To better understand UK-based Sniper Elite 3 developer Rebellion (who also worked on Rogue Warrior, Aliens vs Predator, and NeverDead), Eurogamer caught up with CEO and Creative Director Jason Kingsley to discuss their most recent release, which is sitting at a 65 on Metacritic for the PS4 version, but managed to finish first in the UK charts:
To a certain extent, our games are loved more by the audience that plays them than they’re loved by the professional reviewer. We seem to, if you look at some of the aggregation sites, do better with user reviews than we do with professional reviews. I think if we get fairly criticized, and constructively criticized by professional reviewers, then, whilst it’s hard to sometimes take criticism for something you’ve worked on for a couple of years, that’s fine. And I’d defend everybody’s right to say whatever the hell they like about my games.
Like most games that launch these days with multiplayer, Sniper Elite 3 hasn’t been without its own share issues. Made by 100 people in just 18 months, Kingsley admits that there was always a danger of rough patches:
I think the nature of the franchise now, it’s on its third iteration and I hope we’ve corrected some of those areas where we got dinged a bit in the past,. The problem is we haven’t had a very big team and we haven’t had long to make it, so the danger is there’ll still be some rough patches.
But you compare that to some of Ubisoft’s wonderful titles, where they have three years and 600 people. Are we going to be five per cent as good as the next massive game from Ubisoft? Yeah, we are. Are we going to be as big and as epic? I don’t know, it’s not something we’re trying to do.
Kingsley then added, “Quite frankly, we’re one of the last big games developers left in the UK. There are some others, but we’re fully independent. We rest on the success, in terms of sales, of our games. I think in general the only real thing that matters is that we’re still here, we’re still a viable company which is quite an achievement.”
Did you pick up Sniper Elite 3? What do you think of it?
