British developers have not exactly dominated the first-person shooter genre. There was Goldeneye of course, Rare's seminal Bond tie-in for the N64, which brought in a new level of depth, structure and replayability. The development team behind it would go on to make Perfect Dark and later – as independent studio, Free Radical Design - the eccentric Time Splitters series. That brief throughline effectively dominates the history of UK involvement at the cutting edge of FPS design.

Ah, but then there's Black. Released at the fag end of the PlayStation 2 era and developed by Guildford-based studio Criterion, this 2006 cult classic, was a stylised, hyper-kinetic deconstruction of the FPS concept. Designer Stuart Black, a veteran of Peter Molyneux's formative Bullfrog studio, was obsessed with the simple act of pulling the trigger. He wanted to explore the bullet and its effect on the environment – hence a huge range of obsessively detailed firearms, masses of environmental damage and enough explosions to keep Michael Bay happy for a decade. It sounds dumb, but Black was smart, visceral and fizzing with creative energy. It wasn't so much gun porn as gun poetry.

Now Stuart Black is creative director at Codemasters Guildford, a young development studio, that has cherry-picked staff from the Black team, as well as projects like Splinter Cell, Fable and Brothers in Arms. Their forthcoming debut title, Bodycount, takes the philosophy behind Black – ballistics as a central game design component – and drags it to the next level. "Outrageous fun is one of the things we talk about a lot," says Stuart, "We want to give people the sensation of glee when they squeeze that trigger, it's an addictive more-ish quality. You just want to keep doing it. We're talking about making a cool combat experience. We're not interested in covering all the usual bases, we're confidant enough in what we're delivering…"



The game is, of course, another FPS, and like Black, it's set amid a shadowy covert war. This time however, the action takes place in a vague near-future. You play a young operative working freelance for a global corporate organisation named The Network. The game begins with the lead character in a rundown motor home, looking plaintively at the photograph of a beautiful woman – suddenly, a helicopter buzzes overhead; it's The Network with a job offer he can't refuse. His role will be to hit the world's trouble spots take out operatives of a rival organisation known as The Target as quickly and messily as possible. "The Target are totalitarian fascist nutjobs," says Black, "You do not want to have any part of their society, or allow them any credence in the world – they're clearly evil and have to be stopped. Where the Network sits is a little more ambiguous, you have to determine that during the course of the game…"

The main draw at the moment, is not the plot and its dalliance with conspiracy theories concerning the New World Order. The main draw is the incredibly destructive environments. Almost every object you see in the game can be torn to pieces by bullet fire; we played a quick test level, a sort of rundown industrial zone complete with guard towers and low concrete buildings. Firing off a G36C assault rifle at a wall sends plaster and brick flying in all directions as the surface, then the wall interior, breaks down. Shoot out a car and the tyres burst, the hood pops, steam billows from the engine.

"We have this catch phrase - rip it up," says Black. "You're going to rip through this environment to get to the bad guys. The single most important thing is the guns. You are a gun, there's no character on screen for you to identify with. The gun is how you express yourself. In terms of impact effects and the feeling of shredding the environment, we're not going to be beaten by anyone. We meant it. Every time a new FPS comes out, I load it up and start shooting at a wall – how does that feel? It's surprising how shit it is in most games – but it's a fundamental element, it's a core feedback."

But it's not just about effect, it's about access. In Bodycount, you can blow chunks out of thinner interior walls, allowing you to burst through and catch enemies by surprise. You can also brilliantly modify cover objects – if you're hiding behind a crate and want to take out enemies without popping up from behind it, shoot a hole in it. Bingo, you've got a comparatively safe firing vantage.

The difference between this and say, Red Faction or Bad Company, is that the destruction isn't limited to pre-set building sections. It's everywhere. This should, of course, grind the processor to a halt, but the team has come up with a simple compromise to facilitate its vision. "The trick is that we're not running full physics on everything," explains lead coder, Jon Creighton. "I don't want to go into too many details and a lot of it is going to change, but the important thing was, for a lot of the objects that are supporting – window frames, for example – because we know it's a constrained system we can simplify the physics, and that just made it a lot easier.

In effect, you're probably not going to get buildings collapsing, a la Bad Company, because the engine relies on the structural integrity of larger objects. What you do get however, is hundreds of smaller props being blown to pieces, drastically re-shaping the immediate world around you. "In action games, really, the most important character, the character that tells the story, is the environment," says Creighton. "If you look at Half Life 2, they did wonderful work with facial expression and story telling, but really it was the devastation of City 17 that gave you that feeling of what the story was. And more recently in Bioshock, the biggest character in that is Rapture. So what we're doing is, we're taking the central character and giving it more depth. As you go through the level you are shaping the environment, all of a sudden, it's got more personality…"

"Another thing we solved is, how you render that. In a lot of other games, when something is destructible, you see a little edge around everything, it's almost like an old cartoon. Because of the way we process the art assets and all of the models, we get rid of all that, so it looks like a smooth surface. It's a combination of a clever solution on the rendering and a nice solution on the physics. And we're still optimising…"

This is tied in with one of the best cover systems I've ever seen. While in a crouching position (gained by holding the left trigger down), you can use the left analogue stick to subtly look and aim around your cover object, ducking and peeking to gain that perfect view of the war zone. It's natural, it's comfortable and it's adaptive, and it will surely consign the whole 'locking on' mechanic to the graveyard of cover system history.

