Call of Duty Black Ops legend says his new studio is an attempt to get back to "old-school" game development

Mar. 9, 2024

Interview| David Vonderhaar is back with Bulletfarm

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

Vonderhaar says he has Bulletfarm’s first game entirely mapped out in his head, but in these extremely early days there’s not much he can say about how it will look. In the announcement, he promised a “more intimate and relatable” experience than Call of Duty, with “an emphasis on co-operative gameplay” and a “passion for rich characters.” Probed over what that might actually mean in the finished project, he points away from modern shooters and military simulations. Those games, he says, have become “about shooting as many bullets as you can into as many people as you can, as fast as you can for as long as you can.” By contrast, with Bulletfarm, “it’s not just about shooting.”

One last shot

Instead, Vonderhaar says it’s about “discovery, and exploration, and building connections, and finding the relationships between things. I think ‘intimate’, for us, means that your relationship between you and what you’re doing is up close. You’re aware that there are consequences for decisions, it’s not just storms and storms and storms of dead bodies. We want it to be a lot more personal, a lot more connected.”

My mind goes immediately to the extraction shooter, and in particular the high-risk calculations that go into firing even a single shot in a game as tense as Hunt: Showdown. When I put that comparison to Vonderhaar, he hints that I’m “not too far off.” As much as the team has studied Hunt, however, “the worlds are way different, the amount of combat’s way different.”

“There are much better analogies,” he laughs, but “I’d be strung out if the game doesn’t develop them.” That intimacy will be expressed within the game, but there’s another side to it, too. At the very start of our conversation, Vonderhaar says that the main aim of Bulletfarm is “to rethink how these big games get made, who they get made by, on what timelines they get made. After three decades of games and two decades of Call of Duty specifically, I felt like there was this opportunity to take all the lessons of that and reapply them in a new and different way.”

“I think we need to be a little more ‘old-school’ with how we approach things”

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

Vonderhaar’s departure might have been personal, but there are also more macro-scale factors behind his decision. One of those is a desire to innovate; I ask about some of the recent shooters that have lit a fire within the genre in recent months by offering an experience that differs from the genre juggernauts, like The Finals, from former Battlefield devs who struck out on their own, or Helldivers 2. In response, he highlights the latter as “not a huge, Call of Duty-scale production by any means. And people love it. And I think that’s what you’re seeing - that you get that kind of innovation not from large, centralized franchises. You get the innovation and new ideas from places that are not constrained by those big places.”

Vonderhaar notes “a whole bunch of people doing really innovative, creative things in the first-person shooter space,” but says that they can get “buried” beneath the larger games. His hope, he says, is to “be in a position where we can use some of the voice that we have to bring up more independent creatives.” But is that enough? Vonderhaar has NetEase’s backing, something that he acknowledges is inextricably linked to Bulletfarm’s ability to even exist, but with thousands of layoffs rocking the industry -including 1,900 at Microsoft in the wake of its purchase of Activision Blizzard- that’s not a luxury available to many developers. Bulletfarm’s first year will see the studio limited to around 15 developers, with estimates of a final team of little more than 50, but Vonderhaar says he’s been inundated by so many applications that he’s spending half his time trying to work out who to hire.

“The game has got the intimate vibe, the studio needs the intimate vibe, it’s all part of the culture of the company,” he explains. “Specialists drive quality up,” he says, but they thrive most in teams of thousands, not dozens, and right now, Bulletfarm needs generalists. With so much volatility in the industry, studios like this, which are “small and nimble” but have the support of a larger apparatus around them - just like the teams that made Zombies, or Blackout - seem the safest bet, as long as the games that they come out with live up to their creators' reputations. Even then, Vonderhaar points out that for him, making those games is no longer the hardest thing he has to do. Now, that title belongs to the startup, maintenance, and perhaps long-term running of his studio.

In the shadow of the live-service bubble, a phenomenon Vonderhaar says was inflated by Covid and that it’s clear is now bursting, it’s apparent that the Call of Duty veteran is being cautious, and that his experience on that mega-franchise isn’t informing his new strategy; “you can’t go immediately to 5,000 people and put them all to work and have them be successful. That’s a losing strategy. You can grow big carefully. I’ve seen places grow big not-carefully and you can see what’s happened in the industry. We have a responsibility, as game industry leaders, to run our studios in a way that’s sustainable for gamers, for gaming, and for game makers period.”

I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 makes headshots deadlier while cutting back on weapon sway and recoil: “We will be keeping a close eye on sniper balance after this change”

Stalker 2 boss thought bugs would bother y’all more and expected “much less success,” still wants to fix things until it’s a game “90% of people loved”

Get hundreds of hours of RPG goodness for $30 with this bundle of 8 games that includes the first two Baldur’s Gate games, which are absolutely worth playing