Last Summer, Istanbul-based developer Motion Blur impressed gamers with the reveal of Black State, an upcoming third-person shooter game that looked very reminiscent of the Metal Gear Solid series. Earlier this year, at CES 2025, the studio was on the showfloor at NVIDIA's booth to demonstrate that the excellent visuals was also coupled with incredible performance, even at this stage of development. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, the game is unique in that it does not utilize Lumen and Nanite as most games do. The gameplay mechanics are also intriguing, particularly with regards to the portal door mechanics that can seamlessly transition the main character from one location to another and back.
Following this latest showing, we contacted Motion Blur to learn more about Black State and the relatively unknown studio behind it. You can find the edited transcript of our lengthy chat with Studio Director Ömer Faruk Güngör below; we also got a couple of exclusive screenshots to accompany the text. By the way, the game is already available to wishlist on Steam.
Ömer, please start by telling us about yourself and your studio, Motion Blur. If I'm not mistaken, Black State is your first game.
Actually, in 2006, our core team made the first international PC game in Turkey. I have a legendary copy. It's titled Nightmare 22 (Kabus 22 in Turkish). After that, yes, this is pretty much the first big AAA title for not just Motion Blur but also Turkey and the whole region.
As the studio director of Motion Blur. I'm pretty much dealing with all the development operations and also the business side of the operations. And also, I'm a writer. I wrote the story with Kadir Demirden. He is our CEO, founder, and head game designer of this game. He's the real deal.
How big is Motion Blur in terms of employee count? Are you all working in the same office?
We are 40 people in-house, and this is actually in our studio. This is my room, totally soundproof (sometimes I sleep here). Outside this room, we have a huge space for the rest of the people. We work in-house rather than remotely, because it would be a little bit harder to finish the game and do all this stuff. This is a strict rule, by the way; all of us should be here.
How did you come up with the idea for Black State? It's pretty clear you were inspired by games like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell, but what was your own concept behind the game?
It was our CEO's original idea. When we met him back in 2017, he had an idea for gameplay and a story, including the concept of these doors opening to different places. He had already completed his R&D process.
So we started tailoring the gameplay and story and all the features, all the levels. Right now, we haven't released any trailers about the story or what is the main motivation for the main character, or what's going on in that universe. Why do these doors open to different places? Why is it that one of them is an art gallery and another is a ship? It has a meaning, actually. When you play the game, you realize that everything sticks together logically.
We hate it when developers say 'it's just a game', and dismiss any consistency issues. We hate that, so we worked meticulously on all these details and nuances about the IP itself, not just gameplay or the story, because we don't want the player to perceive any dissonances when they are playing. We don't want to undercut their motivation to play the game.
We have a 500-page design document that was completed before we even started the development phase. Every detail, every character, every gameplay feature, every gun, every line in the story, everything is in here. At Motion Blur, we are very strict about what we desire to do in this industry. It's not just that we had a cool idea and began making a game to see how it went.
No, we have a huge plan, not just for this project. The main objective for us is to make the best-looking games with the best optimization. When we showed Black State at CES, people were shocked when they saw it running at some 400 frames per second. For us, the game needs to run well because it's a game, not a movie.
Even before we started development, the core team knew the FPS target, the mesh counts, the limits we had, and everything from day zero. We can't make a game just for owners of high-end graphics cards. We are making games for all gamers. Of course, if you have better graphic cards, you can see better graphics and run it even faster, but if you have even an average GPU, Motion Blur still aims to give you a really fluid gaming experience. The whole idea, even the story itself, is built on this philosophy.
The game looks amazing, and it's surprising that it already runs so well. Usually, a game that looks this good, at this stage in development, is around 30 or 40 FPS. It's kind of unexpected, but more interestingly, I've read that you are not using the trademark features of Unreal Engine 5, Lumen, and Nanite. Is that correct?
We have a dynamic lighting solution. So, sometimes we use it, but mainly, unlike everybody, we do not use Lumen and Nanite. As I said, we are making Black State for everyone. We are using Unreal Engine 5, but we made lots of customizations because of optimization to physics and other aspects of the engine. We altered them to make them more optimized and to make them fit our portal doors. I believe that it was at GDC 2022 when Epic's Unreal Engine engineers saw the portal mechanics for the first time, with the door opening, and suddenly, you're on another level, where you can go, and you can come back. They were shocked and asked how we managed something like this. Back then, we were maybe even fewer than 30 people. Right now, we are 40.