The meaning of Bodycount

Black describes Bodycount as a glossy techno thriller, something to sit beside the likes of Heroes, Flash Forward and True Blood as a piece of slick modern entertainment. It quickly becomes clear while talking to him (or rather, listening to him talk – his turbo-charged Scottish brogue doesn't allow for much in the way of interjection) that he's an obsessive pop culture magpie. In the space of a few seconds, he name checks Black Hawk Down, Die Hard 4 and Marvel comic book series, The Punisher, before telling us that the three biggest influences behind Bodycount are Steve McQueen, JJ Abrams and Lady Gaga.

The upshot is, this isn't a grimly realistic military simulation, it's fantasised violence in a graphic novel world. With character design for example, Art Director Max Cant is hugely influenced by 2000ad artists like Cam Kennedy, who retain naturalistic human proportions, but draw oversized equipment, accentuated silhouettes and gigantic weapons to create a dramatic, exciting look.

This approach extends to the environment. "In this industry, there's a standard thing where people will just use photo references for all the textures," explains Cant. "That's alright, but it effectively means that everyone is working from the same stock – that's very high frequency, high-detail textures. They give you the end result, but everyone ends up with desaturated browns and grays, with rusty corrugated iron in every level. There's no real meaning. But this stuff should support the storyline, which is tied up with mood and pacing and everything. If you want to support that properly, you have to go back to basics and deal with colour. Grading and tinting are techniques we're seeing more and more in the movies. So take Ridley Scott: it's early in the morning and you do a fly over of Rome. Now Rome is all white walls and red roof tiles – but Scott's shot will be blue - it's that kind of thinking, telling the story through colour…"

So that matt, grubby, photorealistic patina so beloved of military FPS developers is gone, replaced by an over-riding gloss. As Cant explains, "Filmmakers will go into the set with a large water tanker and spray the entire set so that all the surfaces have a sheen that picks up the lighting. As you're going around [Bodycount], the light plays on the immersive glittery environment and helps to lift the mood, so you're not seeing the same drab surfaces everywhere. And instead of just using arbitrary four way-tiling textures, all of our edges have scuffing and damage, all of our recessed areas have oiling and staining. That's the comic book influence, again – it helps to stylise, but it also helps your eye to read the object at distance. Ultimately, all the edges of worn stuff will have exposed metal so you'll get lots of glints and light, again trying to lift the tone of the thing, by bringing in some iridescence and sparkling colours."

Colour is even being utilised on a subliminal level. During the Africa levels for example, the key themes are pollution, corruption and sickly unease. Cant has used yellow as the predominant colour, not just because it denotes the relentless heat of the sun, but because apparently it unconsciously makes us feel hungry. It's all about creating discomfort. "We'll tie it in with audio too," says Cant. "So when there's thunder, you're hardly aware of it, but it'll be sub-bass stuff - the feel is tied in with indigestion…"

There's also lots of colour-coding going on within the action: red objects are likely to explode, for example. It's a subliminal language that players must pick up in order to survive. This use of subtext extends to the iconography of the warring corporations. The Target is psychotically focused, relentless and ruthless, so its vehicles have cold steel surfaces and angular styling – it sees curves are a sign of compromise. Meanwhile, the Network wants to present itself as a customer-focused, friendly US corporation, so its colour palette is all nostalgic Americana – confederate grey, the exact blue from the Stars and Stripes – "America's smiley sell to the world," as Cant puts it.

Bodybuilding

Bodycount is split into three acts, each in a different part of the world. We know one is Africa, but Codemasters are keeping quiet about the rest for now. Each act is separated into a series of missions and locations, which can be attempted in any order – Black says it feels a little like a Resident Evil game in terms of structure; you get to re-explore old areas whenever you want.

In most missions, you're given a specific target, then you go out and create what Black laughingly refers to as a 'corridor of death' leading straight to them. In other words, you kill everyone. To ensure destruction and mayhem are ramped up to the max, the team has added an interesting arcade-style combo system to the slaughter. Every time you kill an enemy, or shred up a nearby computer, they'll drop an in-game currency known as intel. This can be spent on weapons upgrades, or used to call in tactical support in the form of helicopter gun ships, predator drones or weapon platform drones. If you chain kills effectively or get multiple kills (especially through some kind of environmental chain reaction), you'll get more intel. Plus, there are several different types of enemy soldier, including medics, who'll heal their stricken comrades, and scavengers, who run about the battlefield stealing any intel you don't get to (and using it to call in air strikes on YOU). Naturally, there's a combo bonus for taking out a variety of these guys simultaneously.

