Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games, has revealed a lot of information at a recent Reddit AMA where he was received as a Rockstar. Obviously people were going to ask him about Unreal Tournament and the likes, and he answered them with no problems whatsoever.
Here’s what he had to say about a new UT game. “As far as a new UT, it’s hard to say. Shooters and their sequels are a tricky beast. Often you wind up upsetting your core whenever you make a sequel because sometimes you change things the users didn’t want changed, or the users are so very in love with their memory of the original game that there’s nothing you can do to live up to the first game. This happened with Counterstrike: Source, Quake 2, Unreal Tournament 2003, heck, even Halo 2,” he revealed.
It does not look like Epic Games has any plans for a new UT game, however, with the upcoming Unreal Engine 4, we may see one next-gen but I wouldn’t bet on it.
He’s a big Nintendo fan as well, but he admitted that Nintendo has a lot of challenges ahead of them.
“I’ll be watching the Wii U closely. I think Nintendo may have initially lost a little of their core with the Wii for a bit, honestly, and they seem to have realized this. I believe they also recognize that we live in a “multi-screen” culture hence the controller design. I played ZombiU at PAX and it was promising (even though the controls could use a little loving!) so we’ll have to wait and see. I sometimes wonder if we’ll find ourselves in a PC/Phone/Tablet future, honestly,” he added.
He’s also a big fan of VR and thinks it’ll be huge. “Oculus is GREAT. Once you try it you’ll become a believer. Mark my words, VR is coming back in a BIG way.”
Last but not least, Bulletstorm’s failure was due to a lot of reasons, one being marketing and he revealed some more information on that. The game should have had a versus mode, he admits.
“The kill with skill system was rather unique and innovative, however, when it comes to shooting it’s really hard to encourage a gamer to “play with their food” because we’re trained in our shooting games to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible,” he said.
“The marketing (which I was partially responsible for!) was also a bit off kilter for the game. The problem with the unique language in the title (Rick Remender did a stellar job on the writing, BTW) is that it becomes the standout thing that can outshine the graphics, world, gameplay and story. Suddenly you’re the game with “Dicktits” in it, marketing latches onto that, and people might not take the property as serious as you’d like.
“Also, I believe we should have had a versus multiplayer in the game.”
You can check out the entire AMA here.