Psykoboy2
05-10-2010, 11:39 AM
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Last Friday I had the opportunity to sit in on a conference call with Nick Baynes, the game director of the upcoming action racer Split/Second from Black Rock Studios and Disney Interactive.
Out of the 5 questions I submitted, only one of those was actually asked (care to guess which one?) while the others were answered eventually through other questions sent in by other gaming sites.
Within the interview you'll learn a lot more about the game and how it works, plus other types of game modes, a bit on the multiplayer and what it takes to make a game where you attack your opponents by blowing up the environment around you.
You can listen to the interview here (http://ingamechat.net/audio/SPLITSECOND.mp3) or read it below.
Psykoboy2
05-10-2010, 11:39 AM
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1173/4592289745_87f3d19109.jpg
Pure was a big hit with critics, why make something as vastly different with Split/Second instead of making a sequel?
We’ve always had 2 teams; one was doing Pure while another worked on Split/Second. Our goal has been to stay in the realm of racing but to not become stale with it. Pure pushed things in a certain way for off road racing and Split/Second is doing the same with street racing.
Is Black Rock planning to just pave their way with new IPs or will they revisit previous franchises in the foreseeable future?
We’re always looking at new ways we can bring fun and exciting new game play to racing games. We’re very proud of the games we make and we wouldn’t rule anything out in the future.
How long have you had the idea for Split/Second? Any ideas from Pure that spilled over into development?
Split/Second is a core concept that’s been around for about 5 years now. When we first found out about the tech specs of the current generation of consoles we asked ourselves what could we do that hasn’t been previously done on the other consoles. We looked at other racing games out there and a lot of them do really great customization and really great car damage but all the innovation seemed to be around the vehicles. We saw the environment as an area of untapped potential that the new technology would really allow us to exploit.
The core concept was just what if you were driving around a dynamically changing track. Over the years through the number of ideas we had, we asked ourselves how it was changing – weather condition or what? And through that we came up with the power plays and the TV show and it became Split/Second.
Where did the team get the idea to use a reality TV show as the setting and will players need to do more than just win races?
One of the great things with the TV show concept was that we wanted to go larger than life and get bigger and bigger. So players, as they advance in the game will be constantly blown away by the scale and the effects and set pieces. I don’t think racing games need much of a back story but I think you have to have some kind of context and this TV show idea fits in that whatever they want to do, they’re on a set, they can build it and blow it up and rebuild it the following week. It’s given a lot of scope to push reality a little bit further than putting it in a more realistic setting.
Where did the idea for Split/Second come from? I have to believe at some point the idea of “What if Michael Bay made a video game?” must have come up?
Well yeah. Right from the start we were looking at action movies. We’d sit around the office and imagine if a big Hollywood action director was given NASCAR to direct. And to imagine these kinds of scenarios... To blend things like NASCAR or street races in Monaco along side big Hollywood action sequences. So yeah, very good observation.
Sticking with movies, I saw an interview with one of the members of the team where he compared the story elements of Split/Second to shows like “24” and “LOST”. How did you draw inspiration from the episodic-leave-them-wanting-more television to create the back-story of the game?
In the tracks we’ve got in the game, there’s so much hidden to be unlocked on each track. So as you’re driving around normally in a racing game the environments are just there to look. As you go through the season in Split/Second and unlock new episodes. Each episode often has new game modes or new tracks. Where we were looking at things like “LOST” for example, this concept of having almost like cliffhangers and real big teases at the end of the episode - so you’ve just unlocked a new episode and you’re shown a trailer in the style of “next time on…” and implies what’s going to happen but doesn’t quite show you. So you really want to carry on and play that net episode. So when we talk about those kinds of TV shows, it reminds me that what we’re trying to go for is – if you’re at home watching a DVD box set of one of those shows and maybe it’s late at night and you’ve seen a few episodes and it finishes on a cliffhanger. You check the time and think you should go to bed but think oh it’s only 40 minutes I’ll go ahead and watch it. We’re trying to have this same kind of experience where you get to the end of an episode and qualify for the next episode and then you think…oh I want to see that new power play I want to see that new track. So that kind of pulls the player through the season in the way those TV shows do.
