Future perfect
and it yields those kinds of interesting ‘plays,’ hopefully it’ll wind up being watchable. But it comes down to making a great, airtight game, and once those variables, those verbs are in place and cool enough for the skilled players, that’s when people want to watch it because it becomes aspirational.”
That ‘dance’ is critical to what he wants to achieve in BlueStreak, and he says it’s something that’s lacking in most current FPSes. Bleszinski believes many modern multiplayer maps are “too porous,” and would rather BlueStreak adopt “a kind of medium-sized, arena-based shooter with the right balance of tight corners and open spaces.” Open spaces, he says, are “where that dance happens and they’re also risky spaces to be in.” But true to the design of games like Unreal Tournament, balancing the danger of open spaces by nestling map attractors such as valuable weapons or power-ups in them provides a risk/reward trade-off, Bleszinski says. BlueStreak’s sci-fi theme facilitates a fiction where floating power-ups aren’t as immersion-breaking, and it’s also a setting that supports the creative forms of movement Bleszinski is clearly excited about. That isn’t the case in most current FPSes, he says. “When you look at movement in the majority of your average military shooters... it’s a contemporary world—and I think even the people working on Advanced Warfare have realized how limiting that can be when you’re just a regular soldier without any sort of boosters or speed-ups, jetpacks, things like that. And so what you have is run, prone, dash, maybe a dive, and just a jump. And that’s fine for what that is, but there’s so much more that can be done in sci-fi in regards to giving the player whatever movement we think is cool—we can come up with a creative fiction to explain how it’s happening. I don’t want to spoil what I’m thinking of with this, but I think what I want to do on PC is get back to that sense of verticality that we weren’t afraid of with a lot of the older shooters. Because on consoles we’re always afraid of the twin sticks and looking up is too confusing if someone’s above you—all that kind of stuff that Halo rightfully taught us.”
Bleszinski isn’t entirely sour on contemporary shooters, of course. I ask him what he thought of Titanfall, another sci-fi FPS that was ambitious about player movement. “What I liked about Titanfall was the variety of gameplay that, just when shooting by itself started to get a bit old, your Titan would be ready and they knew how to switch it up a bit,” he says. “I think introducing a little minion gameplay, without turning full MOBA, was a good step.”
I’m surprised when Bleszinski gives a huge compliment to a franchise created by a company that he spent most of the ’90s competing with. “The new Wolfenstein was in my opinion... one of the best firstperson shooter campaigns since Half-Life 2. And I think I’m about halfway through right now. I’m stuck on this bridge section but I refuse to lower the difficulty because I hate having to do that in a game. When I
So much more can be done in sci-fi
saw that game at E3 a couple years ago and then PAX East, I was completely underwhelmed, I was writing it off. I didn’t want to be a dick and say something about it on social, but my expectations were really low—I thought it seemed kind of cheesy and just weird. And then when I got hands-on, it was extraordinarily well written, graphically gorgeous, and the maps were extremely well built. And the combat was just fantastic, it was a labor of love.”
Word of mod
Hard details on BlueStreak are scant at this stage—Bleszinski won’t reveal anything about factions, weapons, or modes, but it’s going to be fascinating to watch Boss Key compete with a franchise that Bleszinski had a hand in creating: Unreal Tournament. Epic’s rebooted, completely-free-not-free-to-play arena FPS has a bit of a head start on BlueStreak, and one of the exciting things about the new UT has been
Epic’s focus on involving modders in the project from the get-go. It’s unclear whether BlueStreak will be moddable for certain, but Bleszinski would like it to be. “What I love about the modding community is that they keep the developers honest,” he says. “You look at what happened with Watch Dogs, and the conspiracy theorists continuing to wonder why that stuff was cut out. A lot of the best games, a lot of the best talent comes out of the mod community because the mod community doesn’t have all of the bullshit red tape that keeps innovation back sometimes in this industry... There’s a new mod that came out for Portal 2 that’s just the paint gun, I love that kind of stuff. Will we embrace that? Hopefully. But again, let’s figure out the darn game first.”
Bleszinski’s openly enthusiastic about designing a game again. But after almost a decade of creating console games, what’s encouraging is how sincere he is about being on PC again. When I ask him what’s exciting to him about the platform right now, he says, “What’s not? If you want the highest-end experience, you go to a high-end PC. If you want to go where the majority of the Twitch streams and the YouTubers are, it’s mostly on PC. And not to flak the consoles, but for me, making a classic arena shooter that wants to have the maximum global reach possible and explore the free-to-play space, the PC absolutely makes the most sense.”
Bleszinski politely points to one of his other free-to-play FPS competitors, a game announced on the same day as his. “Randy [Pitchford], over at Gearbox, he’s doing that interesting looking pseudo-MOBA Battleborn, and I looked at the platforms planned and it’s PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and a lot of developers intelligently do that to mitigate risk. I get and respect that. But there’s a little bit lost when you’re not laser-focused on developing a project specifically for one platform initially, to maximize what that product is best at. And for PC, it’s that classic keyboard-andmouse aiming ability and the ability for players to maneuver in a nimble fashion on all axes.”