Blur Q&A Feature

Bizarre Creations know how to make a good racer.  Having brought the universally acclaimed Formula-One to the PSone, the Liverpool outfit is probably best known for its work on Microsoft's Project Gotham Racing series - along with the hugely under-appreciated Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast.

Activision's acquisition in 2007, however, brought the series to an early end, with the result marking the publishing giant's foray into the racing genre.  Blur marries the studio's expertise with a somewhat unexpected experiment with power-up's and weapons.  Naturally PGR fans were quick to dismiss such a notion, but as we discovered there's plenty of potential to what's lazily been labelled a Mario Kart clone.

TVG attended a roundtable discussion on Blur with Bizarre's Peter McCabe executive producer and Ben Ward in charge of studio communications.

You have a great heritage in racing games and a loyal following; as soon as those guys hear 'power-up', how are you going to assure hardcore fans that you haven't remade Mario Kart?

Ben Ward: This is why we're doing this so early.  We're very sensitive to the fact people are going to see that and go 'Power-ups, what?' 

But really all of the feedback has been really, really good.  Obviously there's going to be purists who think power-ups are the worst thing ever, so that's why you can turn them off.  You can literally disable them in the Custom Race mode, you can literally build everything you want, you can disable all power-ups, if you just want to race on the racetrack, if you just want to race in a race car.  Basically the dynamics underneath is the Gotham style, so you've got the same experience if you want it.

Hopefully we won't be strung up too bad.

Have all the power-ups been decided upon?

Peter McCabe: We've got loads of user tests going on, so twice a week we have people come in-house and over to Activision in the US to give us feedback on the perks, everything in the game, the damage, the AI, and that's something that's still undergoing because we are still pre-alpha.  We get more, we may get less, we may get different types.

BW: We had some guy who was like, 'So you're shipping with 5 power-ups', and I'm like, 'no, we might ship with 20,' and he's like 'so you're shipping with 20', 'well no if it doesn't work properly we'll ship with 3'.

PM: We're seeing what's fun, and what's fun we'll ship with. 

BW: The way that power-ups are introduced in the single-player game is one at a time, so the first couple of races you'll have nothing but nitro's for instance.  You'll get used to one nitro slot and then you might get a mine to set some traps, and eventually you'll get introduced to more and more and more and at some point you'll meet a character who knows how to upgrade your power-up slots and then you can swap between them.  You've got up to five slots.

PM: But again that's subject to change. So we've added slots so you can have multiple perks at once you get added complexity, and toggle between all of those gets overly complex.  If you had 20 you'd be like 'oh I don't know what to do', so we found out that five at the moment is the best to have, three people can just pick up and play it.

You do seem to have an awful lot going on with the game, is there perhaps a danger that you might loose focus?

BW: I know what you're saying because with previous titles, like Project Gotham Racing 4, which was huge and wide as a game there was two or three game modes essentially.  We've learnt our lesson and we're going to stay focussed, that's why you're not seeing things like motorbikes and weather effects, we've deliberately kept these things back to focus on the core thing that it's really good at. 

So telling a story, we haven't done that before but we've spent a lot of time making up for that deficiency.  We've hired really good scriptwriters and for cut-scenes we've got the same people who did the Gears of War cut-scenes.  I think it's a huge job, it wouldn't be Bizarre if it wasn't a huge undertaking, but we should have all bases covered.

The social-networking feature is interesting, can you elaborate on how this pans out; are you plan on expanding this for multiplayer?

BW: The beauty of the social networking is that it doesn't work in a set way, it's not 'just pick this menu' and then this thing will happen.  You might get a message with a challenge associated with it, or you might do things in different ways; for example, if you're in a race and you're really good at setting hot laps and you're good at just pure racing, one of the AI characters will notice that and wills end you a message, 'Join my Time Trial Group' and then you literally just join that and the storyline branches off and you do an extra little group that is just about Time Trial racing.  That's the beauty of it; it's not set in stone how it works.  Traditionally you'll get invites through messages and join a group, but every so often you might get given a new car in a cut-scene or something, it's adding more character to it.

Essentially it will be the same interface for multiplayer, so all of the groups, all of the messaging system will work in the same way.  Originally both modes were combined, but the more focus testing we did we decided to put a split in there because people generally want to decide whether you want to play against other humans or AI.

You spoke during the presentation about a website which will mix into the social networking; with PGR Nations you could take screenshots from the game, are you doing something along similar lines?

BW: The ambition is bigger than PGR Nations, we made a very conscious decision that people... this isn't going to be the next Facebook, we don't have a team of lots of people working on this sort of thing.  But what we have got, the key selling point for the web integration is that it's very tight to the game.  We're building essentially a set of public APIs in the same way as Facebook or Twitter, and saying wherever you want to use this data you can use it; if you want to build a Facebook app, if you want to build an iPhone app, we're going to be publishing tutorials on how the community can build on top of that.  I think it's a more realistic approach then trying to force everybody into one area and do all their socialising in that one place.  It's something we can build on and open over time with an open-data philosophy, a new Web 2.0 way of looking at things.

You've mentioned that you wanted races to be very close; how conscious are you of 'rubber banding' and the bad press?

PM: Our rubber banding is such a small thing, we do have rubber banding but we don't use it to balance the races, we use everything else; we use the personality of the AI so if you're in a difficult race in a difficult location, you'll be there with your friends, your friends won't be attacking you, giving you that extra ten seconds on each lap because you're not getting shunted.

We're balancing it through perks, through AI personalities, through track design, alternative routes, not just rubber banding.  The rubber banding is subtle.  Each difficulty setting - currently we're doing through usability Easy, Medium and Hard - and across those all these little values are slightly tweaked, but it's not like the AI is going to stop in front of you and wait for you to catch up.  If you crash out you get a reset screen currently, again that could change, but the screen allows you to keep up with them, but you've still got to catch them up, they're not going to wait for you.