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What were the references the dev team used for Split/Second? I see hints of a Death Race remake in the game but was there any others?
To list out all the references we’ve taken in the game would probably take the rest of this call. The team has looked at, over the course of this project, probably every action movie that’s been made in the last 20 or 30 years and I think as you go through and play each track, you’ll see nods to this film or that film.
Are there any specific chase scenes from a movie you’ve tried to replicate? If so, what are they?
It’s kind of a combination of sorts. It isn’t directly this scene or that scene. For example, one of our modes called Survival has you driving around in a storm drain with these big rigs throwing massive barrels at you and you have to weave around them. I would say with that, very clearly, we’re influences by the car transporter in “Bad Boys II”, also in “The Island” there is another similar sequence, and the famous “T2” scene with the truck chasing Arnie on the bike down the storm drains. And I think all those things have influenced just that one game mode. But yeah, there are specifics we can call out.
As I understand it, each race is an episode of a fictional TV show, so if you lose the race…is the season over?
No, absolutely not. If this were real and you lost the race, then yeah, you’d be sent home, but thankfully this is a video game so you try again. I mean the way it’s structured is that each episode is made up of a number of qualifying events and then a final “elite” race at the end. So in the qualifying events you are racing against other competitors who are each trying to qualify for that final event as well and you’ve got a target number of points you are trying to accumulate across those modes to unlock and gain access to this elite race. When you’ve done that and get to the elite race, this is when you are driving against the expert drivers. In those races the player needs to finish in the top 3 to be invited back to the next episode.
What were some of the biggest difficulties the team encountered while working on Split/Second?
There were 2 big areas that were a challenge. One was having the kind of tech that could render on the screen these believable, massive explosive events. That was a huge investment of time and resources for us. I think the hardest thing was making these tracks. Normally, you just go smoothly to basic track concepts and layouts and then just kind of dress it with scenery. Whereas with Split/Second you need to lay down the base animations for the power plays and it goes back to the animators and the visual effects artists and then back to the designers. It’s a much longer drawn out process.
What is there to the game beyond the racing and destructible track variations, as if people need more, to keep players interested?
In terms of the race mode – every race does feel different since power plays can be triggered by anyone on the track. We have found that it’s really a constantly changing experience that I think keeps you coming back. And there’s also other game modes – race mode, elimination mode, detonator (which is our version of time trial), survival mode, and we’ve even got game modes where you are being chased around the track by helicopters firing missiles at you. I think for a racing game there’s a lot of variety in there.
How tough was it to come up with objects and environments on the track that would look harmless in a real world situation, but can become destructive in the Split/Second universe?
It was interesting. Some tracks and environments lend themselves to it much better than others. And in truth, one of the reasons the environments in the areas we’ve chosen to set races in is really around what lends itself well to it.
It was the ideas that were hard. It was pretty easy to come up with things to blow up. But doing it in a way that was going to be fun and the player could learn. That was tricky. Sometimes it’s easy to say one thing but to implement it was another.
Is the environment wholly destructible in the terms of any building that can obstruct and change the course or only certain ones? And was it difficult to create a truly destructible environment?
There’s a degree, or quite a large degree, to the way things can be triggered in terms of…we’ve defined the areas that can be destroyed and where the routes can be open. The reason for that…I think if we’d taken this as an FPS, then yeah you can have a great degree of freedom in what you can blow up. I guess because you can react to things much more easily. But when you are driving around a track at a 150mph or more, and the players can potentially blow anything up in front of you, then it’d be very hard for us to ensure it was going to be a fun experience and ultimately it needs to be fun. If you are going to do all of that, we need to be sure the player can make it around that obstacle and have fun. We’ve tried to keep it balanced between loading these environments with set pieces that when you play it you get the sense that you can just blow anything up and trigger all of these power plays, but in truth, there is a certain extent of control there to make sure it’s all a fun experience.
When a title like this combines this kind of destruction with physics, odd things happen. Where there any strange and hilarious bugs happening during development?
The funny thing really, that happened often was the nature of the change collisions and physics when you change the environment in front of you. It had some kind of unpredictable effects. A car might hit in a wall and suddenly you find it launched into outer space. Or the other thing – we’ve got one track where you make boulders fall down the side of the track. At one point, it was like a giant soccer ball falling down and bouncing around.
