Police Warfare might not be Kickstarter shooter's final name

Police Warfare, the cops and robbers multiplayer FPS currently seeking Kickstarter funding, might not keep its Activision-baiting moniker if it makes it to launch.

When asked to defend charges that the studio is being a little cynical with its branding, Elastic Games' lead designer James Wearing told Eurogamer that the title is "a work in progress". He explained the crude handle is just a way of concisely communicating exactly what the project is all about.

"We're saying right now that it's descriptive. It's not necessarily the final name of the game but it really describes what the game is - it's police and it's warfare, and we wanted to capture that. What the name will be at the end is to be determined but we're definitely open to new ideas."

He also confirmed that Modern Warfare publisher Activision hasn't yet contacted him to discuss his choice of name.

Elsewhere during the interview, Wearing laid out his inspiration for making the game - a desire to replicate the famous post-heist shoot-out from classic 1995 crime flick Heat.

"I'm a huge Battlefield gamer but I'm also a big fan of movies like Heat and that whole crime universe.

"Looking around I was think why there are no cool bank robbery or heist games? There's GTA and Kane & Lynch but they're a little different. There's nothing that puts the Battlefield or Call of Duty-style experience in that world, so we decided to do it ourselves."

What about last year's PC/PSN effort Payday: The Heist? Hasn't that beaten you to the punch?

"Payday is cool and that came out shortly before we went live with our project but the difference with Payday is that there's no playable police," he replied.

"And it's about scale. Payday is great for that co-op Left 4 Dead experience but we wanted to go in a different direction - more like Battlefield's open maps and high player count as opposed to a co-op type game."

Wearing went on to argue that with gamers starting to tire of modern military shooters, there's a nice gap in the market opening up for a studio willing to try something different.

"There's definitely space for that," he insisted.

"I think in the next few years you're going to see less focus on modern military conflicts in shooters. In the same way that World War 2 hit its saturation point, I think we're starting to see the same thing with modern military warfare.

"I think shooters are going to go into new spaces and this could be one of them."

However, the jury is still out on whether the general public is ready to follow Wearing and his small team of former big-publisher AAA developers. After nearly a week of fund raising, Elastic has raised $23,500 towards its $325,000 goal. We asked Wearing how confident he is of eventually reaching that target.

"From the fan feedback it's clear that people want the game," he responded.

"I think right now it's about proving to people that we have the capabilities to do it. Conceptually people really like the idea so right now we're just plugging away and trying to do everything we can do to let people know that we're a legit group of people with good credits. We really just want to make a great game for people."

He added that should the Kickstarter drive fail it's not necessarily game over for the project.

"We do have additional financing besides the Kickstarter so everything isn't riding on it," he revealed.

"We'll see how it goes and re-evaluate if necessary but our plan is to keep plugging forward. We've got a good group of people and have done a lot of work so it wouldn't make sense to throw everything away at this point."