14 DAY TRIAL // Codemasters has announced that it is developing a new first person shooter at its studio in Guilford, the main man behind the new intellectual property being Stuart Black, the senior designer working on Black, the FPS launched by Criterion in 2006. The team in charge of the new FPS for Codemasters also includes Tom Gillo, who was an executive producer for the studio Sony Computer Entertainment has in London, and Andrew Wilson, who was a senior producer at Black Rock Studio.
Codemasters is saying that the fresh game is set to use the EGO engine and technology platform that the company has developed from scratch and has been used to power titles like Race Driver: GRID, Colin McRae: DiRT and the military shooter Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.
The EGO engine has performed very well in racing titles but when it comes to Operation Flashpoint, a lot of players complained about the limited number of soldiers that did battle at the same time on the rather large maps and about the lack of vehicles in the initial campaign.
Gavin Cheshire, who is the development vice president at Codemasters, stated, “Codemasters’ multi-site studio network has seen a significant rise in headcount to over 450 people and growth at the Guildford Studio is key to our overall development strategy. With Stuart Black’s new shooter in production, deployment of EGO and key development figures heading up a highly skilled team, our Guildford facility offers great potential for development talent based in the South East.”
At the moment, Codemasters is not talking about the themes that the new first person shooter will tackle. There's also no word on when the game might be out. When Black arrived in 2006, it aimed to offer a more cinematic experience married with some tactics. The new project might inherit some of those sensibilities.