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Has the team been able to lock down a solid frame rate at this point?
Oh yeah. With a game like this it’s always a moving target and very hard to get that frame rate. But right now we’ve decided that 30 fps to start the game and we’re really solid on that now with all the platforms.
How did the HUD design come about and how does it affect the way people play?
One of the things we tried in development was to not just do things for the sake of it. By that I mean – quite often in racing games it does seem certain aspects are implements just because other games do it. A lot of racing games will have a lot of unnecessary information on the screen. In an arcade racer, they’re not really that important. They are good to know at the end of the race, but while you’re racing, it’s not a fun thing to keep looking at. You remove that and you’ve removed about a 5th of your screen in the top corner. We first looked at what we actually needed for the player to play the game and have a good experience and the other thing was that this game is all about the environment as much as it is the cars. It seemed kind of crazy to cover up all these environment with loads of unnecessary HUD information. So we had this idea to bring it all down to the back of the car, which frees up the rest of the screen. It was one of those things that as soon as it went in, generally we’ve had a really positive response to it so it’s been really great.
What is one aspect of the game the team is most proud of in terms of features?
The HUD is defiantly one of them. It’s hard to talk about without sounding a bit too arrogant. But to pick one thing the HUD is something we’re proud of. I feel that’s an area where a lot of racing games have just done the same thing again and again and again without questioning why and I’m really proud of everyone on the team that we challenged that and I’m sure we’ll see other games that will copy us in the future.
The other thing we’re most proud of is the power play mechanic – the concept of using the environment to change the course and as a weapon on your opponent because again it was really something that hadn’t ever really been done before and it provides so many challenges from game play to physics to visuals and frame rate. I think the fact that it’s all come together and does work really well when you are driving around the track – I think we’re all immensely proud of that at the studio.
What was the most outrageous suggestions for an explosion or triggered event that was nixed during development?
There’s quite a few. When you come up with these kinds of ideas you naturally want to push it further and further but you don’t want to push it too far. I think the wackiest idea I can remember was one idea which was a giant one-armed bandit; fruit machine where you triggered that and all the barrels spun around and if you got 3 explosions than it blew up which, to be honest, would probably work better in an “Itchy & Scratchy” cartoon. It was a nice idea anyway.
Was there ever a time when the game was remarkably different or has it been the same since the start of development?
Often concepts do change a lot from start to finish and the core concept, to be honest, we put it together about 3 years ago and it has stayed really consistent and we’re really proud of that. The biggest difference really is when we very first started the game as to how things would change…was it because of the weather or did players change things. But the core game play mechanic and concept of what we were trying to achieve was amazingly consistent throughout development.
Many racing games today are designed for hardcore enthusiasts or for younger generations. Do you tend to balance the game for a wider audience that is somewhere in the middle?
That’s defiantly what we’ve tried to do. It kind of sounds like a cheesy answer I think everyone would say but the first thing we did was…we have a got a very deep physics model underneath the handling of the cars. So, someone who’s a hardcore racer they can play and have some of the subtleties of maybe a hardcore racing game and control their drifts and that sort of thing. But we’ve layered enough driving aides on top that someone who just picks up the cars at the start of the game, they can control it and have fun as well. We kept the power play mechanic down to a couple of buttons – no lock on targeting or reticules – it’s very simple that something is on screen and you press a button. But again, the draft elements and the speed, it’s all happening and it works well with that. The other main reason as well to keep it open to more people…we’re going to get some people who may not be racing fans, and fans of other genres. Maybe this is their first racing game in a number of years. We didn’t want to alienate those guys so I think it is a pretty good balance and I hope everyone will have a pretty good experience.
Was it challenging to make a game with so much destruction without the obvious use of weaponry used in other car combat titles?
Sort of yes and no. We talked at the start about some kind of weaponry and it almost, in some regards felt like the easy option in terms of explaining why these things were blowing up. It’s been done before. This kind of goes back to why having a TV show is such a great back-story because ultimately anything happening is because a team of stunt coordinators has built it all and you’re just triggering it. So, yeah, it really did open up our creativity a lot.
