While walking in the offices, it was remarkable how relaxed the atmosphere is over there. Just across the entrance was a cosy corner with a bunch of magazines, a plasma tv and an Xbox. On that very same moment, Jeremy Chubb, the producer of Black, was gaming to kill time.

The first item on the agenda was a presentation by Bart Cobbaert (EA - product manager). That didn’t take to long because Jeremy was so enthusiastic about the game, that he instantly started talking. The most important slide was the one with the legendary words: “stealth sucks:
you’re going in all guns blazing”. That sentence tells a lot about Black. It’s all about hard and incredible fast action, so it’s not recommended to sneak around a corner. Like Jeremy said so nicely: “It’s Burnout with guns and there’s nothing in the game that isn’t fun to shoot. You can shoot the crap out of everything!”. If you would think, while standing in front of a closed door, to find a button to open that door: forget it! There’s only one way to open it… shoot it to pieces or blow away the wall!

It has become a trend to create the possibility to go online with almost every single game. So it’s very remarkable that a game like Black hasn’t got a multiplayer-mode. According to Jeremy, they wanted to create something with Black that has never been done before. There are a lot of FPS-games, but none of them gives you a stunning and overwhelming feeling when you shoot these guns. The crew acquired that experience by doing a real weapon training in Nevada. It was so amazing and fun that they wanted to put that same feeling into the game. “Regular FPS multiplayer as we know it today is dull and conventional” stated Jeremy. Therefore, they’ll only make it a multiplayer game if they can think of something new and original. He didn’t tell us anymore details because he didn’t want and/or was allowed to talk about any future plans…

There are several reasons why Black won’t be available for the pc. Although he only gave a humoristic response like “you need a beard for a pc”, we’ve got some answers why they haven’t made a port for the pc. First of all, the team just hates pc’s. Moreover it’s much easier to focus on the performance for the PS2 and Xbox, because you don’t have to worry about hardware-differences as there are with pc’s. But of course, the costs for that port will have played a large role...

Criterion have used their own “RenderWare” earlier for Burnout and now for Black. Jeremy told us that Criterion has a lot of inside information about the PS2 and an excellent team of programmers, so they can really push the PS2 to its limits. At the start of the development of Black they tried to use the current generation of consoles and they’ve done everything they can to make it work. If they’ve had come to the conclusion that it won’t be possible to do so, they would have made the step towards the next-gen consoles. But the experience for the gamer would be the same if he or she was playing it on his Xbox 360, XBox or PS2, and that’s what Black is all about. Jeremy wasn’t sure if you’d be able to play the game on an XBox 360. It hasn’t been tested with the XBox-emulator that runs on the XBox 360, so it depends on Microsoft and the quality of the emulator. But he thinks that it should do just fine and if not, that Microsoft probably will release an update.

There aren’t much tactics needed in Black because the main goal was to make shooting as fun as possible. Sometimes you have to ask yourself where your teammates are, but that’s about it. With the lowest two difficulties you can, most of the time, shoot and run through the levels. Only on the highest difficulty, that is made for the die-hard fans, there’s a little more tactics needed to complete the levels. The total length of the game isn’t so bad. Jeremy Chubb plays through all the levels (highest difficulty of course) in 12 hours.

The game takes place in Eastern Europe and consists of nine levels of different sizes where you’ll sometimes run alone and sometimes with a whole team. You have, however, always radio-contact with them. Moreover there are sixteen different weapons in the game. Some of them don’t exists and for the others they’ve used an existing gun as a base and made some modifications so they didn’t have to pay the licenses for these guns.

It a cliché but if you make a game with heavy gunfights in Eastern Europe, you need Russians that are jumping around the level. In Black it isn’t any different… they even speak Russian! Jeremy added a funny anecdote about that. Because of the strict legislation about languages in France, they had to release another version where even the Russians spoke French! Of course, that would destroy the whole concept. Luckily, for the French gamers, they’ve come to an agreement with the French government and so the Russians may speak Russian everywhere. Concerning the low interest for FPS-games in Japan, they are eagerly to see how much copies of Black will be sold over there.

When you walk your way through the game, you’ll recognise several elements from well-known Hollywood movies. Because the team of Criterion is a big fan of the action movies from the eighties and nineties, they got a lot of inspiration from “Die Hard”, “Terminator”, “The Matrix”, … They even made the lift-scène in Black! And if you compare screenshots from that scene with images from the “The Matrix”-game , you’ll see that this is much better in Black and there are a lot more scraps flying around.

We all know that game-development costs a lot of money and time. Black isn’t an exception in that matter, although it’s costs will be a bit lower because they were able to use there own “RenderWare”. But still… Jeremy told us that they’ve started with the concept of Black four and a half years ago. There where about hundred employees needed for the actual development and programming for the past twelve months! Not to mention the soldiers who have helped by giving an explanation about all the weapons, the training to learn to know and to use the weapons, …

When you die in Black, you will, as in most other FPS-games, come back to life and get another chance to clear the level. This may seem obvious, but Criterion received a lot of remarks on that. Jeremy is very clear on this matter: “as it is ridiculous to drive around with a car with three wheels in Burnout after a crash, it would be stupid to continue in Black with one arm and no legs”. To make it easier to see whether you are almost dead, the colours of the environment change: everything becomes darker and eventually it gets almost completely black-white and it gets a bit blurry. As a matter of fact, the environment also gets blurry if you are reloading your gun. That’s of course very realistic because you are, at that moment, entirely focussed on your gun.

Black is a 16+ game (and not 18+) because there isn’t any blood, you can’t blow away any limbs, … But on the other side: the amount of destruction is really unbelievable and the action in the game is very fast! That makes it sometimes a bit chaotic, but also more fun to play. If you complete the game, you’ll get a reward, but Jeremy refused to tell us what that reward will be. So we’ll have to wait for the European release at 23/02. From then on: a lot of practice is the message! At Criterion they can relax for a little while and then continue to work on Burnout 360.