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Bodycount preview: The journey
I'm going to take the mic here for a moment, readers, and tell you something personally: It has been fascinating to watch the development of Codemasters' FPS Bodycount. I originally posted the game's unofficial announcement early last year, saw a preview and talked to creator Stuart Black at last year's E3, saw the game in action after Black left the project and, finally, got to see and play it last week at this year's E3 conference. Long story short, I've basically had a front row seat on the development of this one, and it's been very interesting to watch it develop over the past 16 months. Black's original vision was not much more than just a demo level, a slick future shooter with a snappy female voice feeding orders in your ear. And from preview to preview, that vision has been prodded and poked by other developers, growing up into the game Bodycount has become. Unfortunately, much of what appealed in the initial vision has gotten a little muddied along the way. Some elements of that early demo are still in there (and there's a whole lot more besides), but Bodycount's gone from a lot of unique potential to a much more mundane reality. %Gallery-126207%
Bodycount preview: Paint it something other than Black
Last time we saw Codemasters' FPS Bodycount was back at E3, when creative director Stuart Black declared Lady Gaga as one of the game's influences. Cut to six months later and Black has left the company, and the game's been delayed to next summer. So how's Bodycount doing? Not as bad as you might think. It turns out Black's leaving Codemasters wasn't completely unexpected. "We'd been talking about it for a while," Andy Wilson, the game's director, told us at a recent press event. "He had it in his mind -- there'd been some hints -- and we started talking about it more shortly after E3. It's a personal decision with him -- it's certainly not something to do with us or anything that was happening on the project. It was just his time to go." [Ed.'s note: Black claims otherwise, telling GameSpot in a recent interview that "it was clear that Codemasters were unable, or unwilling, to provide the support needed to realize the vision I had for Bodycount."] So Black moved on, but Bodycount, Wilson assured, is "still going to be the game that it was going to be at the beginning." %Gallery-110342%