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What’s the most glaring feature of the game that you want players to get right away?
Well I guess this is quite easy really…it’s the power play mechanic. When people realize how effective they are, the difference between success and failure, it massively changes the race experience...the game experience. We spent a lot of time focus testing the game and observing people playing it and being our own biggest critics and seeing what was working and what wasn’t, I’d say yeah. A couple of months ago there were still people playing who couldn’t understand why they had to trigger power plays, so that was a real area we spent a lot of time tweaking to make sure they were as effective as possible and the communication to the players was as specific as possible. So yeah, really, it’s what the game’s all about and if people don’t get that right away then they aren’t really getting the full experience.
Black Rock has now made two arcadey racers. Is that something the team has a fear of being typecast as or is it what the studio really wants to focus on? Will we ever see you step into another genre or are racers where your collective hearts lie?
I think we’ve deliberately focused on the racing genre. Before we were Black Rock we were a studio called Climax Racing so we’ve been making racing games since 99 or before. We’ve had a lot of experience in it. Also, if you look at some of the best studios around the world, whatever the genre, they do tend to be the studios that focus on one genre and that is something we definitely want to learn from and follow. Having said that I think across genres…they are blending all the time. A lot of action games are featuring vehicles now and in the same way, we’re featuring more action than racing games in the past. I think the studio and maybe the genre as a whole may move into other kinds of genres but we’re a racing studio and that’s at the heart of what we do.
What were some of the locales that were considered and then scrapped?
That’s a good one. Its funny cause some of them kind of got merged into the others. For example, we thought a casino or Vegas like environment would look really stunning. But as happens, you have an idea and you develop it further and find that visually it’s great but it doesn’t offer anything new to the game play compared to say…downtown. So we decided to spend our time elsewhere. If you look at the downtown track as it is now, you’ll see the odd influence that you may realize it came from the casino idea.
What is the greatest difficulty in creating a racing game? Is it the physics of the cars and their interaction with each other and the environment? Is it creating a unique set of options to keep players interested? Is there more focus on multiplayer or single player game play?
Wow...that’s about 7 questions in one. I think the greatest difficulty, when it comes down to it is the AI. Ultimately, the very nature of a race is you against opponents. Obviously you want people to win, but at the same time you want the AI to give you a challenging race. If the AI is tweaked too much it can feel unfair, so just getting that balance right is the real challenge. Be it a game like ours or a NASCAR game or any racing game really. Things like physics and everything else…individually they are all very achievable but getting the AI balance right is the thing that takes the most time. You work on it more than any other areas of the game, right up until it goes out the door.
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Please describe the different forms of power plays and how they work.
There are 3 or 4 different types in terms of logic behind them. The way it works, to trigger these power plays you have to earn enough power and that’s what you see behind the car, split into 3 segments. You earn power by drifting, drafting, jumping…all those kinds of things. When you’ve got one segment of the three full, it enables all the level 1 power plays on the track. These are sort of the small scale and by that I mean like a gas station blowing up. If someone in front of you is in a danger zone of one of these level 1 power plays a blue icon will appear above their car, you press the button and then trigger the power play. You can also use the level 1 power play on a short cut or cut corners. These are often warehouse doors you can open or things you can life to drive underneath as in the demo.
If you save up and get all 3 segments full, you can choose to drain that all at once to activate a level 2 power play signified by a red icon above the car. These really are much bigger in scale.
The final type are the route changer and if you approach one of these you can drain your entire power bar and create something that really is, in scale, in my opinion the biggest set pieces ever done in any genre of video game. They completely open a whole new route. While it looks spectacular it can also take out multiple opponents in front of you and provide a new route for opponents behind you to drive on and they are often shorter routes than the previous ones. So if you’re in 5th or 6th place, then activating one of these gives yourself a mighty big advantage to catch up.
It really does add a bit of strategy as to how and when you’re going to use your power.
What is the average amount of power plays in a single race/event?
It’s hard to say. Each track has about 14 or 15 rather big ones and you’ve also got multiple small ones around there as well. In the course of a race, there’s some that can be triggered once around the track while others that can be done on multiple laps. So in terms of how many times you are going to see power plays used in a race it comes down to how much power you and your opponents earn, I guess.
