Bulletstorm, the explosive Epic Games/People Can Fly FPS collaboration, might be stocked full of enemies, guns, and cacti, but it will be restricted to a single player experience. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Cliff Bleszinski, the design director of Epic Games, discusses the reasoning behind cutting a co-op campaign from the shooter.

Epic's history includes some of the most well known multiplayer first-person shooters of the past two decades, but Bulletstorm is aiming for a different kind of gaming experience. According to the interview, Bulletstorm started off as an entirely different beast, and only once the guns started to take on a life of their own, and the points system came into place, did the shooter really take off.

Of course, having the game so focused on special moves and special effects flying over the corpses of the player's enemies meant that there would have to be sacrifices in terms of what the game could contain other than a solid campaign. Bleszinski explains in greater detail exactly why deathmatch didn't make the cut:

"We empower the player through the verbiage and the weapons so much that if you were in multiplayer on the receiving end of that, it would be the most agonizing, unpleasant experience. It is a solvable problem, I do believe, but it would basically require building an entirely new game that is in many ways not even Bulletstorm."

Once the vision for Bulletstorm had been realized, Epic and People Can Fly decided that the experience would be significantly tampered if players were running around with or against each other, not taking the time to rack up points and kick monsters into cacti. While this may be surprising and disappointing for some who have gotten used to the Unreal Tournament and Gears of War mulitplayer modes (the latter of which will be playable with the Epic Edition of Bulletstorm), Bleszinski assures us that the game will be better off for the changes:

"Really the game just broke down, and it was a situation where people would race through the game, ignoring the vistas and they wouldn't set up as many skillshots. So when we made the decision to go straight campaign, it gave us the chance to put in one-offs that could only be controlled by one player, like the giant robotic dinosaur, where you don't have to worry about Player 2, or slow motion one-offs that could only occur in a single player game."

It seems that the interview might be slightly misleading though, because back in December we discussed the sole multiplayer mode, Anarchy, a Horde-like mode that revolves around points and creative kills in a cooperative setting.

It is interesting just how much Bulletstorm has evolved since its inception, and with its release looming right around the corner, it won't be long until we see if the campaign is worth the price of admission.

Will you be picking up Bulletstorm tomorrow?

Bulletstorm releases for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC tomorrow, February 22, 2011.

Source: The Telegraph