A dozen years later, Bulletstorm, one way or the other, endures.
You wouldn’t count on it for a sport that, in hindsight, scans extra as a Duke Nukem-esque responsible pleasure that got here nowhere near its gross sales expectations. Gratuitously violent and absurdly foul-mouthed (does anybody else bear in mind “Hey, dick tits!”?), even when Bulletstorm drew laudatory critiques for its gameplay, significantly its ammunition economic system, it hardly looks like a sport that may very well be known as “ahead of its time.”
But it’s, insists Radomir Kucharski of Incuvo, the Polish digital actuality port store that Bulletstorm maker People Can Fly acquired on the finish of 2021.
“When we were searching for a next project, we looked at Bulletstorm and thought this game, with its mechanics, was actually, like, designed for VR,” Kucharski stated. “Bulletstorm is so action-packed, so close to the action, and with such physical interaction, it just looked like it was designed for VR.”
At the time, Incuvo was impartial and contemporary from its VR adaptation of two of Bloober Team’s horror titles — Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, each for Oculus Quest and PlayStation VR. Incuvo had discovered success adapting established video games on a work-for-hire foundation, and Kucharski was searching for one other hit to maintain the studio’s momentum going. It additionally helped that People Can Fly, like Bloober Team, is a Poland-based developer.
More essential, Kucharski stated, was the cult-hit standing Bulletstorm continues to get pleasure from. Electronic Arts and Epic Games virtually deserted the property after it fell far quick of revenue and gross sales expectations. People Can Fly, which Epic acquired in 2013 after which spun off in 2015, retained possession of the franchise, and nonetheless had sufficient of an viewers to warrant remastered releases for consoles in 2017 and 2019.
“I was big-time into first-person shooters,” stated Kucharski, a developer who had labored on Medal of Honor and different navy shooters within the decade previous Bulletstorm’s launch. “I found Bulletstorm very unique; I thought the gameplay was very fresh, something that was groundbreaking at that point.”
The groundbreaking parts, which appeared to take a again seat to all of the cussing and the violence within the authentic advertising and marketing, have been Bulletstorm’s “skillshot” gameplay loop; the use of the surroundings to creatively eradicate enemies; and the “energy leash” that hero Grayson Hunt makes use of to lasso foes, stun them, or fling them to their doom.
The leash, Kucharski stated, is probably the most VR-ready characteristic of Bulletstorm’s authentic gameplay. Reloading a weapon, for instance, is a extra significant expertise. The dual-wield nature, of a gun in a single hand and the leash in one other, is extra simply expressed by a devoted controller in every hand of the participant, Kucharski reasoned. “This is something that was simply not possible using standard controllers, or a keyboard and mouse.”
Bulletstorm VR is unquestionably not a rail-shooter adaptation of the franchise, Kucharski emphasised. Players might freely roam the degrees as they did within the authentic. The adaptation can also be devoted to the unique story, although Kucharski stated the sport isn’t a “one-to-one copy. I want to say it’s a new game, but it is the same original story.” Half of the degrees are precisely the identical as the unique Bulletstorm, he stated, “but there is new content,” even when that doesn’t imply narrative modifications.
“We used a lot of assets from the original game,” Kucharski stated. “We had to redo some of the stuff, obviously, we had to change the engine from the old Unreal 3 to, I believe, 4.27 is what we’re using right now. We had to recreate a lot of stuff, but the assets are based on the originals.”
Bulletstorm VR, introduced in the beginning of June, will launch later in 2023 for Meta Quest and PlayStation VR 2. For all of his discuss Bulletstorm’s superior gameplay, Kucharski stated this one will nonetheless carry the identical smirky tone of its forebear.
“Yeah, the game is still pretty violent,” he chortled. “It’s very over-the-top with the violence. It’s not serious; it’s fun.”
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