So do more power play options open up as you progress in the race?
Yeah, exactly. Partly because the more you race the more power you earn, but you open a brand new route and there’s always multiple power plays within there as well. You can play through the game for a good 6 or 7 hours, go back to a track you played at the very beginning and you’ll still see new content you haven’t seen previously cause maybe you’ve unlocked a route you didn’t go down the first time or an opponent triggered something you haven’t seen before. The tracks really do keep on giving.
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How do you make sure power plays don’t turn into the “blue shell” of the game?
The way we balance that is by only allowing you to trigger the on opponents you can see in front of you who have the icon above them. If you are at the back, you can’t blue shell everyone in front of you or just the lead opponent. In the same way, if you are in first, you can’t trigger power plays since no one is in front of you. When the players could do that, they would trigger all the power plays in front of them making it immensely tough for the people in the back. So we found a really good balance. It tends to bring the pack very close together and on the whole, it’s avoided any blue shell type moments.
At what point did you have to stop adding in destructible structures?
It’s memory more than anything. Every part of the environment that was a power play has multiple parts that have to be loaded at the start, animations, the path course itself. You just eventually run out of memory so that was the limit. At the start of the game we had less power plays that we ended up with cause you know, as you go through with new tech – we learn new tricks. So as development went would have ways of making more memory or shrinking the size of the text. It was a constant battle between artists, designers, and programmers.
Does the game feature racing without the power bar or the ability not to use explosions?
No, it doesn’t. Well, it sort of does in other game modes. Survival has no power plays there but it does have explosive barrels. One of the rules in designing a track was if they were going to be fun and we try to make sure every track is a fun one. When we tried to do anything that didn’t involve power plays in the other game modes, we realized you want them there. The more you use them the more you get used to them and want them to be there.
Why the decision to not have markers on the track like in kart racers to let players know when a power play is available for use rather than have to memorize each landmark associated with them?
One was we didn’t want the player to get a full power bar and drive around the track and learn everything at once cause it’s ultimately about learning the track as you drive around it. One of the fun things is coming back to a track and finding something new. It also comes down to balancing in terms of making the targets over the cars instead of the environment allowed us to make sure we’re keeping the cars together. There’s an old version of the game in the studio where we did try it, but it just didn’t really work as well.
What gives Split/Second the edge over other action oriented racers?
The big thing that I think personally is the intensity of the experience and the way I describe it is that sometime in Split/Second you have races where it just doesn’t let up from the start to the finish. A very adrenaline packed experience. It’s such a rush. I think in a lot of other racing games you get that, but in bite sized pieces. It really does feel like [in Split/Second] you are driving though the mother of all action movies.
How many different vehicles/vehicle classes can we expect in the game? Any concept cars?
There’s quite a bit of variety in the cars in the game. The number is around…just over 25. We decided to focus more on different type of cars than an endless number. The ones we have are very focused. We have supped cars, muscle cars and trucks – those are the three main types. There are other cars in the game that are concept like. And all the cars handle differently with acceleration, speed, and cornering. It’s quite a wide variety.
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Will all of the cars be available from the start or will you need to play the game to unlock some of the cars?
At the start of the game you have 3 cars and as you go through the season, you win cars as you go through.
Will players be able to customize their vehicle or will players be able to choose different kinds of vehicles with different specs?
We don’t have full customization with the vehicles because, really, the focus of this game is as much about the environments as it is cars. What we tried to do is offer a wide enough variety so that every players taste is catered for in some form or another.
Will Black Rock have the ability to update existing tracks via patches or DLC?
That’s a possibility. What we are doing right now regarding things like DLC, we are still finalizing our plans internally. And hopefully exactly what that is will be revealed soon. But yeah, it is something we are looking into.
What are some of the biggest challenges designing a game where the players can change the track at any given time? Were there special considerations for multiple players to be showing parts of the track at the same time?
