http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9150&Itemid=59 By Edge | |
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| The makers of Project Gotham Racing, MotorStorm, Sega Rally and Dirt tell all. | |
Impossibly shiny cars, breathtaking speed, blue skies and roaring engines: racers were once videogaming’s ultimate expression of realism crossed with escapist fantasy. But while other genres have rapidly evolved, from the thunder and bluster of modern FPSes to the vast scope of RPGs, racers seem stuck in the same old routine of race upon tournament. Even the biggest sellers don’t seem to be performing as well as they used to: once a perennial fixture at the very top of the UK Christmas chart, Need For Speed managed only fifth place as 2007 turned to 2008. Buried in the blizzard of last year’s big releases, Project Gotham Racing 4 has failed to ignite the same fervor as its predecessors. And can Gran Turismo’s luster really sell PS3 the same way it once did PS1 and PS2? And yet a few titles are breaking out of the mould, incorporating new ways of presenting races and multiplayer experiences, and hinting at how the genre can reinvent itself. To see how they view their place in videogaming and what challenges lie ahead, we went karting with Nigel Kershaw, game director at MotorStorm maker Evolution Studios, Gareth Wilson and Gerard Talbot, lead designers on the Project Gotham series at Bizarre Creations, Guy Wilday, studio director at Sega Racing Studio, and Gavin Raeburn, executive producer on Codemasters’ Dirt and the forthcoming Race Driver: Grid. Which racing game do you most respect right now? Raeburn: Test Drive Unlimited. I’m still playing and really enjoying it. It’s not really a racing game, more of a driving game, but even though what you’re doing is pretty much the same as any racing game, it’s packaged in a much more authentic way. In a traditional racing game it’s mode after mode – Test Drive presents things in a more encompassing and believable way. Wilson: The start, when you’re queuing up for the plane to go to Hawaii, that’s excellent – you do feel that you’re this person that’s gone on the plane, bought a house, a car. Talbot: One of the funny things about that game is it is set as a big multiplayer racing game but I don’t think I ever tried the multiplayer – you’d see people, it’s an online persistent world, though I didn’t actually play anyone. Kershaw: I suppose it’s an early prototype of what persistent racing could be. It never came off as well as it ought to have done. Raeburn: You were encouraged to play multiplayer, but you didn’t have to. You mention the importance of Test Drive’s presentation – how crucial do you think it is in terms of developing the genre? Raeburn: It helps give a structure; it gives what you do a meaning. If you compare Burnout Paradise to the older ones, what you’re basically doing is similar but the open world adds a whole new dimension. It’s certainly something that I’d like to push with our future racing games. Talbot: ‘Why am I doing this?’ comes up in design meetings a lot, and it’s a real hard one. Wilday: It’s fundamental, isn’t it? You focus your efforts on making the gameplay experience during the races, and you’ve got to come away from them feeling that that was what you enjoyed. Obviously, in Sega Rally we focused on the whole deformation thing more than anything else. Progression, or the reason to play on, is with game modes and challenge from online, but I think the driving has got to be right first. Does that mean simulation is still a really important consideration? Talbot: I think racing games are stuck between two groups. On one side is the sports sim, the Forzas and the Gran Turismos and Race Drivers. On the other there’s arcade racers, the MotorStorms, Sega Rallys. Kershaw: Yeah, we found that with World Rally Championship. It was trying to be a simulation, and it never broke into the mass market. While the race fans loved it, they’re only a small subset of what you can sell a good game to. Talbot: Most people don’t like racing games. Kershaw: They just want something that’s fun, that gives you the adrenaline rush. Wilday: Do you not think that these things are cyclical, though? For me there was a period where that motorsports thing was it. It was what everyone wanted and played. I think that they then grew tired of it and wanted something else, and at the moment we’re definitely at a point where racing games are trying to do something different – more fantasy based, less realistic – more entertaining, in a sense. I don’t know, but I can see it going full circle. Kershaw: The realism thing isn’t so much the issue any more. Our handling models are as realistic as we want them to be. We’re not trying to make someone be a rally driver, we’re going through the motions and giving them the perception of being one without having to be that good at it. It’s about creating emotion and feeling rather than simulation.
Raeburn: It’s about being a good driver without having the pain, but people don’t want to know that when they’re playing.
Kershaw: Yeah, absolutely, you’ve always got to pander to that hardcore market, that vocal subset that’s into suspension settings and how much your tires are toed in.
