Bulletstorm is a fantastic shooter. It's fast, funny, creatively violent, and wildly profane, and it irritates me to no end that it never got a sequel. But even though it's been eight years, People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski told Eurogamer that there's reason to hold on to hope for a follow-up. (But maybe don't start holding your breath just yet.)
"We are, as you can see [with the remaster and the Switch version], still holding this IP deep in our hearts," Wojciechowski said. "We want this IP to have its second life. We're still not sure what that means but obviously since this is our IP—we own the IP—and the IP is known and has its fans, we would like to do something about it."
"There are no immediate plans to come back to this IP, taking into consideration our current effort on Outriders, but if we think about PCF in the longer-run, then obviously it would be awesome to come back to this IP."
In order for it to happen, though, People Can Fly would want to be confident that the sequel will have wider appeal that the first game, and that could be tricky. Cliff Bleszinski criticized the game's marketing in 2013, saying on Twitter (via Critical Hit) that "people didn't see a cool sci fi game, they saw 'the dicktits game'." PCF co-founder Adrian Chmielarz, who left the studio in 2012, said something similar in an interview with Kotaku UK earlier this year, telling the site that everything but the launch trailer "make the game look like it lacked any weight."
But the silliness embedded and emphasized in most of the pre-release advertising is a big part of Bulletstorm's appeal: The "crassness," as Bleszinski put it, may have been a little over the top (okay, or a lot), but the launch trailer makes Bulletstorm look like a thoroughly generic Gears of War-style bro-shooter, which entirely overlooks everything that makes Bulletstorm distinct and memorable.
In any event, a Bulletstorm sequel is a long-term prospect: People Can Fly regained its independence from Epic in 2015, and is currently working with Square Enix on a co-op shooter called Outriders, which is expected to be out in the summer of 2020.
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