21-Feb-2006 We infiltrate Criterion HQ and uncover the truth behind this gen's last best shooting hope... We've devoted more than a fair amount of time and coverage to Black over the past few months and frankly, can you blame us? Not only does it come from Burnout wonderboys Criterion, but we've long maintained that it's going to raise a last magnificent hurrah for the FPS on current gen.
Despite rogue code slipping out onto the 'net recently, Black's full debut is set for this very Friday and not so long ago we joined Criterion's Lead Designer Craig Sullivan and Producer Jeremy Chubb at a top secret locale in Budapest to get the very last word on the game.
In the course of a long but intriguing and occasionally hilarious interview, we talked about the birth of Black, the philosophy behind its inception, how major decisions were made to keep it on the current gen and why it's been kept to a single-player experience rather than being sacrificed on the altar of online. But there's also plenty of intriguing talk of what might happen to the series if it does make the move to next gen, how Criterion managed to squeeze the most out of the Burnout engine and AI and indeed the very future of the FPS as a genre.
As the old saying goes, enough talk, let's see some action, so lock and load - this is Criterion's definitive word on Black.
Black's seized a lot of headlines, but how did the idea for the game originally come about?
Craig Sullivan: It originally came about during a visit to a gun shop in Vegas.
Jeremy Chubb: Well, originally it was tagged a modern day Medal of Honor. Medal of Honor was a brilliant game, with brilliant audio and a brilliant sense of being there. We wanted to deliver something like that but more contemporary. That sort of chipped along for a bit, but it was the visit to the gun store which turned it into a particular direction for the gameplay.
CS: Alex Ward had already been working on the idea for the game for about six months before I came aboard, knocking around some ideas based around Medal of Honor - you know, where was Black set, it's got to be modern weapons etc. Everyone had just about had their fill of shooting World War Two-style weapons and didn't want to see guns with bits of wood on anymore. So he was thinking, we've got to do modern weapons, there hadn't been a game which had done justice to modern weapons in terms of the visceral kind of experience you get from firing them. We've been firing blanks today, but imagine what it was like firing those real weapons, firing real rounds, or having real rounds fired at you. You get an adrenaline rush just from being around them, you know the smell of the gunpowder, how loud they are.
There's the realistic side of it, what it's actually like to fire a gun, and then of course there's the Hollywood treatment. When they make really big Hollywood films, they don't just model exactly what they do, they go over the top and really make it obvious that the hero of the film is being shot at. Not because you can see the bullets flying through the air, but because everything around him is being ripped to pieces.
So one of the first things I did was to look at the way Hollywood was treating big gun battles and what was exciting and what wasn't. I've seen a lot of FPS games and I had my own thoughts about how they handled weapons. To me, there's been a very big disconnect between the intensity and the feeling that it should be really scary to be shot at. It should also feel really cool and really powerful to shoot at someone else. It's not about who's firing the weapon in an FPS, because actually the characters not on the screen, it's the gun which is one the screen. The gun has to be the major thing and the bullets that are flying back and forth between you. It's not the bullets that hit you which are important, but it's what happens to the ones that miss you too.
So looking at those two things, the big question was how do we stage a big firefight where you care about the enemies around you and where you are and what's around you. That took us down a route where we were starting to structure the game around these firefights and these cool exciting encounters. There's a lot going on and it's not because it's extra stuff, the debris, the ricochets, the particle stuff. Everything has to meld together for that firefight experience: 'I like firing real guns and Hollywood does great firefights' and those two elements have never been brought together in a game and that's the gap we've filled. We've done 90 percent of that with this game, but we can go further.
Black's earned the affectionate title of gun porn - is that something you're proud of or has it come back to haunt you?
JC: [Laughs] It's come back to haunt me and I can tell you why. I went to Redwood Shores to talk about the game with approximately 45 seconds of black and white footage and it was an absolute nightmare. If you've played the game, it's a very simple but highly focussed game; and on paper it's quite a small game, there isn't a million different features to talk about, but the things that make Black a great game are the sensations that you feel, the visceral look and feel and the weapons and the destruction. Until you've actually got that, there's very little to talk about. We talked about gun porn...
CS: ...and now you're doing it again!
JC: [Laughs] ...because at the time we were looking internally at the weapons and they weren't really going far enough, they weren't elaborate enough and weren't taking up enough space on screen and we were trying to push the modellers and animators in a definite direction - how are we going to make these guns sexy? All the scratches, nicks and details and the light reflecting on the gun weren't there at that point, they were too pristine.