But Gran Turismo is still being sold as the Real Driving Simulator – it’s still seen as an ideal. Talbot: I think that when it comes down to it, racing is a sport. Our history leads us to realistic racing.
Raeburn: All the research we’ve done says that hardcore simulators are selling less and less. I wouldn’t call Gran Turismo a racing simulator. It’s more like collecting cars.
Kershaw: Car porn. It’s aspirational.
Wilson: Cars are desirable objects and most people will never get to drive a Lamborghini. So if they can get close in a game, that’s satisfying some inner need. But we all simulate – underlying Gotham is a proper physics engine. We spent all our time trying to unmake it for the game.
Kershaw: Exactly the same with MotorStorm – we’ve got a pretty realistic handling model, but we detune it to get it to do what we want it to do.
Because you need your game to appeal to the greatest number of people possible.
”I do worry that it might become an extremely niche area unless we work out a way of making it become more massmarket.” Wilson: Actually, I kind of fear for racing games in the future. Look at last year – there’s been so many quality games that aren’t racing games. Even me, as a racing game lover, there’s a lot of good games I’d buy ahead of pretty much any of them, even though there’s been quality there, too. I do worry that it might become an extremely niche area unless we work out a way of making it become more massmarket.
Wilday: You’re right, I completely agree, and it’s throwing down a challenge to us that we’ve got to up our game. Wilson: The focus for our new title for Activision is: how can we make a really, really big-selling racing game, something that people will buy over Call Of Duty 5? Talbot: I was talking to a friend recently and he said that he didn’t know why he should play all these other racing games when there’s Grand Theft Auto. I said that GTA isn’t really a racing game, and in fact the driving isn’t as good as most racing games. He was, like, “Well, you get to do all these other things as well”. Burnout Paradise and Test Drive have now played with the idea of driving in an open world, like GTA. How do you think it’s been working? Raeburn: It needs refining a bit. But GTA isn’t just a sandbox, and nor is Test Drive. It’s linear missions that you can explore but have control over doing. Wilday: But the perception of the player is that it’s completely open-ended and that they can do what they like. ”If you have licensed circuits and championships, it totally dictates the structure you can have.” Wilson: It’s very hard to design circuits – you lose a certain amount of racing in a free environment. Test Drive is a really good game, but the driving would never really compete with a circuit racer. I think Burnout has tried by making a load of circuits in an open world, but you don’t get things like turn markers. Me and Ged spent hours in every circuit in PGR making sure every apex and turn marker is right, but you can’t do that in an open-world racer because you don’t know where they’re going to turn. Immediately it becomes more of a driving game than a racing game. But then your average gamer isn’t that bothered, and that’s why they’re happy with GTA, even if you’ll unfairly fail a race by missing that checkpoint, hitting that lamppost.
Raeburn: It’s all very hard to do with a circuit racer. If you have licensed circuits and championships, it totally dictates the structure you can have. Wilson: Can I ask a question, actually, about Dirt? Traditionally, Colin McRae games have sold well in Europe but not the US, and it seems like Dirt has done really well in the US – why? Raeburn: It’s got a lot more American content, and it was definitely geared for there. Kershaw: They really don’t get rally driving. You didn’t push the rally driving side. Raeburn: It looks a lot like MotorStorm – you’ve got off-road segments, damage, and that’s what we pushed. You’ve got to sell stuff that people want to buy into, but damage, crashing, maiming – that’s what people like. It’s hard to sell ‘being a racing driver’. |
Wilson: A lot of people don’t want to be racing drivers.
Kershaw: Americans have a very different attitude to their racing drivers – look at Nascar. They’re all country heroes, and people in the northern states think they’re hicks. But it’s a good spectator sport – I worked on the IndyCar series which is about turning left for 200 laps, but it’s great to watch because you get the spectacle of people crashing and you can see the whole track. But to actually play it – I actually fell asleep when I was tuning the game.
Wilson: But the crashing is good.
Kershaw: Yeah, but the thing is that crashing is the best part of motorsports, but in games it’s a negative. We tried to address it by making the crashes look really nice in MotorStorm, and Burnout did really well to exploit it with aftertouch and Crash Mode.
There’s a lot of variety in today’s racing games – Dirt features many different events and cars.
