The Motorstorm series has been a mainstay of the PlayStation 3′s exclusive catalog almost since the console’s launch. So far we’ve seen off-road racing through Monument Valley, on a Pacific island, and in the Arctic. But the latest entry in the series brings the series’ iconically chaotic racing to the big city. Developer Evolution Studios showed off a goodly proportion of the new game and its conceptual work at the recent Eurogamer Expo, and it’s certainly looking like an interesting game for fans of anarchic driving.
Motorstorm Apocalypse first became a glimmer in Evolution Studios boss Martin Kenwright’s eye during development of the first Motorstorm game. Game Director Matt Southern clearly recalls the day Kenwright burst into his office clutching a crumpled piece of paper describing a game called “Urban Smash.”
“This is how most games start,” joked Southern, showing the piece of paper in question. “In fact, it’s usually the back of a cigarette packet, so this game actually had quite high production values.”
The core principle behind the proposed game was that it would be Motorstorm in a city, featuring intense, moment-to-moment, breakneck gameplay. They wanted the game to be set in a busy world that was full in life, suggesting locations like Washington DC, or Moscow during the May Day Parade.
It didn’t take much to persuade the team that it was absolutely essential for them to take reference trips to various cities around the world. So they visited London and Washington, took lots of photos and video and began to consider how they could set a racing game in a city rather than the organic, off-road environments they had previously worked on. After returning, they developed a prototype for what they thought the new game might look like.
The prototype featured a variety of different vehicles ranging from tiny motorbikes to hulking London buses blasting around a rough approximation of Washington DC. The key technology they developed for the new game was an impressive-looking damage system—not for the cars, but for the buildings. Hitting the corner of a building, for example, would knock out the wall in a very convincing manner, despite the primitive-looking, non-textured graphics the prototype was rendered in.
“Doesn’t that look bloody awful?” chuckled Southern after showing the prototype off. It actually looked like just that game would have been pretty fun, but Evolution wasn’t satisfied with just another street racer. They believe that there are too many copycat racers out there and wanted to do something completely different. They also realized that they were missing a huge opportunity if Urban Smash didn’t become a Motorstorm game.
“It still wasn’t enough to make a straight urban racer,” noted Southern. “We’d got this damage technology we’d been working on that we were really excited about. So, we thought, why don’t we wreck this city right from the start? Let’s abandon it and create the ultimate playground for Motorstorm to come in and hold a festival of racing that certainly has urban racing elements but is still at its heart an off-road racer. Let’s do urban off-road racing.”
So it was back to the prototype drawing board for the artists and programmers. After a couple more test runs, the team decided that the city looked great, but still lacked life. So the decision was taken to leave some people behind in the city.
“What kind of people would stay behind in the city?” pondered Southern. “‘Idiots’ was the answer we came up with—people as crazy as the Stormers themselves.”
There are two main groups of idiots for Motorstorm to contend with throughout the 48 virtual hours that make up the game’s campaign. The first is an “insane military contractor” who stayed behind to “protect” the city. As such, you can expect to be fired upon by soldiers, tanks, helicopters and all manner of other heavy hardware. If you were hoping to be able to shoot down the helicopter a la Disney’s Split/Second, however, that’s not going to happen.
“Motorstorm don’t fight back,” said Southern. “They’re just there to have as much anarchic fun as possible.”
The other group of people are simply referred to as the Crazies. They have no sense of personal safety and wander around the city as it collapses around them, and as the Stormers race through it. And for the first time ever in the series, players are able to run these people over. But, Southern points out, this is not done in an attempt to be gory or violent; rather, it’s added for comedy value.
“We were inspired by films like Jackass: The Movie,” said Southern. “Films where people hurt each other, laugh…and live.”
Despite being completely set in a city, the range of tracks on offer looks impressive. Earthquakes and other environmental effects occur in real-time during races, opening and closing routes dynamically. There are also interiors to race through, ranging from underground tunnels to sewers and even office blocks. One race takes place on the rooftops of the city and features the ludicrous sight of big-rigs smashing through desks in offices. Elsewhere, the Stormers have to contend with tornado damage and insane weather effects on the waterfront, as well as buckling, snapping bridges. A new dynamic lighting system for the series also opens up the possibility of night-time racing.
So the racing itself looks solid and thrilling to play, and indeed some brief hands-on time with the game confirmed that yes, it is a lot of fun. But that still wasn’t enough for the team. They looked at feedback they’d received from Motorstorm: Pacific Rift and found that people enjoyed the moment-to-moment short-term excitement of the races, but felt that the entire experience needed to be more compelling and rewarding.
As such, the team decided to put a much greater focus on the game’s chronology. It opens with an interactive prologue, with all the Motorstormers bursting forth from a variety of D-Day style landing craft and heading for the city. And it ends with a similarly interactive epilogue, with the racers escaping the destroyed city and attempting to get back to an aircraft carrier before they’re trapped in the disaster zone.
Southern seemed curiously apologetic about their attempts to put a story into Apocalypse, however.
“We know we’re a racing game,” he said. “And we know that typically when someone says ‘a racing game with a story’, we have every right to be terrified about such an awful prospect. So there is a very light, loose story about this time in the city. It’s done in a deliberately different art style, it’s deliberately separated from the main game experience and is always optional. So if you’re one of those players who always skips cutscenes, the option is always there in the first place; it’s incorporated into the design. If you choose to watch them, they don’t take any longer than the track will take to load. So we’re aiming for a very seamless single-player experience. So you can choose how much you want to know about this crazy subculture.”
Those who choose to skip the game’s story elements will miss out on some impressive artwork from comic book artist Jonboy Meyers. But for those who want to skip straight to the action, they have the option to do just that.
The game’s multiplayer mode has received an overhaul, too. Evolution looked at the most successful multiplayer games out there, all of which are FPS titles. So they decided to incorporate the best elements of these, and came up with a system for people to customize their vehicles with both Call of Duty-style Perks and visual upgrades. Liveries and paint jobs can be shared online and also easily applied to other vehicles. Not only that, but game modes can also be created from scratch, shared online and even incorporated into official tournaments if they prove successful enough.
The game, even at this early alpha stage, plays pretty well, even in 3D. While both Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5′s visuals suffer quite a bit in 3D, Motorstorm seems to work pretty well. Southern is up-front about this—it’s because they’ve got a great deal of experience with working on the PS3.
“3D does affect the resolution of the game,” said Southern. “You’re rendering the game twice. It’s like split-screen. It’s why we don’t have 3D split-screen. But we’re still aiming for 1080p in 3D and split-screen. We do as many clever tricks as we can with level of detail, downscaling on textures, without seeing it too much, with a few little tricks such as streaming. You do need a little more processing power, but I don’t think it’s quite the hit that some are claiming. The main thing is rendering the game twice, and if your code’s efficient, that’s not a problem.”
Motorstorm Apocalypse is due out early next year. A closed internal multiplayer beta is starting very soon, with an open multiplayer beta to come later in the year. Those who are active members of the Motorstorm community online will receive personal invites from the team, while others will undoubtedly be able to sign up shortly after.
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