With the second part of the question it’s not really that big a deal simply because the really big moments tend to be spaced out enough they can be triggered simultaneously. When you’ve got multiple routes open and objects on the floor, it does mean your lap times can vary greatly. It is a big challenge there. In terms of designing the track there are things we wouldn’t normally look at. For example if we know we’ve got a really big moment in front of you, maybe we have a hairpin on that corner to bring the players speed down enough so they can navigate it more easily. There are numerous considerations we had to make so it definitely made it a lot more challenging.
Will cars take damage that will stay visible throughout the race?
Yeah the cars at the start are pristine but by the end of the race they are really scratched up and dirty. When cars do crash, you’ll see the car get ripped apart; doors come off and the front of the car and engine block can get ripped off as well. We don’t think any game has done that before. The only thing that stays intact really is the driver. We didn’t want to have that thing where you have a few crashes and a wheel is loose and your steering is off a bit. There’s some superficial damage that’s consistent but the real big ripping apart moments are saved for the spectacular crashes.
Is there ever a time where you’re surroundings are completely destroyed where you just can’t complete the race?
I’m sure everyone will be glad to hear the answer to that is: No. There’s always a way to navigate around the power play. Some are harder than others but there’s always a way.
How competitive is the AI?
Good question. It’s a big challenge. With PURE we did a special kind of balancing called DCB which dynamically changed the AI’s difficulty as you raced to make sure…one thing we’re against here is rubber banding. We’ve tried to change their ability and difficulty and competitiveness based on your driving skills. So I think every player will have a pretty consistent experience. When you get a certain way through the game these AI cars can be mean.
Since co-op is the new black in gaming, did you guys think of going with a Death Race style co-op: one person triggers and the other one drives?
Co-op is an interesting idea for this game and it’s something that….I think the thing is when you have a brand new concept that you are really trying to prove we wanted to make it work really well for just that single car experience for the car. Co-op is an interesting idea and I think it’s worth investigating further at some point maybe. But for this game we were all about nailing that first car experience rather than trying to run before we could walk.
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What inspiration did FUEL serve to make this title? Did it play a big part?
I guess as in the game that came out last year from Codemasters? Umm, not really at all. By the time that game came out we’d been in development for over a year and a half. In terms of the concept on paper it was really interesting to see, but in execution for however good or bad it was, I don’t think it quite filled that potential really in anyway near the way that we’ve had. I’d say not really at all to be honest.
How much of development time was focused on multiplayer? How many players does the game support offline and online? And how is the experience for PC players?
Because the AI is so difficult to get right, when we were first testing the game play and proving that it worked and that it was fun…a lot of that was done through us playing online because we had some really good network code from when we’d done PURE so we could get our prototypes up and running really quickly with 8 players. Around half way through the project we started focusing more on the single player experience up to the same quality as the multiplayer. Towards the end of the game we went back to the multiplayer to make sure it was balanced.
The races online are 8 players to a race and for offline local we have 2 players split-screen. To not have split-screen would be a shame because you definitely want the satisfaction of landing a plane on your friend’s head while he’s sitting next to you.
Are there any full replays in the game…not the instant?
So the replays…we decided to go for the in-game dynamic replays that the player can choose to trigger themselves by pressing the left trigger. We just found the amount of debris and particles flying around to actually store that whole race as a replay the consoles just couldn’t handle it. It’s too much data.
About career progression. Will I see any personal progressing in regards to stats, abilities, etc.?
The way the progression in that respect goes is you are effectively getting better abilities based on the new cars you are unlocking. In terms of personalization, the number on the side of your car changes based on how far you are going through the game. If you go online, it changes based on your winning streak and how many races you’ve won and players you’ve beaten. The other thing, and this goes across all of your cars, as you go through the single player campaign and do certain achievements and reach certain milestones then you are awarded decals for the side of your car and these are automatically applied, but there’s only about 12 or 14 slots on the side of the care when there is over 50 to unlock. So when you go online and when you play other people online the stickers on the side of your car are a visual representation of your progress through the game.
What kind of modes will be available for multiplayer? Will it simply be one off races or a season mode for online?
We haven’t got the full season modes online, but online you can race, elimination races with power plays, and survival mode.
What was the first video game you ever played?