The team is planning favourable 'kill lines' through each level that'll offer masses of juicy intel for the correct combo sequences. However, there's a keenness to avoid directing the player too much. "We don't want an optimum way of taking out enemies, because then everyone will then do it that way," says Black. "We want you to think about the threat level to you versus the value in terms of combos and intel. There's no right and wrong, it depends on how you play, and your confidence. Do you take down the 50 cal guy first because you're having a hard time staying out of the way of his bullets, or do you think, 'no, I know how to deal with this guy and put cover between us, I'll deal with the medic first, because when I DO put the 50 cal guy down, I don't want someone coming around and healing him up again'. Or perhaps you get the commander because he can call in reinforcements. I'm very big on player customisation – it's their experience, they've paid their fifty quid for it, I want them to play the way they play."

Another key structural concern for the team is combat staging. Often in linear FPS titles, enemy activity will be activated at pre-set trigger points – you'll go through a certain door and they'll spawn behind it. But of course, Bodycount isn't quite linear, and you don't have to go through the door, you can always blow a hole in the wall, so that last-minute spawning strategy is no good. Instead, it seems that enemy soldiers will be spawned into the world very early, and they'll patrol it realistically, so instead of set-piece choke points, you'll get dynamic encounters that sprawl over the playing surface.

I definitely got a feel for this during my hands-on time with the game. Enemies were all over the map, working individually and chasing me through locations, or joining together to form makeshift squads, scaling over environmental objects and improvisationally flanking me. It's fun because you need constant 360 degree awareness, just like playing deathmatch, and this sense of urgency is heightened by the comparative compactness of the maps – they're around 200 square metres. Black wants a lot of the showdowns to take place in 30m zones of death. There's nowhere to run to.



Body of evidence

What we don't have yet, is much of a plot. Black says he wants the game to engage players emotionally, but all we have is a story about warring companies and a young Captain Kirk-style hero in the middle of it all. Clearly, we'll find out more about him and his motivations later. En route, the narrative is going to involve some big decisions for the player – throughout the action you're remotely fed mission briefings by three mysterious female operatives who you never meet. But at some point in the game, the objectives they each give you start to contradict. Who do you trust? Black hints that there's much more going on behind the façade of corporate dueling that he's given us so far.

One final, reasonably interesting element. Apparently, there's a 'boss' at the end of every level, but it's not a character, it's a building. Every mission area concludes with you gaining entry to the local Target HQ – and these will be absolutely cutting edge edifices. "I've penciled the Target buildings in as machine towers," says Cant. "So it's ambiguous as to whether they're actually buildings. It's not like an office block. We might do stuff like have them move…"

The art team have been swotting up on the latest trends in architecture, studying Coop Himmelblau, WORKac and Daniel Libeskind. And for the interiors they're looking at Apple, Bang & Olufsen, and things like luxury yacht design. The buildings will be well defended and fiendishly difficult to enter, but once you're in, you get to tear the place up with machine gun fire in a ballet of destruction.

Elsewhere, we can expect drop in/drop out for co-op and team deathmatch. Black is enthusiastic about how the destruction modifies the standard multiplayer online gameplay. "We've got 12-player deathmatch up and running at the moment," he says. "We're just starting to play it, and it's terribly unbalanced right now, but we can see how it's going to get there. And what surprised us was how destruction changes the way you play; it stays consistent throughout the rounds, so you start out playing with shotguns and sub-machine guns, and you're using them to rip through walls, creating your own route through the levels. But the more holes you make, the more the stage opens up. So you switch to assault rifles, which aren't as good for close combat, but are better at firing accurately in a set direction. And then finally, you're on the sniper rifle, and you're on one side of a building, shooting all the way through to some guy on the other side of the map."

It's been a long time, then, since Britain's last truly agenda-setting first-person shooter. With Bodycount, there's a chance the wait could be almost up. From the brief demo we saw, it's frantic, bloody and panic-inducing stuff, like being shoved into the middle of Black Hawk Down, as it's noisily re-filmed in someone's rapidly disintegrating garage. It's also stylised and self-conscious; it isn't Modern Warfare, it's postmodern warfare.

Stuart Black is of course, very confident about the opera of chaos and destruction he's composing. "We've got some real stars here. Not just from Black, but the new people, from Lionhead, from Media Molecule and various other companies. They're really good guys, particularly on the code side: we have an incredibly strong code team. I've been in quite a few development studios and there's an energy, a buzz, around the great teams, that isn't there in the others. And it's here. I definitely feel it here…"