The BPRE beta is entering month 2. It's amazing how much we've learned and adjusted our initial product to suit life in the great outdoors. Among the various optimizations, UI adjustments, feature tweaks and art changes, there has been one sweeping change that we're still working through. When we did the mission outline and shoot back in July of 2009, it was based on a treatment of a BPRE graphic novel that was near finished draft. We did paper prototypes, designed and produced templates, hooked them up to the app and then let people play with them...
Fast forward to November and MW2. MW2 was an interesting turning point for me as a creator on several levels.
First, it was an amazing roller coaster ride that delivered a level of fidelity and polish, previously unseen in "war" game.
Second, despite great voice acting and graphics, it was one of the most disappointing narratives I've ever experienced. Not to mention, it seemed like every time you turn around in the game someone else was picking up the slack(getting punched out, having ceiling fall on me, someone else catching the bad guy I couldn't seem to catch, grabbing my hand as I missed a jump onto a rope ladder, etc.) or I was outright getting killed. That is, of course, when the developers weren't busy bringing characters back from the dead and undermining all the dramatic sacrifice from the CoDMW single player experience.
After playing MW2(and last year's MGS4), the last thing I wanted was yet another twist ending where the player is betrayed by command or some other war is bad preachy thing.
So I sat down and started over and produced a totally different story, same world and still based on real world operations, but with a whole new spin.
One month later, when the team read the draft, everyone got very excited. From the narrative side, we were suddenly in much darker territory with protagonists who were driving the story rather than being driven by it - aka a "Snow Crash" vs "Neuromancer" approach. The new narrative has more potential for diversity in terms of gameplay in a social network environment(ie it's not jsut shooting people - not that there's anythign wrong with that).
We started thinking and talking about BPRE in terms of a modern warfare RPG rather than as a modern warfare FPS/action game...
Fast forward two months and Echelon is knee deep in beta .9999999
Our target is far different than when we started, but we're going with it. The creative process is mercurial and it needs to be controlled but it should not be walled in either. Sometimes, you need to re-write and re-shoot. Sometimes you have to work with what you have. Sometimes, it's a little of both.
Armed with a better understanding of what we have in our hands, we're prepping to do a shoot for the next mass of content in about 4 weeks with the latest iteration of the comic series, driving the mission but not the details. It's an exciting time.