The first one ever…okay, I don’t know if anyone’s going to actually know what this game is but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s a really poor game called PUNCHY. It was on the commodore 16, which was like the low budget bad version of the commodore 64, and it was a terrible game, but I obviously liked it enough to stick around games and end up making them.
Good stuff. Was your question "Will Black Rock have the ability to update existing tracks via patches or DLC?"?
Excite Truck for Wii did something like power plays (you could create and destroy hills, with often hilarious results for opponents) and Burnout Paradise featured eviscerated cars and engine blocks, but this game sounds really interesting on its own merits whether the designers think they're the first ones to do it or not :)
I have a twit I never use, I guess I'm an old crank. Anyway I guess I just assumed that question based on your predilection for Burnout DLC :)
This game has me intrigued, I was just thinking of Burnout the other day and wanted something new and fun to drive.
Psykoboy2
05-10-2010, 01:10 PM
There's a demo on 360 so give a shot at the very least, although the Survival mode online might be a blast trying to run other cars into the exploding barrels.
As for Burnout, the Criterion guys are teasing some shit on their twitter likely leading to some kind of reveal or bigger tease at E3. Could be Burnout related or Need For Speed related since they are working on something for that franchise.
RandoM51
05-10-2010, 04:13 PM
If the data is too big locally for replays then one wonders how they manage to squirt it through a tiny pipe for MP, in real time. Hmmmm.
My understanding of modern replay systems is that they save the player inputs and however many seeds are used for the various random elements in the game so that instead of saving a full replay all they really do is run the inputs through the normal game with the same seeds so you get the same output.
Makes for relatively tiny replay files.
Psykoboy2
05-10-2010, 10:42 PM
I've always wanted games like these (Burnout, Split Second, Blur) to have the replay system that Halo 3 has. While I really can't stand Halo multiplayer, that replay system is the most beautiful thing.
Psykoboy2
05-11-2010, 09:49 AM
This is the longest interview I've ever seen! I'd like to know who asked this extremely stupid question: "What inspiration did FUEL serve to make this title? Did it play a big part?" That's like asking Lady Gaga if she was inspired by Dolly Parton. WTF?! Apples and oranges in terms of both gameplay and quality.
It was an hour interview and yeah, transcribing the thing took me most of the weekend, and I would tweet at times during that process about some of these questions asked.
Speaking of, that one wasn't one of my questions.
Iron Past
05-11-2010, 10:37 AM
"If this were real life, yes, that would be a problem, but luckily this is a video game."
Ha! I wish more people would answer that way. It's okay, you don't need a contrived story element for everything in your make-believe world. Nice interview so far.
Psykoboy2, was one of you questions the Michael Bay one towards to start?
Psykoboy2
05-11-2010, 10:54 AM
Correct!! In fact, these were the questions I submitted: 1. Where did the idea for Split/Second come from? I have to believe at some point the idea of, "What if Michael Bay made a video game?" must have come up.
2. Given the alternate routes caused by chaos...not to mention all the usual chaos itself, how long did it take on average to build a track?
3. What kind of multiplayer modes can we expect to see?
4. Is there split-screen mutli in Split/Second?
5. Can we expect to see any kind of DLC later on in the life of Split/Second?
Psykoboy2
05-11-2010, 11:07 AM
See, you DID ask a question about DLC, it just wasn't worded the same. I knew that would have been one.
Good questions though.
I kept meaning to come back and reply to you that DLC was one of my questions but wasn't asked specifically...like my Michael Bay one.
PathMaster
05-11-2010, 09:02 PM
Played this at PAX, was actually a lot of fun, once I figured out drifting helped to create those events. It was very satisfying to see my opponents blown away and me driving through the fire from the burning car corpse. ;)
I can see some Mariokart-esque moments with players destroying opponents right before the finish line, thus allowing them to cross first. Mariokart in real cars, go fast through city streets, with environment weapons? Heck yea!
Spigot
05-15-2010, 07:09 PM
Great interview, Scott. I've spent about an hour or so playing the game today and it is awesome. The AI is smart but not rubber-band 'smart' and while I've come in last once or twice, I've also managed to learn the track and drive smarter and go from 5th to 1st. It definately does live up to the 'Burnout done by Michael Bay' analogy quite nicely.
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