Adrien Chmielarz Discusses Bulletstorm 2’s Concept and Leaving People Can Fly

Adrien Chmielarz has revealed at Polish conference Digital Dragons that there were plans to make Bulletstorm 2 and that it would have been "an amazing game.

"It was gonna be actually more insane in a way. It's still kinds believable but the pulpiness and the craziness of it was through the roof.

"Whoever read Rick Remender's crazier comic book series, those know what I'm talking about here. When he basically lets go, he fires with all cannons. Things are really truly insane in his signiature series Fear Agent. But reading his Fear Agent series was like 'Okay, this is madness, but you care about the characters and it's good storytelling'."

Chmielarz revealed that developing Bulletstorm 2 would have meant overcoming the problems which were present in the original, "Wow, that could be an entire book."

However, "The thing is, we did want to make Bulletstorm 2, and actually there was a concept and, I think, it would be an amazing game.

"We analysed what we could for the sequel, what we have control over, and it would be an amazing game. But it was also very risky. And Epic asked us would you want to do Gears? They did impose the game (Gears of War: Judgment) on us. We wanted to do it. I was ecstatic, because I loved Gears."

Chmielarz joins Cliff Bleszinski in believing the original Bulletstorm's marketing campaign was poor saying "I think it was bad. The way I blamed myself for it was I basically enjoyed it too much. Initially I asked can we do it so it sells the game as an action-adventure, a pup sci-fi rollercoaster, and not do the Bad Company 1-style of campaign of silliness and jokes? And then they showed me some marketing materials and I was laughing and like, 'Okay that's funny, let's do this,' and that was a mistake," he admits.

Eventually Chmielarz's requests for a "more serious tone" led to the game's launch trailer which was "different to any other marketing that was done for Bulletstorm. No more Duty Calls and any of that bull****. That was simply good, action-adventure, pulp sci-fi. But that was too little, too late"

He says his last year depature from People Can Fly, the studio he founded in 2002, was not directly connected to Epic's takeover of the studio. His split from the developer "was not directly related, and I'm still under NDA so I cannot disclose the details, but it felt like the stars aligned at this point."

Source: Eurogamer.