From the playstation blog (more details on update)
The Live Page does two cool things:
First, it serves up news about the game – so that’s news about updates and the kind of stuff you’d expect on criteriongames.com, but it’s also news about what’s happening in the game – so, expect to find news about what you’ve done in Paradise City as well as about what’s happening online, like when we hit the 100 millionth crash, for example.
Secondly (and this is the really, really cool bit), it’s where we can, using the Game Calendar, create what we’re calling ‘Live Broadcast Gameplay’. This is how it works:
If you check out the Game Calendar, you’ll see certain dates on it are ringed. These represent ‘Live Events’ that will occur on that day. In the news panel on the Live Page there’ll be a corresponding story telling you about what’s happening on those days.
So, for example:
Saturday 12th July 2008 - Prize Cars Weekend
Where for one day, if you go online we’ll let you try out all of the Carbon and XS Cars (that are normally available only when you complete the offline game) for you to test drive in races and Freeburning.
As this shows – it really allows us to mix up the game, and we’ve got a schedule packed with cool events that stretch out through the summer.
This breaks down as:
Every Tuesday, we’re going to mix things up online by focusing the game around a specific set of cars. For a whole day, your online junkyard will look radically different. This coming week (Tuesday 15th July 2008) will see only Speed Boost cars online.
Every Thursday, we’re going to mix up racing (both ranked and unranked.) Everyone’s junkyard will be as normal, but in races we’ll supply a certain set of cars to race in. This will really level the playing field in racing.
The other great thing about Live Events is that it allows us to award our players with all kinds of cool stuff. So, starting in a few weeks’ time:
Graduation Weekends
In these, we’ll let you try out new cars and new liveries for a whole weekend. Over the course of the weekend, you’ll be able to test drive our vehicle of choice, and if you want to keep it, then we’ll set up an online challenge for you to complete.
The first such event will be our “Mount Olympus” event in which you’ll get to test drive the new Hunter Olympus, and, if you win an Online Road Rage event in it, you’ll get to keep it forever.
We’ll be running multiple Graduation Weekends that will introduce even more vehicles and for those players who participate in all of them, there’ll be a special prize.
So there you go – more exciting and innovative stuff from Criterion Games. Now, let’s see what we can come up with for Week #4!
