Bulletstorm Started Life as Third Person Cover Based Shooter

The development team at People Can Fly that is creating the upcoming first person shooter Bulletstorm has revealed that initially the game was set to use the same third-person perspective as the Gears of War series from parent company Epic but that the approach was abandoned when the fast-paced core gameplay was set in place.

Speaking with the Official Xbox Magazine Tanya Jessen, who is the producer working on Bulletstorm, has said, “The very first prototype of Bulletstorm was a third person shooter.”

She went on to offer some detail, saying, “We always knew from the beginning we wanted lots of environmental stuff. We knew we wanted an over-the-top pulp sci-fi feeling and we knew we wanted it to have a very distinct attitude and tone. But the gameplay was completely different than it is now at the beginning. It was cover-based. So it went from a third person shooter, to a cover based first-person shooter, to a non-cover based first-person shooter.”

Apparently the team went through a lot of design ideas before settling on the concept of quick, flowing skill based kills and that's when it became clear that third person and cover based would not be the way to go.

Bulletstorm aims to capture the joy of shooting enemies and making one's way through a level with a lot of attention paid to how enemies are dispatched and less of an emphasis on careful tactical movement, so the first-person mode was better suited.

The Collector's Edition of the game comes packed with a beta code for Gears of War 3, which will allow players to jump in and see what the new third-person offering from Epic is all about in April.

Bulletstorm is set to be launched on the PlayStation 3 from Sony, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PC on February 22 in the United States and three days later in Europe.