Nexuiz — The Twitch Shooter Fueled by Dicks, Gaga, and Booze

The closest video game equivalent to hearing an old man whine about the hills and snow between house and school must be hearing a Quake / Unreal Tournament enthusiast lament the state of shooters today. In a real shooter, autoaim doesn’t do all the shooting for you and you don’t spawn with all the guns you want right away. Kids these days.

I’ve basically got the early bird special frequent diner’s card when it comes to shooters, so that’s why our announcement of Nexuiz during the 2011 Inside Gaming Awards captured my attention. Conveniently, Scott “Sark” Robinson of Machinima Respawn got to visit Nexuiz developers Illfonic recently, giving me an opportunity to get some info on what the game’s all about.

“Nexuiz is a new downloadable game from Illfonic that’s their attempt at resurrecting arena shooters with the added complexity of it being on a console in addition to PC,” Sark said. “That initially rubs some people the wrong way, but hey, it’s the year 2011.”

Depending on how hardline you are about twitch arena shooters, being on a console might completely invalidate it. Thinking that is a mistake, though. Nexuiz sounds like the real deal.

“That’s probably the first thing you notice… ‘Whoa, this is fast.’ Fast, not in a way like Call of Duty (CoD),” Sark said. “It’s CoD if you have sprint doubled… and a crazy Halo jump added in to the mix. It’s really fast, and it’s pretty. You notice that right out of the gate, because they got the CryEngine going.”

Fast, pretty, and intense… that checks off all the identifying features of the classic twitch shooters. Nexuiz goes one better by adding a twist to the formula in the form of mutators.

“Twitch shooters are not a laughing matter, historically. You need to be hopped up on caffeinated beverages to be full affect. It’s all space marines, aliens, and chicks in armor that would never work but it’s hot,” Sark said. “Nexuiz is a sci-fi shooter with this thread of comedy built in with the dynamic mutators, which I think is awesome. Right in the middle of your techno-throbbing murder spree, your controls will invert or the screen will go black in white, or your dude won’t stop jumping. It injects such a level of fun into what is an otherwise super-serious game type.”

While the mutators might sound like a cheap gimmick, they can actually work into the gameplay in a very tactical and fundamental way.

“When you see the mutators, all you see is ‘big head mode’ or ‘flying whale,’ and it seems like they’re for the lols, but there’s a lot of strategic mutators they’ve put in there,” Sark said. “You want to coordinate with your team to figure out what order to pick them up. The mutators do have a strategic element, and that adds to the depth of this game dramatically. I feel like I just scratched the surface.”

Fans of the glory days of shooting will remember that the games themselves are only half the package. The best games came from the best developers, usually a small group of dudes that crunched code in garages and warehouses. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a game seeking to bring back the arena shooter comes from developers that were immersed in them.

“These guys are heavily embedded in the Quake community,” Sark said. “At least three of them were modders for Quake levels. They have a lot of love for that genre, and Nexuiz is their love letter to it… to all of us.”

Nexuiz is being developed by Illfonic, a group of 11 developers based in Denver, Colorado. If greatness is born in the face of adversity, the guys at Illfonic are destined for some great-ass things.

“They’re in this office that is the second story above a transvestite karaoke bar. It’s this awesome space to work in, then every Wednesday through Friday night it’s just Lady Gaga remixes being belted out by shemales,” Sark said. “They’re not too happy. There’s running Lady Gaga hate jokes over there because they hear it so much.”

That’s not the half of what goes on at Illfonic, either. From the sounds of it, it’s a sort of Pee Wee’s Playhouse mixed with a college frat.

“The first thing you see when you walk into their office is this huge whiteboard covered in pictures of dicks. There’s horrible charicatures of creatures made of dongs and feathers and it’s just… they’re all about farting in each other’s work spaces,” Sark said. “It’s not a buttoned-down, shirt-and-tie style office.”

Somehow, between the haze of alcohol, dick monsters, and basslines to Lady Gaga, Illfonic is developing what may herald the return of one of gaming’s best and long-forgotten genres.

“They’re in crunch time right now, so it’s long hours at the office followed by ridiculous benders at the local bars, and then stumbling back into the Illfonic transvestite office covered in vomit and continuing work on your resurrection of the arena shooter.”

Godspeed, Illfonic.

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