Alex Ward said 'the guns aren't exciting enough', let's take out some of the modern high end, high tech kind of weapons and substitute ones which you might pick up off some back street arms dealer. That's why the guns are all sort of scratched up. That was the point in development where I had to talk to the press and it was hard, but everybody loved that line, people really responded to it. So it did a good thing in that respect, but it did cheapen what we were doing as far as we were trying to build a serious shooter. Suddenly it seemed like we were making Time Crisis with sexy guns and that really wasn't the case, which is why we shy away from it now.
So elaborate a little on Black's storyline - give us some more detail.
CS: Well Alex Ward talked to me about a conspiracy-based shooter about 10 years ago, we talked about American terrorists as well. So the storyline is an obsessed pursuit. You're Kellar, this special forces operative, you uncover in the course of the game this American terrorist who's worked for Langley and SFOR. The game itself takes place in the past because you're being interrogated about the things that you've done and you play through them in flashbacks. So the whole game, apart from the final cut-scene, is done in flashback.
JC: Obviously, what we wanted to avoid was strange scary videogame mannequins and shit like that in the cut-scenes which tell the story. It's really hard to do stuff like that, we've seen people who've spent years trying to put three hours of rubbish cut-scenes in a game. We were really keen to avoid that, so we tried to keep it really simple and straightforward, a single-room interrogation with flashing kind of imagery. The idea is to hint at this larger world and the real-life CIA and black ops operations.
It's all the kind of stuff you read in the news - JFK was an inspiration particularly the final speech at the end. 24 was a big influence, Alias the TV show. The more Alex and the guys researched, the more it was like, fucking hell the real-world CIA - there's all sorts of shit going on beneath the surface that you only find out about 10-15 years later. There are all sorts of deniable organisations like the recent CIA renditions, smuggling terrorists on flights through Europe. Black hints at a similar world and it's a very cool place to set a videogame - and the real world is a million times cooler than something about aliens.
So why did you choose current gen, rather than next gen, to develop Black? And did you ever consider a PC version?
JC: Well, because the concept was in development for a very long time - we did ask ourselves what were going to do. It came to the point where we started to go into full production and we looked at next gen as well. To be honest, it was a really tough call, but in the end the choice we made was based on the fact that we really wanted to do an exciting new shooting experience that no-one had had before. We looked at current gen - and I have to say we had an unbelievable team on this one - and talking to those guys they were really confident we could do what we wanted to do on PS2 and on Xbox. It was a case of we can do it now and we can do it on this current generation of hardware, why do we need to take it to the next gen? At that point there wasn't even any hardware, they hadn't even begun to make it and it would've been a crazy decision. Everyone was buzzing about 360 and the media asked "when are you guys going to be on it?" but they weren't even making the machine then, so it was a case of "relax we'll be on it, when we're ready."
So no immediate plans for next gen right now?
JC: No at the moment. We're just taking the time to finish this game and we want to see how it performs before we think about the next one.
Talking of the engine, how did you push the current gen tech so hard?
JC: Well it's Renderware, the heart of it is Renderware just like the Burnout engine, although in a very heavily modified form and we've built a lot in there. It's pretty sophisticated, but the quality of the game is more testament to the experience of the team working on it than the technology. It was interesting talking to them about current gen as well. We'd say to them we want to put in this extra gun and we want it to do this, and they'd know immediately what to do with it. There was no fumbling in the dark, wondering what the machines can do, so that was really helpful.
It's an evolution of the Burnout engine and it's all steeped in Burnout history. The guys who did the AI on this did the AI on Burnout. They say it's really similar although it's really different - even if this is people-based rather than car-based, it was still their experience which carried them through.
You mentioned AI there. What have you been aiming for with that in Black?
JC: We wanted to have different types of enemies, enemies that react in different ways, who need to be killed in different ways and it's tough to get that working. We wanted that to be the dynamic context of the game, but then to build in brilliant firefights, to have an ace firefight in corridors and big open arenas with guys with rocket launchers and RPGs firing at you and snipers taking pot shots. It really kind of evolved as the game went along, there was no kind of grand design with AI that we wanted to build the game around, it was more a case of we knew what we wanted to get across and the AI was there to support that. Funnily enough, there were areas of the game that we were really reluctant to talk about early on because it was so hard to get right. But it's really surprised us all as it's such a strong part of the software. It's a good game on Easy and Normal, but then you play it on Hard and you can see some real nuance in the enemies and they really do feel different.
It's a little curious that you've not chosen a mulitplayer component - surely it would be great on Xbox Live?
