Racing is about to get even more extreme with MotorStorm Pacific Rift – so eu.playstation.com asked Evolution Studios’ Game Director, Nigel Kershaw, for a speedy tour around some of the game’s finer points.
Can you describe the new island setting in MotorStorm Pacific Rift?
The new setting is pretty much the pinnacle of what we want to achieve in MotorStorm Pacific Rift. The desert was brilliant for MotorStorm, it's beautiful, it's iconic, but it only did one thing: it was dry... with the odd bit of mud. What we really wanted to do with MotorStorm Pacific Rift was find a location that had all the elements to give us a much wider diversity of racing tracks but still feel plausible. Coming from our rally heritage, we're not in the game of making racing titles with big Aztec heads that spit fire and things like that - we really wanted to have a lot of racing diversity in there, but make it in a plausible location.
Also, we tried looking up what we could do with the location. We're really keen on ensuring that everything we put into the world has some kind of interactive element to it. Painting a beautiful picture is all well and good, but making it interactive is the really hard bit - so it's not just a beautiful, diverse place but you also look at things like the vegetation, the water, the lava, all those kind of things and give feedback to the players in different ways and they get a real visceral, entertaining in-your-face experience.
How destructible is the environment?
As destructible as we can stretch it. You can't destroy everything, but as much as we can let you destroy, you can.
Can you go into more detail about the new vehicles?
The monster truck is one of those things we were quite precious about in terms of the whole balance we had with MotorStorm, so there was a lot of science involved to make sure we had that fine balance. But we always wanted to have a monster truck in there, it was a natural thing to stick in because it's big and fast and you can do stupid things. So we spent a long time prototyping the monster truck, where it would sit [in the game] and what it would do. And what we realised was what we didn't have in MotorStorm was something that sat at the top of the food chain.
The monster truck isn't about driving really fast or being really manoeuvrable or outperforming anyone - it's basically about kicking the tar out of anything else on the track. The way we've developed it and the way they drive is that you can go very easily over other vehicles, or crush them or push them out of the way. And when you're playing with the monster truck it's quite a different experience because it's all about hunting down those little weedy guys in the fast things and making sure they're out of the competition.
What were the things you wanted to change from the original MotorStorm?
With the time that we got to develop the first game we did everything we could. But we want to refine it in every single area, and also move the whole thing on. It's almost a new way of [approaching] racing games, in terms of multivehicle balance and stuff like that but we really want to take it to new places and do something different with it. Split screen is obviously the big one. That was one of the things we just physically couldn't do with the technology at the time, so we went back to the drawing board with all our rendering techniques and really went to town on making sure that split screen forms an essential part of what this is all about. Online is still there for hardcore and for those who want to be the best, but when you just want to have a play around with a few buddies there's nothing better [than playing split screen].
The online experience is also easy and accessible, we've got matchmaking, people can jump straight into a race with no waiting around, we've got a Time Attack from the start, completely re-written a lot of the low level stuff to make it run faster, more vehicles online, more vehicles on the track... all around [it's] a much more refined and playable experience.
There's much more to come on MotorStorm Pacific Rift, so keep checking eu.playstation.com as the game races towards its launch.
Twenty-nine stunning MotorStorm Pacific Rift images
Making Computex Green. Literally.
