14 DAY TRIAL // Cliff Bleszinski, the famed creator of the Gear of War franchise, apparently thinks that there is a lot more to shooters than people give them credit for.
Granted, the take aim, shoot face, rinse and repeat flow of gameplay that most of them have gotten us used to lately might not inspire anyone to dream of a more free-flowing array of interactions, but Bleszinski thinks that what Titanfall and Destiny do is barely "scratching the surface" of what shooters can actually do.
The Gears of War creator is currently working from a new studio, Boss Key, where he intends to make the next big thing, a competitive multiplayer shooter titled BlueStreak.
When talking about the Gears of War franchise, he isn't entirely happy regarding how it turned out in the end, as its development was directed by the general intention to make it as cinematic as possible. It relied on providing quality gameplay too, but the pursuit of a filmic experience was at the time the result of what he calls "a continued Hollywood envy, that insecurity that the video game industry suffers."
In fact, he even states that what he sees as the greatest accomplishment of the series is in fact something that nobody planned in advance.
"In Gears, cover helped the game as much as it hurt it. We wanted to go for the stop-and-pop thing, but players' instincts to flow through that 3D world took over. They would roll, roll, roll. I don't want to fight that. I want to embrace that sense of the first-person shooter zen flow of movement," Bleszinski tells VentureBeat.
The focus on movement seems to be his primary concern, stating that both Halo and Gears were played almost entirely within horizontal planes, but that some new contenders are starting to explore what the genre could offer in the future.
"From what I've gathered from Destiny and Titanfall, they've started to scratch the surface of that [focus on movement]. Destiny has a bit of a ground-pound move. You look at the double jumping and the wall-running in Titanfall. There's so much more you can do with that," he explains.
His next game, Blue Streak, is meant to be a fair free-to-play shooter that's headed for the Windows PC platform for now. Apart from that, he wants the game to severely challenge the horizontal, stop and go, cover-based gameplay we are used to.
"That feeling of flying through the air and then falling down, the sensation of movement. It's one-third of your arsenal at the very least: how you float through the world... I'm not saying everything needs to go all crazy like Serious Sam or Ratchet & Clank, but there is absolutely a lot of room for some compelling stuff that can allow for some really cool trick shooting in a first-person shooter environment," Bleszinski shares.