Warhammer‘s boomer shooter gets closer to release.
The term “Boomer Shooter” is a fairly new term, but the concept is very old in gaming. The most famous of these titles are Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem 3D. This type of game was a huge hit in the 90s and shooters have evolved more and more since then. Things like DOOM (2016) and Wolfenstein: The New Order revitalized these franchises, but the look of the games all updated with the times.
Luckily, developers of all kinds have been carrying the torch of the boomer shooter with games like as Dusk, Prodeus, and Ion Fury. Focus Entertainment announced developer Auroch Digital would be making a Warhammer 40K first-person shooter at Warhammer Skulls 2022. Players take the role of a battle-hardened Space Marine on a perilous mission across the galaxy to fight against the Warriors and daemons of Chaos. The game is set to be heavily inspired by the boomer shooter genre and fans have finally got an answer to when it will release and more!
Coming May, Rahul Kohli Will Mow Down Enemies for the Emperor
Warhammer Community released a blog post with info on Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The trailer reveals that the game will be released on May 23rd and that the Space Marine will be voiced by actor and devout Ultramarines fan Rahul Kohli. Rahul Kohli sat down with Warhammer Community to discuss joining the team.
“The folks at Auroch Digital got in contact with my team and asked if I would be interested in voicing the protagonist”, Rahul said. “It was an immediate yes!” “There’s definitely a particular vocal style that Space Marines have across the various forms of media. Before my recording session I was sent a ‘Warhammer bible’ which has the do’s and don’ts for portraying such a character.”
Kohli had a lot of Warhammer content out there to watch and play to really help get him into the role. Luckily, he has been known to play things like Warhammer 40K Darktide and Warhammer 40K Vermintide in his spare time to immerse himself in that world. He also made sure to look into as much Space Marine content as he could for the role:
“I watched Angels of Death”, Rahul explained, “and I’d recently played through Space Marine, so I had good vocal reference. There’s this almost regal or Shakespearean tonality to the way they speak. I just wore an Ultramarines T-shirt, some heavy boots, blasted my lines into the mic, and crossed my fingers.”
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Kohli joined the Warhammer 4oK community in January 2022 and sees this as a dream role.
“I’m feeling incredibly lucky to be a part of the Warhammer universe”, Rahul said. “I only recently became a fan and had chosen my chapter (Ultramarines because I’m a sucker for the box art). Over the past year or so, I found the community to be so welcoming, it kind of accelerated my love for the hobby.
“To have voiced an Ultramarine in a first person shooter? I mean, I’ve kind of peaked. It definitely feels like the perfect project.”
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via Warhammer Community
PlayStation Blog Behind the Scenes
Grant Stewart, Lead Designer at Auroch Digital, sat down with PlayStation Blog to discuss the game. Stewart said the game is designed to look like an older shooter while also using more modern tools for placing enemies and programming their actions.
“On top of plenty of classic locations with enemies diligently hand placed, there’s also areas where waves of heretics are dynamically spawned by an intelligent system to seek the most exciting positions to challenge the player. In these situations, designers pick the enemies using a “nodegraph” and construct escalating “encounters”. They then populate the combat “arenas” using “spawn points”, to denote locations where the enemies can appear in the world and “zones”, controlling the positions they should try to move to during combat. As the fight progresses the AI looks for the most suitable zone and attempts to move to it and engage the player.”
“….intelligence was “hard coded” into the AI’s brains. They moved, hunted and shot based on simple rules that were executed largely in order. The current zeitgeist for digital adversaries revolves around “Behaviour Trees”, hierarchies of orders that the AI executes based on factors in the environment. The AI of Boltgun uses an alternative called “Finite State Machines”, a system first popularized by the Grunts of Half-Life”
via PlayStation.Blog
This way of using an AI system to understand how the player plays to increase or lower the amount of challenge for the player is a fairly common tactic in games nowadays. The original Resident Evil 4 is famously known for having a system designed to help or hinder the player based on how well they were playing. Enemy AI has also come a very long way since Doom originally came out and the developers knew that just because it was a throwback, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t evolve.
One of the cool things it does is that the game is all built with 3D models that are then changed a bit to look more like an old sprite to the player.
“Modern games have become extremely good at creating beautiful characters that move in lifelike ways, as there are countless tools dedicated to just that. For Boltgun we created a hybrid process. Our enemies are modeled and textured in modern sculpting software, paying close attention to the details of Games Workshop’s tabletop miniatures.”
“…our animated models are “rendered out” as digital images, then virtual cameras take shots of the models from eight directions as they cycle through the frames of their animations. These images are imported into the Unreal engine and stitched back together into 2D flipbook animations.”
via PlayStation.Blog
Warhammer 40K has an abundance of content coming out and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is shaping up to be one of my most anticipated games this year. As long as the game plays as great as it looks, this is going to be fantastic.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun releases on May 23rd for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
“To admit defeat is to blaspheme against the Emperor.” – Primarch Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines
Spider-Mike is a staff writer who is a regular co-host on the let’s play channel Rage Select and regular contributor to One of US.net for over 5 years. Born in Austin, but raised on the border of Texas and Mexico. He has been gaming since the NES and jokes that he has a Masters in Spider-Man, Superman, and Dragon Ball.
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