Raeburn: But you’ve got to be really careful – variety is a dangerous thing. In one of the Race Drivers we had lawnmowers but only because we had a deal with Honda and got money for it. It was supposed to be hidden away, but it got out and it got into every review of the game, and it’s not necessarily what people want to do.
Wilday: Going back to Gran Turismo, it’s a value-for-money proposition – all those cars. For me, the reason why Forza 2’s been selling so well is that it’s a good deal for all the content you’re getting. With the different distribution methods you have now it’s going to be very important to consider how you launch and at what price. But if you have a well-balanced, well-put-together arcade racer and you’re competing with these games with a lot of content, it’s tough.
Raeburn: It’s what you do with the content, as well. In Gran Turismo the cars are a bit disposable – you don’t get to see them all, and that’s a bit of a shame.
Wilday: But I don’t think it’s important to players that they don’t see all the cars.
Talbot: But with something like Need For Speed, there aren’t many cars at all.
Wilson: There are some games that can sell on the premise alone, and Need For Speed nailed that. I don’t know how well the franchise will continue…
Kershaw: I think it’s tailing.
Wilson: And in Pro Street they’ve dropped straight into Gotham and Race Driver territory – simmy arcadey stuff. It’s strange. It was a hugely successful brand.
Going back to the point about downloadable content, can you see yourselves ever creating one game for a long period that’s supported by lots of new content?
Talbot: I hope not.
Raeburn: Why would you have that? Look at movies – you don’t have one movie about war, you have loads of different takes on it.
Wilson: There are always new takes on racing, though there’s also room for downloadable content.
Raeburn: Look around the table – we’re all making very different racing games. We’re getting fewer and fewer, but the ones left are getting bigger and better and getting more sales, but the small fry are disappearing.
Talbot: It’s like the Gran Turismo thing – we can all respect what it did, especially at the beginning, and what it turned into. But everyone’s looking for the next thing. We’ve seen Forza’s take on it, and some people are already asking what the next thing is going to be. Looking around this table, I don’t think that any of us are completely happy with our tech, visuals, gameplay. Especially visuals.
What, in a technical sense, would you like to achieve next? Are you focused on graphics, or can new tech add to the driving simulation side?
Talbot: The physics side is just about interpretation. A large part is premise and content – these will change and have changed a lot. We’re putting characters into the games.
Kershaw: AI opponents. Not in terms of them getting better but them being more interesting, acting along what the Hollywood script of a racing game would be, or make interesting emergent events happen more often, or better. That’s where a lot of our effort is.
Talbot: I think there’s still space for the simulator. I think it’s about the nitty-gritty - the visuals. There’s a lot more to do.
Wilson: That reminds me, one thing that was good about Pro Street was the smoke. That was good.
Raeburn: One thing we’ve really pushed in Grid is particles and getting shit on to the screen. You’re racing around a track, and a lot of track racing games seem very lifeless. You want to get particles and smoke just hanging in the air.
Wilson: If you’ve ever been to a proper race day the smoke and the noise is unbelievable and I still don’t think we’ve captured that.
Raeburn: You go and record cars on the track but it doesn’t capture what it’s really like. You feel it in your chest, and it’s hard replicating that.
Wilday: The home cinema thing – hi-def and surround sound – is driving that technology up and gives a better opportunity to start getting that sound out of a basic 5.1 system.
Raeburn: Though we’ve had tests of our games with team members taking them home and we find that they’ve got speakers pointing at the ceiling and configurations wrong.
Wilday: One of the big things you get when you’re driving in real life is the feedback.
Kershaw: We’ll never achieve it in games.
Wilday: Well, you say that, but rumble is now a standard, which is giving some information back. That’s a big area for feeding back what’s happening because it’s such a big part of driving.
Wilson: There’s that force feedback bodysuit thing made at MIT.
Kershaw: We need something like that to make racing games more realistic.
Raeburn: There’s force feedback on sticks.
Talbot: Force feedback steering wheels are good, but not many people use them. It’s a shame, really. It’s a big thing, though, and not many casual players are going to buy it.
Wilday: It’s interesting what the supercar makers are doing with their cars. Ferrari have got this little switch on some of their steering wheels that allows inexperienced drivers to pull off stylish driving techniques like drifting.
Wilson: It’s fuelling the whole aspirational side of cars. And racing games are a great thing for for car manufacturers for that.
Your games epitomize what supercars are to most people.
