While I waited for Simon Barlow, Design Director of DriveClub to quickly scuff down some breakfast as a queue of media was forming on the other side of the closed door, I was kind of struck at the enormity of the project that this man helped create. I really wanted to know more about how far they pushed the detail in the game, and how they got this information without going completely crazy.
Could you please give a small introduction about your position at Evolution Studios?
I’m directly responsible for the User Experience of the game, so basically the interface and what people experience when they play it.
How will the game work with different team members? Will each member have a specific quota to fill during a race? How does this make DriveClub different to other racing games that are coming out for next-gen consoles?
So the clubs [in DriveClub] are a pretty unique feature. Initially the clubs were designed sort of like, clans or guilds, but we decided to take a slightly different approach to that. We wanted some way for players to work together and share together, but if you’re in a guild of 30-40 people, generally you just kind of feel like you’re just part of the machine. You don’t really feel like you have any direct involvement in it, so we limited the positions [available] in the clubs down to six.
They were originally, sort of around 12, but we cut them back to six and we found that through play-testing that’s absolutely the right number. It’s usually you and five of your closest friends, whether you know them in real-life or the ones that you often game with online. They’re people that mean something to each other and therefore you’re more likely to feel part of the club. You’re more likely to have a specific role within the club because there’s only six of you.
We’ve worked really hard to make sure the game is accessible and rewarding regardless of your play-style. We didn’t want people to feel punished if they weren’t the best racer amongst their mates, or the best racer in the club. Maybe they’re the [kind of] person that likes drifting. They might not be a competitive racer, but they love drifting, so we can reward you for that. We score you for drift events and reward you with certain accolades which are like trophies or achievements that’ll unlock new content. Specific accolades gear towards certain play styles, so that if you’re not always the one on top of the leaderboard, you can still contribute to the overall score.
For example, if you’re just a car fan and not even a racing fan and you love Ferraris, there’s a specific award for effectively being loyal to Ferrari by basically unlocking all the Ferraris and driving them on every single track, and racking up mileage which will in turn earn you accolades and points that way as well. The point was, we wanted everyone to feel included. We wanted everyone to feel like they had a specific purpose, that they were contributing some way, and that you were all kind of working together and sharing that experience and in turn, unlocking awards.
Do you expect there to be celebrity teams that will form, and the members take on their own specialised roles, and maybe rise to fame, much like boy bands?
Hahaha, potentially yeah! We’re launching DriveClub as a service. This isn’t going to be a game that we release and you maybe get some DLC down the line and that’s it; this is a different model. The game is launched and that’s just the beginning. We have an ambitious schedule of additional content and updates to the game over the next 12 months, but we also want to work with the community as well. Sharing those cool moments [together] and those great photos, when we launch Photo Mode towards the end of the year, which will be a free update for everybody, we want to promote that content so if there’s people within the community that are the best racer, or best drifter or best photographer, we want to be able to promote that. We want these people to feel like they’ve got a platform to share their content and almost become that celebrity, you know.
There will be several tiers of clubs I think, because each one will be into different things, so maybe they’re the elite racers or there maybe some clubs out there that are infamous for being the absolute best racers, so there may be some high level competitions and challenges between those clubs. The game kind of supports the whole range of players really. We’ve tried to make it as open as possible so that people can kind of explore this stuff and irrespective of what they do in the game, there’s kind of avenues to explore and become famous through one of these.
One of the main shifts of focus for DriveClub is the development of on-road racing as opposed to off-road racing. Could you elaborate on why this shift has happened and what brought that on?
We wanted to make a game based on our dream cars; real-world dream cars, the cars we wanted to drive. We’re all not just gamers, but we’re also massive car fanatics at the studio as well. We’re all petrol-heads and so there’s that kind of inspiration about wanting to take a beautiful car and put it in a beautiful location and just experience the thrill of the raw emotion of driving that car in that location. You just don’t see some of the locations anywhere else, like from the mountains of Chile down into the dense jungle of India. You just don’t see this in racing games, but [that scenery] is so inspirational, and to take your Ferrari and absolutely hoon it round those roads and feel that kind of raw thrill and that connection to that machine and those environments.
