it to People Can Fly for trying to do things differently. In today's industry, its a rare thing. Publishers want something that will make them money. You could say they're pretty afraid to go out on a limb because lets face it, todays games aren't cheap to develop. They're tens of millions of dollars. So companies like Activision are going to stick to Call of Duty, Capcom with Resident Evil, Square-Enix with Final Fantasy, etc.

Now, we'll go into Epic Games. For Epic Games, this was a great opportunity to license out their Unreal Engine 3 to a talented developer and even show that the Unreal Engine 3 can run rather well on the PlayStation 3 hardware, or in this instance, look a little better on Sony's hardware as Epic has predominately developed solely for the Xbox 360 using its strengths there after Unreal Tournament 3 was all said and done. So, I think that Epic's primary reason for taking a big hand in Bulletstorm. It was a game that could be developed using Unreal Technology from another developer. It was also a game that could be developed for the PlayStation 3 with an Epic Games seal on it to release on the PlayStation 3 to quite the Sony fanboy's about Epic's position and relationship with Microsoft at the current moment. It also had another purpose. Not longer ago, President of Epic Games had stated:

"Do we wish we could take all those Killzone and Resistance fans on PS3, and get them to say 'Gears is awesome'? Yeah, sure I'd love to ship the Gears trilogy on PlayStation," - President Mike Capps

Design Director of Gears of War and Epics own Cliffy B. had also stated:

 “The real reason Bulletstorm was built was because Gears [of War] wasn't ready for this spring and      we needed a product to screw with Killzone.”

Cliff Bleszinski had claimed himself the 'Creative Uncle' of Bulletstorm working with People Can Fly with the Unreal Engine. Whether the version of the Unreal Engine 3 People Can Fly used for Bulletstorm is what we can expect to see from Gears of War remains to be seen, or whether its version 2 we just don't know. Its clear however, that Epic Games wants to stake their claim on the PlayStation 3 hardware without having to use Gears of War and maintain their relationship with Microsoft and the benefits offered from them and focus all their resources on Gears of War for the Xbox 360. Bulletstorm was the best way.

When you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about the PlayStation 3, Sony's hardware or anything Sony related, other than the Blu-ray player or the NGP so far, he usually tends to speak of it as though its a chore. For example in an interview with Eurogamer, he was asked about the PlayStation Move. He mentioned, "I don't want another piece of plastic on my coffee table." When asked about Kinect, he perked up as he usually does with Microsoft and his evangelizing of Microsoft's hardware altogether. It was Nintendo's glasses free is great, "I hate wearing Sony's glasses for 3D.' This seems to be something that supports that. That Cliff Bleszinski was interested in disruption of Killzones sales and that's what had happened. EA and Epic Games had gone out of their way to release a game alongside an already established franchise and Bulletstorm's sales are hurting. Because of Killzone 3 alone? Certainly not. It was the thought of disruption that having released the game later could have helped the new IP but wasn't enough. Marvel vs Capcom 3 was slated for release that day as well. It was too much of a good thing going. We'll come back to Epic in  moment.

Electronic Arts may have had some say as far as were the game was going or its likely People Can Fly had a good opinion concerning the PlayStation 3 hardware that they'd agreed to go multi-platform and release the game on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Cliff Bleszinski did state however that the developers would be using the strengths of the PlayStation 3 and that PS3 fans had nothing to worry about as PS3 gamers were concerned they would be getting the short end of the stick again on a multi-platform game. The end result:

Electronic Arts hadn't had much to say about the game rather seemed to leave the game to the Creative Uncle to talk about. perhaps Electronic Arts could have done more.

To finish off, we'll go right back to Epic Games. People Can Fly were clearly the developers of the game but Epic Games were busy with their hands full with Gears of War 3 and working to give gamers a better multi-player experience. So much so that Gears of War 3 was delayed to polish the multi-player experience and work on their 'server farm' to help give the game some balance through dedicated servers taking away home ice advantage (for lack of better term. Apologies) However, seeing as how the Epic had their name in the game and the game was using their engine, it was a perfect chance to evangelize their own work and stick a Gears of War 3 code in the box to get in on the multi-player beta. It was a big opportunity to get some cheap advertising in on that project from Xbox 360 gamers and its going to work. In several reviews I had read, one editor had stated that Bulletstorm was purchased and work the money to buy, but that gamers shouldn't throw away the disc because it was the only way to access the Gears of War 3 multi-player beta insinuating that $60 was worth it for the Beta and when gamers would want to trash the game, they wouldn't want to if they wanted to actually play the beta. At the end of the day, Bulletstorm saw some disappointing sales. The story of the game was weak though the direction they wanted to take the FPS genre was great. Epic Games were far too busy focusing on their own work and Electronic Arts was there to make a sale. Killzone 3 and Marvel vs Capcom 3 was heading out the door and Gears of War 3 got to capitalize on the game. Many played the game, it was to repetitive and was instantly traded off. Though it had Co-op multi-player, there was not competitive or lasting appeal which is all too bad. In the end, we do get to jump in on the multi-player beta and hack and slash some Locust horde with extreme prejudice to gear up (no pun intended) for Gears launch this September.

Do you think things could have been done differently, was the operation executed perfectly? What do you think?