Talbot: We’re interactive Top Gear, that’s what we’ve become to a lot of people, especially Gran Turismo. How many times have we heard people saying that they’ve tuned up their VW Beetle to 1,000 horsepower, but it won’t go around corners? They’re allowing people to have these experiences. But in some ways, technically we’re right at the beginning. The new deformation stuff that was in Sega Rally. The collisions in Dirt – it felt like hitting things. And these things will become standard. Persistent skid marks have become standard.
Wilson: The in-car view when we did PGR 3 – we had to convince everyone that it
should be included because the poly-count and all that was huge. And now it seems that to have a professional simulator, you have to have this in-car view, or photo mode. Gran Turismo started that.
Wilday: And everyone knows it has to look as good as yours.
Raeburn: That’s what I say to the team: if you’re going to put it in, make sure it looks better than what you see elsewhere. It’s interesting what you said about cockpit view – we were considering it for Dirt, and the branding department demanded that it should go in.
Wilson: Every time a new game comes out we think, oh God, we’ve got to get all
this into our game, too. We’re really pushing at the limits of technology with racing games.
Kershaw: Yeah, getting things moving as fast as they need to be, and on the multiplayer side the challenges are huge. In an FPS players might have moved five feet in a second; in a racing game they may have moved 50 or more.
Raeburn: And streaming worlds with fast cars is very difficult. Call Of Duty 4 apparently had fewer polygons than its predecessor but it has bump mapping and all that to make it look good. You can’t do that with a car. It just has to have that detail.
How are you looking at multiplayer at the moment?
Kershaw: A lot of people are actually worried about playing online. People kick my arse at MotorStorm. I can’t even compete. But it gives you that longevity, which is good for the downloadable content we’re selling.
Raeburn: And you don’t just want a hardcore crew playing it after a year. That’s why you need grading and different levels. And it needs to be transparent, like Test Drive – you need to almost just stumble on a race. You shouldn’t need to go to separate lobbies.
Wilson: When we were working on Gotham, Microsoft gave us some very detailed statistics on who played online and when. The vast majority of Europeans played in unranked custom games, and the vast majority of Americans played in ranked competitive games. I think if you want to appeal to the American audience you have to go for aggressive multiplayer, though it does tend to put off the Europeans and Japanese, who want this inclusive team-type stuff.
Wilson: Particularly in racing, people are so downright dirty online. In Gotham we have terrible trouble with people deliberately bashing into people, stopping in the middle of the road, working in pairs.
Raeburn: I found that too in Gotham, and it’s the same for Race Driver of old – there’s that fear of the first corner. Everyone backs off because the first one through will be shunted. It really ruins the experience.
Talbot: You can do what Burnout did and encourage it.
Raeburn: You can reduce shunting strength, or increase damage to shunters. It’s artificial stuff that you don’t really want to do, or add rules – penalties – but that can frustrate people as well.
Talbot: We had a funny one with PGR4 – originally motorbike riders weren’t able to
fall off because we thought players would think it unfair, but it was the opposite – they wanted to, even though their race would be ruined. We had to say: “OK, it’s your game!”
If the market for racing games is getting smaller because people are getting what they want from the idea of driving cars around in GTA, do you feel optimistic about the genre’s future?
Wilday: I think, fundamentally, racing fast cars is fun, and people are always going to aspire to doing it. There are other aspirational gaming experiences, of course, and we’ve got to continue to compete with creating compelling games that will do that. We’ve got to innovate, because that’s what they’re doing in other genres.
Wilson: It’s almost as if racing games have gotten away with not innovating for a long time. If you look at the singleplayer structures of the games that the people around this table have been creating, they’re very similar in design to what wass done ten years ago. The challenge is to create a really compelling premise and world in the way that other genres have, and move on. We’ve always fallen back on our graphics and technology, but it’s really how the story unfolds and who you are as a person, and how that progresses is the thing that racing games need to catch up on.
Kershaw: We need to take more risks.
Talbot: I certainly want to play the next racing game. I’ll play them all, because I like them, not just because I’m a designer.
Kershaw: Ultimately, racing games are a niche, but a really large one. And occasionally Need For Speed or Gran Turismo will break out of the niche and go absolutely massive.
Wilson: They’re 12 percent of sales, aren’t they?
Raeburn: Yeah, in the US. And if there are only five or six big sellers, that’s a lot of money.