That was the thing we were trying to capture. There is variety in environments, but it is a road-based gamer rather than an off-road gamer, mostly because you can’t really off-road in supercars and hypercars. But there is variety in the environments - like in India, the roads are very different to a racetrack in Scotland for example, which is a very bespoke racetrack with a very clean asphalt surface - then you have these dirt roads on some of the Indian tracks. But our heritage, as you pointed out is off-road games, rally and Motorstorm. I think when you play DriveClub you can see it dialling back into that [heritage] a little bit. The cars have a believable weight, they sit in the world really well, which is the basis of making so many off-road games. So I think when you pick it up and play it you can kind of feel the connection with the previous games we’ve made. This is our take of on-road racing and it feels like no other game I’ve ever played.
I was in awe when I saw the in-game weather system this year at E3. The transition from a little drizzle to a full downpour worked much like any real-life storm and was running on a development kit at the time. I compared it to a study I wrote back in uni and I couldn’t find the seams. Does the rainstorm happen in stages, or does it take cues from itself?
The only way we could support weather was by building a full atmospheric simulation. Weather in most video games tends to be an afterthought, or it tends to be a fullscreen effect. Yeah, you could put a shader on the road, and you could have the road get wet and you could put raindrops on the windshield and all the rest of it, but to truly capture the thing that you’ve just described, to make sure that you can’t see the seams, you have to start with the simulation.
We use a full material database, so we don’t just capture just the texture of an object. We know the density of that material, we know how light reflects off it. Every property of that material is simulated. Similarly, the atmospheric conditions are simulated, so we’re accurate for latitude, longitude, altitude, time of day, time of year, even the starfield is accurate for that particular time of year at that location. If you play on the mountaintops in Chile, the atmosphere is so thin up there, there is a particular quality to the light and that obviously changes throughout the time of day.
This is the type of work our full atmospheric simulator does within the engine that we built just for the PlayStation 4. This isn’t just an engine for DriveClub, it’s the engine for our whole lifecycle of PlayStation 4 so it had to be extensible. When we wanted to add to it, weather was the next logical step really, and as trivial as I’m making it sound, it was almost as simple as just adding precipitation to that system. If you’re simulating everything else, and then you add precipitation to it, it interacts with all the other systems.
For example with the rivers in the game, if you put it on heavy rain and you let it rain constantly throughout the race, they will rise because everything interacts. Everything is a simulation. This isn’t an effect that we’ve thrown on to everything; it’s a physical simulation in the world itself. That’s why you can’t tell where the seams are, because the cues are taken from the simulation based on the real world so that players are utterly emmersed in that experience. There’s no one thing that pulls them out, there’s nothing jarring. There is that level of detail because we’re trying to come out of that uncanny valley and reach a level of immersion where the player can experience that raw emotion, that raw thrill of racing these cars. You can’t feel like it’s a game. You have to totally belive it. That’s why we spent so much effort on this system.
The physics in the water itself is fantastic. Did the team spend hours putting water around things, or was the research taken from something else?
I was playing around with Photo Mode the other day and I didn’t even know we did this until I paused it and I was looking right at one of the tyres in the rain and there’s kick-up from the wheel, but looking closer, there was pools of water in the grooves of the tyre and I thought, why have we done this, we’re insane! Surely we’re insane, but I think it was just a by-product of the simulation, it just, it blew my mind [laughs].
[Laughs] Yeah, that’s definitely obsessive! But it sounds like it creates it’s own world in itself. It’s really cool to see the entire simulation work. Has there been any new changes to the weather system that haven’t been already covered that we should look out for?
Well this is the reason why it’s taken so long. I mean, we wanted to get it out for launch but it’s such a big undertaking. The weather’s pretty much done now, there’s a few little optimisations we need to make because we basically had to take all the tracks that we built and we’d optimize them without weather and when we added it in, we’d have to optimise them again without removing anything from the tracks.
The art team are working so hard to just be super-efficient with their tracks now. But the thing that’s actually taking the extra time are the windscreen wipers. Because everything’s simulated, and because all of the cars are so accurate, 1-to-1 recreations of the real cars, that means the windshield and the windscreen wipers have to be 1-to-1 as well. The actual density and thickness of the wiper blades and also the wiper patterns, and the speed of the wipers have to be accurate, because we need to simulate the water droplets as well, and simulate where they’re pooling.
