MX vs. ATV Reflex - Q&A Feature

Sports-based games are inherently difficult to make. The trouble is the closer developers get to emulating the real thing, the less accessible the game becomes. Take the brilliant GT series from Simbin for example. While this is a must-have game for diehard motorsport fans, it is almost unplayable without a steering wheel and peddles - virtual hara-kiri in terms of accessibility. With MX vs. ATV Reflex, Rainbow is treading the line between an easy-to-pick-up arcade game and a detailed sim.

We talked with the game's Lead Art Director, Ian Wood, about how they've maintained the balance.

TVG: The game feels definitely more like a sim now than ever before - punishing at first, but very rewarding; it actually feels very organic. How did the "fanatics" receive it?

They love it, they absolutely love it. They want more of course; they want their manual gear shifts, their front/rear breaking, and I cannot confirm or deny that that's going in the game but there are some things we will be considering as well. We never actually talked about it being a sim. We always wanted to aim somewhere between arcade and sim. Something that is giving you the essence of what motocross is about but at the same time I'm not the hardcore rider; I want to make the game accessible.

We have diehard fans that are guaranteed to buy this game but we want to open it up a bit more and offer something to the first time user. The organic experience and the easier entry level do that for us. What you saw today was pretty much the hardest of the hard but, believe me, there is a much easier level and a much more accessible way of getting into it.

TVG: How have you gone about creating realistic tracks without licenses for them?

We're more trying to emulate certain styles of all these events, for example we have a level in the desert that was very easy for us to do. We just took a ten minute drive out of the city and we were where we wanted to be with that level. With the one we saw today, the Icarus level, we wanted to really focus on the snow and the deformation, and what better way to do it than at ten thousand feet above the cloud-line. But the supercross courses and the nationals are all based off a combination of track styles.

We really wanted to focus on not just the different surfaces such as clay or sand or slate, but really what those offer up. So without getting too technical about it - believe me I've been bludgeoned by the technicalities of this - but certain nationals will feel more like supercrosses and certain supercrosses will be a little bit more like nationals. Look at the way, for example, in Las Vegas a few years ago they actually raced out of the stadium and went back in again. We're just looking for different ways we can present them.

TVG: So, for your diehard fans, is all the gear going to be up to date and licensed?

All that stuff is licensed. We have all the latest gear: helmets, boots, rider gear and so on. It goes into pretty sick details on that stuff, as well as the parts; they're all licensed. You name it; you look into a motocross catalogue and you'll find it.

TVG: What do you feel this game offers over its predecessors and its competition?

The art has moved on to such an extent this time. Obviously I'm the Art Director so that's what I'm going to push, but it is so much more immersive. The sense of speed is much more intense, created by the frequency of terrain and resolution and even the placement of the trees. We've just been able to capture off-roading a lot better.

TVG: You've decided to alter the controls, with the left analogue controlling the bike, and the right controlling the rider, which makes the game feel a lot more like a sim. What was the thinking behind that decision?

In the previous games we produced the same result with just the left stick, and one of the things we found was that there's actually a lot more to riding a motorbike than just steering or just pushing front and rear weight. For example, last time we had a preload, and a preload metre, which in essence is a spring that you loaded up that would launch you off a jump and it was very unrealistic. In real life people use their body weight to achieve that natural spring. This time we wanted to tie it up in a really nice package to have wreck avoidance, the stop system and how you jump all in one area, so it all made sense. We just separated the rider from the bike, so you have the rider and all his movements totally on the right stick and everything vehicle based is all on the left.

There's so much that goes into riding a bike properly in the dirt. The preload metre only hinted at what you should do on a bike or how you control the weight on the bike. Using the right stick gives a complete range of motion and function: as well as pitching the bike up and down and moving the bike around, we have our rider who's moving, shifting his weight, so there is a nice completeness to it.

TVG: How do you go about working out the physics of how the bike and rider interact? Do you just go to lots and lots of motocross events and put it down as "research"?

In Phoenix Arizona, where the studio is based, we have hardcore motorbike and motocross fanatics who are pushing the gang further and further into the  hardcore, but there's a bunch of us who are pushing back to be more accessible. It's a really nice harmony to balance the game with. They are telling us what to look out for and they really push things like the deformation because it makes such a difference in real dirt racing. They really do play up the ruts and we were never able to do that - we always have to paint them in and not actually deform them live.

TVG: The ground deformation system is quite an impressive advance. How much work went into this system and how important was it for you in this iteration of the game?

It's something that is related to dirt racing in general and this is something that we hadn't managed to capture before. In fact, we're fairly disappointed with ourselves for producing lower res terrain in the past. It's all about how you interact with the terrain in dirt racing, whereas in street racing you're on tarmac: it's fixed, so you can get away with a lot more. We really wanted to offer something that's unique to dirt racing and unique to Rainbow. It was actually a piece of tech we'd had around for a while and had never found a nice optical way of getting it into the game, because obviously it's pretty technologically advanced and heavy but we've got some magical people there that managed to get it onto the box.

TVG: Is it just the different weights of the vehicles that will alter the scale of the indentations?

Different weights, absolutely, but different pressures too, so if you hit a jump and hit the ground hard you're going to create more of a lump than if you skip across it. I don't know if you noticed but when the rider's leg hangs out on the snow it leaves a trail, but there's different levels: if his foot is just glancing the snow it's going to leave a smaller trail.

TVG: How detailed is surface of the ground in terms of the resolution of the polygons compared to previous games in the series?

Quite easily ten or more times more detailed. I wish I had the screen shots to show the previous wireframe versus where we are right now - how high resolution it gets. We can set what that resolution is per level - certain levels don't require us to go down to 6 inches of depth and just don't require that kind of detail. In certain events such as supercross, we wanted to protect that resolution a little bit more because it's a smaller event.

TVG: Will different materials like wet mud, snow and gravel act differently in the game?

Yes, every aspect of it is controllable. We control how much each deforms, blend it with a little bit of it, blend it with none at all; it's just how deep you want to go and how wide the deformation track is. It's like a paintbrush that we've used to realistically simulate every surface.

TVG: When you're playing, is there a limit to the amount of havoc you can create with the deformation beyond which the ground starts to reform?

You can stay in free ride worlds for as long as you like and it will deform and deform and deform. Well, it will only go down to a certain level but also remember that you also build dirt up so you never are able to level out the world. The dirt goes somewhere.

TVG would like to thank Ian Wood, MX vs. ATV Reflex's Lead Art Director, for taking the time to speak with us about the game, which is due out at the end of the year on Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, and DS.