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February 22, 2006 | 10:30 PM PST
by: Sascha Lichtenstein
AMN Speaks with the Shadowy Figures Behind BLACK
Criterion, the development team behind the now-revered Burnout franchise and the upcoming FPS simply titled Black, have heard the comparisons between their high-speed creation and the recently released Full Auto and are unimpressed. Not unimpressed with the game mind you – they've been too busy pouring their blood, sweat and tears into a bullet-ridden labor of love over the last years to play the new-fangled Xbox 360 and the recently released next-generation combat racer, and thus had no comment on the game's quality. No, the talented folks at Criterion simply stand by the belief that Black fits the 'Burnout with Guns' description better than any weapons-based racer ever could. Filled with the same energy and developed with the same back-to-basics mindset as their destructive racing franchise, Criterion contends that the heart and soul of Burnout has transcended genre barriers, and gamers will immediately recognize the streamlined, aggressive feel that has become their trademark.
“We wanted to put the shooting back into first-person shooters,” Jeremy Chubbs, the producer of Black, enthusiastically proclaimed during our conversation with lead designer Craig Sullivan and himself. While the initial reaction to that statement is likely to be confusion seeing as almost every FPS released in the last few years has featured enemies to kill, guns to shoot, and yes, buttons to shoot those guns with, the sentiment made sense once he explained his way through the hyperbole. It seems many of the people that played early builds of Black over the course of its development showcased what the two described as 'timid' play-styles, even in the most adrenaline-pumping shoot-outs. “[Games these days] are training players to fear pulling the trigger,” Chubbs explains, citing Halo and Half-Life as just two of many well-executed games that reinforce the notion of 'picking your spots, and saving your shots' and emphasizing the journey over the bullets spent along the way. While the two certainly had no problem with that style of FPS, its a gameplay type that has grown repetitive as a result both of popularity, and of publishers trying to beat a proven formula to death. The goal for Black was simple – distill the genre down to the visceral foundations that made it so enthralling to begin with.
The fact that Criterion has never made a first-person shooter before certainly doesn't seem as though it was much of a psychological hurdle. Quite the opposite in fact, Jeremy and Craig reason that a fresh take from those outside the FPS bubble may be exactly what is needed to kick-start the stale genre, “we figure, never having made [a first-person shooter] before either makes us the absolute best choice or the absolute worst choice for the job.” Perhaps it was this outsider status that allowed them to rethink the priorities of a first-person shooter and put replication the feeling of firing a machine gun at the top of the to-do list. After getting the chance to fire actual machine guns, the talent at Criterion agreed that no game had really managed to capture the feeling inherent to the experience. In order to change that, they contracted the people whom they felt had done a better job of getting the thrill of firing a weapon across – namely, lighting and special effects specialists from Hollywood. Whereas games such as Rainbow Six have followed the specs of real-life weaponry to the letter, the disconnect between holding a gun and controlling one on screen means that the presentation has to make up for the lack of a true tactile experience. Specialists in Hollywood have spent years and millions of dollars trying to find the best way to get around this disconnect, and most have found that exaggeration is the best policy – make the guns so crazy loud, so insanely powerful looking, and so wonderfully visceral that the mind fills in the sensation that actually holding the gun would provide.
The Hollywood talent also provided valuable advice regarding the staging of elaborate and exciting shoot-outs, advice which was taken into account when the decision was made to make the levels in the game more restrictive and linear than some of the larger open areas seen in games such as the Halo franchise, or FarCry.”It would have been easier to get away with bigger, open levels because they require less detail, but they didn't provide well for the kind of gameplay we wanted,” Sullivan explained, citing movies like The Matrix to support the idea that most thrilling fire fights generally take place in enclosed environments with destruction occurring on all sides. “We needed to know roughly where the player would be in order to make the fire-fights as effective and exciting as possible,” Sullivan continued, stating that combat in large open areas generally deteriorated to sniping at enemies 10 to 20 meters away, which just isn't as much fun as fast-paced close-quarters shootouts. Of course, the AI also plays a huge role in the level exhilaration provided by virtual gunfight, and Criterion has coded advanced scripts to ensure that players see a large variety of intelligent enemy behaviors, including group dynamics such as flanking maneuvers, and use of cover – even in the midst of environments being torn apart and rearranged by explosions and gun-fire. That said, intensity is the name of the game, and we were assured that while positioning and a tactical mindset would certainly be assets, there would be relatively few situations that couldn't be survived by a skilled gamer with quick reflexes and an even quicker trigger finger.
Speaking of intensity, none has been spared. Whereas there was some concern (enough that Jeremy noted that they were asked similar questions in almost every interview) that the typically mainstream-friendly EA would try and force a teen rating on the game, Craig and Jeremy both had nothing but positive things to say about the world's biggest third party game developer. “Nothing has been edited or left out of the final product due to pressure from EA. We wanted to make a gritty shooter in a contemporary context, and we put everything we wanted into it, including profanity, characters that smoke, destruction, and [bloody] violence.”That said, the enthusiastic developers wanted to make it clear that nothing was put into the game simply to be shocking or because the could; everything that appears in the final product is there because the talent at Criterion felt the game was better for its inclusion.” That includes everything from the atmosphere to the gameplay – right down to a particularly delicious weapon feature that Jeremy was particularly determined to see from the onset of the project. All of the grenades in the game, whether hand-tossed or fired from a weapon, are capable of being detonated in the air with a well-aimed bullet (or stream of bullets). Players that get particularly skilled at intercepting grenades will find it quite useful to toss a grenade and explode it in mid-air, rather than letting it bounce around giving enemies a chance to seek cover. We can't wait to try it.
Black will hit stores February 28th. Check back to Xbox Advanced for the official word on whether or not Black lives up to the hype as Burnout with guns.