For example if you had two drops of water, they’ll come together and pool, or maybe form a slightly bigger one. All of that, the way it trickles down the windshield depends on speed and things like that. If you then put a windscreen wiper on and start cutting through it, they create particular patterns on the windshield and we had to simulate that as well. We had to get that right. So we’ve modelled every single cars windscreen wipers patterns as well.
So there’s someone sitting somewhere watching windscreen wipers for hours?
Yes... pretty much. Lliterally getting footage of those cars, either from the manufacturers or wherever we can get that footage from, we’ll sit and watch those windscreen wipers and try and recreate that pattern. We’ll get the CAD data first, so we can physically model the windscreen wipers, so we know what the specifications are for that car, but then we need to also observe how that affects the rain and also snow, like, what’s the build-up like? Where does it gather on the windshield, and recreate that as well. So that’s taken time, and we have to get it right. As I said before, if one little piece of the puzzle is missing, the whole game experience falls apart.
That’s incredible!
It’s insane is what it is [laughs]
DriveClub also features the most beautiful tracks I've ever seen on the PS4, the seasons change, and you can change all kinds of weather properties. You can just sit there and take it all in. When the tracks were designed, how did replayability influence the interface?
The replayability was key for us really, even before weather. Just changing the conditions of the lighting makes the track feel completely different. Even if you know a track really well, if it’s your favourite or whatever, if you then start racing it at night, or if you have it so that it starts light and then gets darker as you race, it takes on a life of it’s own. I mean, you know yourself any roads that you drive down are completely different depending on what time of day you drive them. That variety makes the track feel completely different; it feels like a new track. All of these things, yes they look beautiful, but they all affect gameplay dramatically. That keeps everything so replayable and so exciting.
What do you expect when the game launches? Do you think everyone will get into teams and get going? How do you think it’ll actually unfold?
To be honest, I don’t really know. There’s so much in the game and there’s so much to do and so many ways to play it I think it’ll be a real mix. I think some people will already be forming clubs right now, you know, in anticipation of the game’s launch. There are some communities who are already putting these clubs together, whereas the other people are a bit more casual and will probably play the single player tour for a little bit, and they might think about making a club later.
The first thing I’d do personally, is join a club with my friends, just because there are so many exclusive rewards for being in a club, so I want to be part of that as early as I can and that’s what I’d recommend. As a designer I think the core experience of DriveClub lies within the challenge system and is where most of that replayability lies. I think that’s what people will play the most, but a lot of people will play through the tour to unlock some of the cars and see all the locations. It gives you a nice balanced introduction to the game.
As a last question, could you briefly describe how the online multiplayer will work?
Sure! The synchronous multiplier is quite different to what people are used to, mostly because racing games struggle to make synchronous a fun experience by the nature of racing. It’s not like Call of Duty or Killzone or whatever where you could jump into a match midway through and make a couple of kills and still feel like you’ve achieved something and had fun. You can’t jump into a race midway through, you have to be there at the beginning and there’s a problem in racing games that even if you are coming first, it’s a very lonely experience. You might feel like, well, I’m either winning or I’m not. There’s nothing left for me to do here and you kind of rage-quit, or maybe you’ve had to wait 3-4 minutes to get into a race in the first place. We wanted to scrap all of that, so we have a very bespoke matchmaking system where we don’t necessarily have rolling playlists.
Instead, we have scheduled events and we’re upfront with what events are available. It’s this game mode or car class, and it starts in two minutes, and you might be like, oh okay! It’s hot-hatches in India and that’s my sort of thing, or it might not be and you can continue searching. The thing with the rolling playlist is that if you want to stay with the same group of people once the race is over, or choose another event from the event list. The other advantage of having a scheduled list is that we can sync-up match slots.
For example, if one particular event list isn’t as popular as the others, we can dynamically change the amount of time between match-slots and it’s all done automatically. It’s all designed to give each player the absolute best experience, to try and make it feel like it’s always rewarding and always fun. We know that there’s a lot of games out there and there’s a limit to the amount of time people have to play these titles, so we wanted to make sure that DriveClub felt like you were achieving something every time you played.
http://nzgamer.com/features/1372/driveclub-interview-with-design-director-simon-barlow.html
The PS5 Exists.