You have to change a lot of things and dive into the code, but I must admit, they have helped us a great deal. We are an indie game company, but they treat us like one of their friends. We ask them a lot of questions. Our team is directly in touch with their engineers. Thanks to the joint efforts of Epic and our team, right now, we don't have any problems with optimization.
Since the game already performs so well, are you even going to need stuff like NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation? Will you implement it in Black State?
We have a really close relationship with NVIDIA. They sent us the new GeForce RTX 50 GPUs a while ago so that we could start working on their new technologies. Let's put it this way: as the first step, we always imagine that you have the lowest hardware, and we're trying to optimize the game for you. And then, of course, we will add all these cool features.
From our perspective, optimization means that whatever you have, if we say you can play this game, whether you have DLSS and RTX or not, you should see and play a really good-looking game that performs well enough. We always consider the lowest denominator, but we are adding all these cool features if you have them.
We've talked about PC so far, but I'm guessing you'd also like to launch the game on consoles eventually.
This is a topic that we don't usually answer. Let's say that right now, we are focused only on PC, but of course, we want to give all gamers the best experience as much as possible on other platforms, as much, but right now, we are working on PC. Still, if you have something to play games with, eventually, we want to be there. But I can't say any timeframe.
Black State is hugely focused on those portal door mechanics. Tell us how it all works. I'm reading on the Steam page that these transitions lead to different adventures. What does that mean exactly?
Without giving any spoilers, I can say that in the gameplay, the architects send you on a mission. We have a couple of different missions. When you are in a mission, you have to discover everything that you can to find those scientists that you have to save, and some other things that I can't say right now. But it means you have to look for them. But while you play the game and explore the map, some doors—and they're not just one or two; we have several—open to totally different places. We call them the other levels.
For example, in the b-roll we shared at CES 2025, of course we had cut it to avoid spoilers. But sometimes you are in a cellar, and one of the cellar doors opens to a subway. Then you have to discover and explore what's going on there and find out if it's the right path for you to find those guys or not.
Sometimes, you have to find something, and you start looking for the doors. Of course, the map can help you. But just imagine that in your mission, you'll never know whether you'll end up in a ship, art gallery, laboratory, or a manor. We have lots of more, but we haven't shown them, so I shouldn't tell them.
We hate that when you start playing a game in a manor or mansion, it usually means that at least 30 or 40% of the game takes place there. We want to give gamers diverse gameplay. You start in a manor and its door opens to a ship. Then you have to do lots of things on the ship, and maybe you have to come back and do another thing, and another door opens to an entirely different place. It's totally seamless. You can go and come back in every mission. Every big level includes lots of different doors like these where you can go and return.
You can also choose whether to go in this door first or that one instead. We don't want to force that much linear gameplay. Of course, Black State is still a single player linear game. It's not an open world, but you can sometimes choose which path to go. It's up to you.
Since you mentioned that players have some kind of choice in picking which doors to open, are there any secondary objectives or side missions that are not explicitly related to the main mission?
In our system, we have the main missions, but when you discover that mission, you'll start learning something and the architects start asking you about also finding that and discovering other stuff.
That little ball flying around with red light does two different things. One, it's scanning the area and making maps for you. That's why we call it mapmaker. But it can also scan and send some data to the architects. Depending on what you discover, they might need something else and tell you to find it and scan it for them.
It's not like, 'find us ten different flowers and send us the pictures'. It's not something like that; it's totally related to the main mission and the story. We don't have any time-consuming side gigs that are unrelated to what's going on. We have lots of different objectives, but they're always related to the main story and mission.
Is there any character progression system in Black State where players might unlock new skills or new abilities and items?
I believe I shouldn't answer this right now. Sorry!
Fair enough! But, you know, the Steam page does say there are several weapons and gadgets and stuff like that.
Yeah, you'll have different gadgets and weapons. You haven't seen all of them. There's a balance in the gameplay. Of course, you won't get them all in the first mission.
Can you go through a level of Black State entirely with stealth, without being discovered, or does the gameplay kind of force you to fight with weapons in some instances?
Kadir Demirden, our head game designer and CEO, hates that. He hates forcing gamers to be stealthy on this level or to kill everybody on this other level.
That's why we have to implement game design to allow gamers both possibilities on every level. It's actually killing us. It's a little bit hard, but we believe that's what gamers want and need because, in time, we discovered that everyone plays totally differently.
If you want to go stealthy, then you should be rewarded from the game, or if you want to kill everybody, okay, there is no limit that you can't do that. That's actually why we have 110 unique takedowns, and we are adding more. It's because the animations vary if you are in stealth, if you are in cover, low or high, or the enemy is behind it or next to you or forward to you. We have totally different killing animations for all these.