BW: That is something that Martin [Bizarre's Creative Director] is very keen on there's not like a Blue Shell, or a Golden Mushroom or a Bullet Bill.

PM: It's still a skill based game.

How much did you study Mario Kart?

BW: We looked at Mario Kart a lot, and we looked at every other racing game an awful lot as well.  Mario Kart does certain things very, very well, but it's not as deep as it could be.  The handling is obviously quite arcadey, the power-ups are quite arcadey; one button press, it fires, it has the same effect every time.  We wanted to take things that are good about that, but mix that with things we're really good at: have more realistic handling, have power-ups based on skills that you use. 

All the sort of stuff... a lot of people that have grown up with Mario Kart wish that Mario Kart had done, it's... the PR people don't really understand that it's like an adult Mario Kart, it's want you want from the next-generation of karting games.

Activision acquired you back in 2007, are you finding it quite a squeezed development cycle?

BW: Not really, development started before the acquisition. 

PM: Because we've got a core tech team who'd already done a lot of work making the engine and already making a multi-platform game, we already had a base to start work on.

The core tech team is six years?

BW: Yeah yeah, the core tech team has been going since way before The Club.  The Club was built on core tech, so all of the character stuff, all of the multi-platform stuff, all of that experience has gone into Blur.  That was our shared tech when Gotham was coming up beside it, that was 360 only; if core tech started here than Gotham started way back here.  With Blur they've merged, all the stuff that Gotham was good at has been moved across to shared tech, shared tech got the brand new graphics engine, so everything visually is brand new, we've got a whole new physics engine, the audio system is completely rewritten, everything is bigger and better.

PM: A massive damage system as well.

People don't know when the next-gen is, but is this a scalable game engine that will cater to any incoming consoles?

BW: Don't know, nobody knows what that is yet.  We could probably take... a big part of it is the tool chain, not just the engine at the end but how you get that.  So we've got a bunch of different tools that are really mature.

PM:  Some of the best bits about the new tools that we've been developing is stuff like if you wanted to move an object in the scene or you wanted to move the start position you only need to do a bit of work here, hit build and then start, retry and it's there in the race and it's moved.  You don't have to recompile, you don't have to wait until the next day to see all your stuff, you don't have to export the entire city.  You could have a build that's five weeks old and still be adding in new content to it.

In terms of downloadable content; the Burnout: Paradise model which is to build, and build, and build, essentially made the game a platform; is this something you're interested in?

BW:  Yes, but we won't be doing that.  Simply because we're not set up for DLC, we're set up for game creation.  We will do DLC, we have some capacity to do that; I think it's a very brave thing the Burnout team did, but I think it's still unproven.  I'm not their accountant so I don't know how much money they've made.  What we're going to do is play it a little bit smart and not harder about that, we're going to build our community features so that people who are interested in what the game has to offer, they can build their custom groups, they can insert new gameplay like that and it doesn't take another six months of dev time to wait for that.

It's a really interesting approach what they've done, but I think we've got our own ideas and our own areas that we want to push.

PM: What's really cool is that a year after we launch somebody can make this group that's an amazing Cat & Mouse group, and it might be the best group ever and that came a year after launch and it's in the game and it's the most popular.  And so everybody would start playing again, all new people would buy the game just for that new game mode that's in there, which we didn't need to work on, we didn't need to do anything for, the community made and voted for it.

The damage model appears to be a lot more advanced and you've got power-ups; has this caused any problems with the car manufacturers?

BW: Basically what we did, we've got lots of experience with licensing cars in our previous games, so we put together a list of all the things we wanted: cars are going to flip over, tyres are going to burst, damage all over the entire bodywork of the car, fire in the engine. 

We said all of these things, this is the minimum set of functionality we want and our legal team went out and said this, some of them, if they didn't want to support that we said 'sod off' that sort of thing.  The people who are in the game, the Fords, the BMWs, all those guys, they're the ones who really want to be there, they believe in the concept and they do support these sort of things.  So all of our cars can catch on fire which is incredible, never had that before. 

There are problems, such as, do they want their brands to be exposed to all this damage, but the way we're dealing with it is the same way that Hollywood does, we're making their brands good, we're putting it in front of people, we're literally making their cars a popular, desirable thing.  If it smashes to pieces in the process that's even more exciting.  Everybody in the game has agreed to that minimum functionality.

With the cars being a big part of the PGR titles, this time around there are official cars, but there's also... F1 Transit Van sounds scary; is that the angle, 50/50 on official cars and not necessarily official cars?

BW: They're all licensed, there's only one car that's made up and that's because we wanted to do something mental, so we've got one Bizarre official car.

It's sort of a bigger question, what we did is look at Midnight Club and Need for Speed and said yeah they support the tuner culture very well, but what about the other car cultures like drift, smooth culture and rat culture; rat culture they don't care about how it looks, it's really rusty and shitty and bits are falling off, but the engine and the shocks and the alloys are race spec.  It doesn't look like much, but it's shit off a shovel basically. 

So what about all these other car cultures that are totally ignored by other games, and we've decided to support all of those so you get Formula D styled cars, say for example the BMW 355 doesn't have an official drift version, so we've worked with BMW to crate a concept car based on that car culture in that style and they've officially approved it and licensed it for us.  Nobody else has done that before in the world, everything is licensed, but everything is interesting and styled in a really interesting and cool way.  I think that's going to make the car set more interesting as it makes the car set really unique for Blur.

TVG would like to thank Ben Ward and Peter McCabe for taking the time to answer our questions.  Blur is scheduled for release during autumn 2009.