JC: No... Well, we've been asked this a lot and because we've always said we wanted to be the best shooting game out there, we wanted to take on Halo and some of these huge games. The mistake that some developers make is to look at the biggest title out there like Halo and say 'right, how do we beat Halo? We have to have vehicles, we have to have online, we have to have all these extra massive features'. They forget the guys at Bungie are pretty good and have been working in this genre for like 12 or 13 years, they spent four years on the first Halo and you don't just kind of jump in and beat that.
What we knew is that we could jump in and kill them on shooting, we could do better guns, we didn't have alien ray guns but we had beat up real-world weapons that had a great feel. So we wanted to focus on that, we knew we could do better destruction than anybody's ever seen. So they were the key things we wanted to get right - and we'd never done a shooter before, so to honest, we'd be insane to try taking on all these other things. We just wanted to say here's something new, fresh and original and something you've never seen before or experienced in a game and we'll build it out of a single-player focus. Maybe we can add further stuff later on.
So you wouldn't rule it out for a sequel?
JC: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty exciting online and there's a lot of stuff you can do with it. I don't think we've seen half of what you can really do with it. We're pretty keen, but you know, we're not obsessive about innovation but we want to give people something they haven't seen before. To do some kind of multiplayer arena game tagged onto this - a lot of people were asking about it, but really what's the point? You've played it before a million times, you've played it in GoldenEye, what's the point?
The FPS genre has been with us for years now and has arguably become a touch stale - after Black is there anything left to do? How do you see the genre developing in the future?
CS: Well without wanting to sound too big headed about it, I think Black will have an influence on people making FPSs from now onwards - just because we've never really shied away from the fact that we're making the whole feeling of firing the weapon the best experience you've ever had of doing that in a game. Nobody else has ever said that, they've been about 'this is the kind of journey you're on'.
Things like Half-Life 2, well it's got guns in it, but it's really not a shooting game. For me it's more about the experience I have while shooting things. We've said this is the other way around, I'm shooting things and having an experience which is very different, it's more kind of minute to minute and second to second, I'm alive now, but I might be dead around the next corner and I'm really on edge.
I think I'd like to see FPS games go back more towards that and really get a gut feeling about FPSs. You can still have driving around in vehicles and go and do all these things with gadgets that some other games do, multiplayer and the co-op and all that - but if people start to come back to the core function of what they're doing in an FPS, which is firing the gun, that can be improved dramatically and we've only just scratched the surface. Like I said, we've got about 90 percent of what we wanted to do and could do on the current gen. So going forward I think there's a lot more scope for getting the experience we have on the screen closer to being in a room actually firing the guns themselves. I think we can get closer and that's what we should aim for.
JC: The guys making Burnout, they 'own' fast racing games and I guess we want to be the same for guns. We want to be the benchmark for that. When people play other games we want them to think this is pretty good, but the guns aren't quite Black, we want to be that benchmark.
So you mentioned movies earlier - what have been your biggest Hollywood influences?
JC: Well, you know, the movies and some of the sequences, it's the big shoot out in The Matrix in the lobby, it's the big firefights in Die Hard, True Lies, Aliens all those kind of movies. There all the movies you know, it's pretty obvious but we haven't taken anything directly, we wanted it to feel like our own but we also wanted people to play through the game and feel that familiarity.
So what kind of opportunities and challenges does the next gen present to you as developers?
JC: I think Craig kind of touched on it in that where we can take this game is to make it even better, more exciting shooting, but the biggest challenge with next gen is working out exactly what we're going to do with it. There's a lot more power and a lot more graphical sophistication, the temptation is to be gratuitous, to say we're going to make a GTA crossed with Halo with World of Warcraft or some shit like that. The technical challenge is to build a whole bunch of new stuff from scratch. There are a ton of new challenges, but the ones we can talk about at the moment are just scale. We had a 100 people working on Black when it was in full production, but next gen will involve something a whole lot bigger, the art overhead is a whole lot bigger, trying to create something which is competitive and will look as exciting as the hardware is able to give you then.
CS: I think a lot of people are going to be far too ambitious; next gen for them means 'well we could do this before and now we can do this'. We can all do more, we just need to do better and that's what we need to do for the next gen and HD gaming in general. The fidelity of the shooting experience can get a whole lot closer to the Hollywood shooting experience .
It's not about doing a massive reveal as you come up over the top of a mountain and saying 'wow you can see the whole country'. We laugh about it, but people will do that. They'll say 'wow, look I've spent three months building this scene with all these polys', but my question would be 'great, what can you do with it?' It's boring. I just want to go and blow the crap out of something. It's about meeting players' expectations, that's where we need to go in the next gen.
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