Bodycount’s Black: Focus on shooting, not bullet points

Codemasters’ Stuart Black, the creative director of Bodycount, feels that too many shooters suffer from shooting that’s, well, not all that good. Why? Because, he asserted, those games prioritize back-of-the-box bullet points (unique selling points, or USPs, as they’re known in the marketing world) — ancillary features such as running up walls, anti-gravity, and time travel — over the core shooting experience, which suffers as a result. “And it’s just unsatisfying. It doesn’t matter how cool those USPs are; when I [pull] the trigger, meh, not so much,” he scoffed.

But if your players interact with the game world primarily through guns, shouldn’t that be the most important part of the game? Black certainly thinks so:

It’s a shooter — it’s fundamentally about shooting a gun. What’s the thing I’m going to do a million times, second after second, in the game? I’m going to pull a trigger, yeah? That better be bloody amazing. Before you do anything else, that has to be awesome.

When I spoke with him earlier this week at a Bodycount demo in New York, he promised that Codemasters Guildford, the game’s developer, is making sure that the act of firing a gun in the game will feel as good as it should. Stay tuned for more from my interview with Black.