Criterion, the development team behind the now-revered Burnout franchise and the upcoming FPS simply titled Black, have heard the comparisons between their high-speed creation and the recently released Full Auto and are unimpressed. Not unimpressed with the game mind you – they've been too busy pouring their blood, sweat and tears into a bullet-ridden labor of love over the last years to play the new-fangled Xbox 360 and the recently released next-generation combat racer, and thus had no comment on the game's quality. No, the talented folks at Criterion simply stand by the belief that Black fits the 'Burnout with Guns' description better than any weapons-based racer ever could. Filled with the same energy and developed with the same back-to-basics mindset as their destructive racing franchise, Criterion contends that the heart and soul of Burnout has transcended genre barriers, and gamers will immediately recognize the streamlined, aggressive feel that has become their trademark.
“We wanted to put the shooting back into first-person shooters,” Jeremy Chubbs, the producer of Black, enthusiastically proclaimed during our conversation with lead designer Craig Sullivan and himself. While the initial reaction to that statement is likely to be confusion seeing as almost every FPS released in the last few years has featured enemies to kill, guns to shoot, and yes, buttons to shoot those guns with, the sentiment made sense once he explained his way through the hyperbole. It seems many of the people that played early builds of Black over the course of its development showcased what the two described as 'timid' play-styles, even in the most adrenaline-pumping shoot-outs. “[Games these days] are training players to fear pulling the trigger,” Chubbs explains, citing Halo and Half-Life as just two of many well-executed games that reinforce the notion of 'picking your spots, and saving your shots' and emphasizing the journey over the bullets spent along the way. While the two certainly had no problem with that style of FPS, its a gameplay type that has grown repetitive as a result both of popularity, and of publishers trying to beat a proven formula to death. The goal for Black was simple – distill the genre down to the visceral foundations that made it so enthralling to begin with.
The fact that Criterion has never made a first-person shooter before certainly doesn't seem as though it was much of a psychological hurdle. Quite the opposite in fact, Jeremy and Craig reason that a fresh take from those outside the FPS bubble may be exactly what is needed to kick-start the stale genre, “we figure, never having made [a first-person shooter] before either makes us the absolute best choice or the absolute worst choice for the job.” Perhaps it was this outsider status that allowed them to rethink the priorities of a first-person shooter and put replication the feeling of firing a machine gun at the top of the to-do list. After getting the chance to fire actual machine guns, the talent at Criterion agreed that no game had really managed to capture the feeling inherent to the experience. In order to change that, they contracted the people whom they felt had done a better job of getting the thrill of firing a weapon across – namely, lighting and special effects specialists from Hollywood. Whereas games such as Rainbow Six have followed the specs of real-life weaponry to the letter, the disconnect between holding a gun and controlling one on screen means that the presentation has to make up for the lack of a true tactile experience. Specialists in Hollywood have spent years and millions of dollars trying to find the best way to get around this disconnect, and most have found that exaggeration is the best policy – make the guns so crazy loud, so insanely powerful looking, and so wonderfully visceral that the mind fills in the sensation that actually holding the gun would provide.
The Hollywood talent also provided valuable advice regarding the staging of elaborate and exciting shoot-outs, advice which was taken into account when the decision was made to make the levels in the game more restrictive and linear than some of the larger open areas seen in games such as the Halo franchise, or FarCry.”It would have been easier to get away with bigger, open levels because they require less detail, but they didn't provide well for the kind of gameplay we wanted,” Sullivan explained, citing movies like The Matrix to support the idea that most thrilling fire fights generally take place in enclosed environments with destruction occurring on all sides. “We needed to know roughly where the player would be in order to make the fire-fights as effective and exciting as possible,” Sullivan continued, stating that combat in large open areas generally deteriorated to sniping at enemies 10 to 20 meters away, which just isn't as much fun as fast-paced close-quarters shootouts. Of course, the AI also plays a huge role in the level exhilaration provided by virtual gunfight, and Criterion has coded advanced scripts to ensure that players see a large variety of intelligent enemy behaviors, including group dynamics such as flanking maneuvers, and use of cover – even in the midst of environments being torn apart and rearranged by explosions and gun-fire. That said, intensity is the name of the game, and we were assured that while positioning and a tactical mindset would certainly be assets, there would be relatively few situations that couldn't be survived by a skilled gamer with quick reflexes and an even quicker trigger finger.
Speaking of intensity, none has been spared. Whereas there was some concern (enough that Jeremy noted that they were asked similar questions in almost every interview) that the typically mainstream-friendly EA would try and force a teen rating on the game, Craig and Jeremy both had nothing but positive things to say about the world's biggest third party game developer. “Nothing has been edited or left out of the final product due to pressure from EA. We wanted to make a gritty shooter in a contemporary context, and we put everything we wanted into it, including profanity, characters that smoke, destruction, and [bloody] violence.”That said, the enthusiastic developers wanted to make it clear that nothing was put into the game simply to be shocking or because the could; everything that appears in the final product is there because the talent at Criterion felt the game was better for its inclusion.” That includes everything from the atmosphere to the gameplay – right down to a particularly delicious weapon feature that Jeremy was particularly determined to see from the onset of the project. All of the grenades in the game, whether hand-tossed or fired from a weapon, are capable of being detonated in the air with a well-aimed bullet (or stream of bullets). Players that get particularly skilled at intercepting grenades will find it quite useful to toss a grenade and explode it in mid-air, rather than letting it bounce around giving enemies a chance to seek cover. We can't wait to try it.
Black will hit stores February 28th. Check back to Xbox Advanced for the official word on whether or not Black lives up to the hype as Burnout with guns.
November 20, 2009