It's killing us because most of the time it's me and my team, the animation team, doing all these motion captures. When you kill somebody, it means you killed some of us from the team.
So, you have a motion capture setup in the studio.
Yes. We are basically doing all this motion capture and stunt stuff. Sometimes we work with real MMA fighters, professional fighters in Turkey. We don't have any stuntmen here, so Kadir's idea was to find real fighters, let them fight, and record it with motion capture equipment. Then, of course, we had to clean and polish all the animations. Right now we have 110 different ones, but we probably recorded 500 or 600 different killing animations with them. We only chose the best ones.
You mentioned boss fights...
Please don't ask how many of them we have!
Alright, I won't. Even though the thought had crossed my mind. I guess I'll ask how prevalent they are in Black State. Are we going to be mostly fighting regular enemies and then, every once in a while, a boss, or are they more prevalent throughout the game?
We have bosses, and all of them are totally related to the story. Before you fight them, you learn a lot about them. So far, we have only shown one of them, and people already started thinking and saying that they'd always be like that one. Actually, every boss fight will be completely different, with unique patterns and styles.
I don't want to spoil anything that I shouldn't, but you'll see the other ones are very different from what we have shown. I mean, we are not a boss fight game. We don't have too many, but we have more than enough for a game like ours.
Are there going to be a lot of story cutscenes? Everyone has been comparing the game to Metal Gear, and Metal Gear is known to be very heavy on the cut scenes, mainly because of Kojiima.
Yeah, we love Kojima. Kadir always says he is the biggest reason we make games, and we're really thankful for that. Of course, it was a huge honor when IGN said after the first announcement trailer that our game looked like something from the Metal Gear Solid series. But the gameplay style of Black State and MGS is not the same. If people expect MGS from it, they'll find out it's not.
In regard to your question, yes, we have cut scenes, but of course, not as much as Kojima's series. But we always try to only take control away from the gamer if it's really important and anyway not longer than what's required to tell an important part of the story.
Otherwise, we also have in-game lines where you talk with somebody while you are playing because this is a game. The most important thing is that they should play, not just wait and see our story. Of course, as a story writer, I would love to make longer stories, but Black State is a game, so we shouldn't overstep. We should tell them the story in playable scenes as much as possible.
Are there going to be several difficulty settings that the user can pick to tailor their experience?
This is also something I shouldn't talk about yet. Sorry.
Can you share at what stage of the development your team is right now?
We are still in Alpha. Here's a funny thing: someone from the game industry, an executive, asked me years ago what Alpha means. I told them, it's when you have put everything together, but everywhere is on fire.
When can we expect to see more about Black State?
We have marketing beats waiting for us. The most important thing for us is that we want to prove that this is an optimized game. Because, like you said, when you see something like this, you probably start thinking, my computer can't run it; I won't be able to play.
We also want to share a bit about the story. We only started to show the game last Summer, so we have more and more marketing beats. We believe that we can show what exactly this game is about. There will be more videos about the game and specifically about the gameplay and story, but I can't say any details about the timing right now.
Will we learn more about the protagonist in these upcoming marketing beats, or are you keeping the mystery until the actual game release? Right now, we don't even know his name.
Yes, one of these beats is definitely related to the story. We want to tell gamers what this is all about, what these doors are, who this guy is, and who the architects are. All of that without ruining the full plot, but we want to give them the idea, 'it's probably about something like this or that'. We can't hide something like this until lunch. This isn't a game like you've seen before, so you have to learn something about what you're going to play if you want to play.
How do you feel about subscription services such as GamePass? Is that something you might be interested in for Black State if you received an offer?
We have close relationships with all the companies like Sony, Xbox, and the others. They have a lot of different platforms and options for gamers. I believe that gamers love those kind of things, but right now we are just focusing on the development side. Still, if the offer fits the direction that we desire to go, then it might be considered, but it's too early to definitively comment on it.
The most important thing for our company when we are considering all these options is to understand what gamers want from us. Our motto is that we don't care about what the big companies think, the numbers, or trends. We only want to gain the gamers' hearts. If they want to see more takedowns in the game, we'll add them. If they want this platform or that platform, if they want diverse gameplay, if they want more gunplay, we want to give them that because they will buy the game and we should give them the best experience.
That's the most important thing when we are choosing platforms or making business decisions. We cannot compromise on this. Then we can talk about the rest of the details.
Thank you very much for your time.
