Developer People Can Fly has spoken up about why they decided to remaster their underrated FPS Bulletstorm as Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition in a rather lengthy blog post. Don’t feel like reading the full post? Here’s a condensed version:
Bulletstorm is a game that Polish developers at People Can Fly always dreamt of making; a crazy, violent ride that took no prisoners among gamers when it was first released to the public in 2011. Sadly, due to underpowered console hardware at the time, compromises had to be made, meaning the team couldn’t carry out their initial, ambitious vision for the game. This is the reason why the Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition was made.
Power to the people
It should come as no surprise that when the power of a new generation of hardware was revealed, developers at People Can Fly started thinking about realising their initial Bulletstorm vision once more – this time to the fullest – in order to present their beloved child to the world once more in the form of a remaster; even if some of the changes did, in the end, turn out a bit more controversial than the developers foresaw.
A good example of this was the now-infamous introductory sequence featured in Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, which was perceived by players as a downgrade compared to the intro sequence in the original Bulletstorm. People Can Fly’s Art Director, Krzysztof Dolas, stated that the decision to change this intro was a creative one as, by removing several noise effects, it gave the game a more “cartoon” feel – rather than a “gritty ‘90s” feel the original intro had.
Absolutely worth it
For the team, it was an opportunity to finally realize their original ideas in their entirety. The developers admit that the game finally looks the way they envisioned it in their heads during the original pre-production stage. The Full Clip Edition is the ultimate Bulletstorm experience and it’s the way the story of Grayson Hunt was meant to be told from the beginning.
In the games industry, difficulties during development are always expected – and Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition was no exception. Many scripts didn’t work on new consoles at first and many lines of code needed to be written from scratch – but it was absolutely worth it!
The team even managed to squeeze some new features into the game for players who finished Bulletstorm in the past. Remastering the game took more time than initially predicted but the experience gained while working on it was priceless.
For more interesting tidbits, check out the blog post regarding the making of Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition in which Sebastian Wojciechowski, Krzysztof Dolas and Jarosław Surowiec from People Can Fly reminisce about how the remaster came to life and all the various conundrums regarding its creation.