Motorstorm: Apocalypse Interview
with Evolution Studios' Matt Southern
Arriving just months after the PS3’s launch, mud-flingin’ racer MotorStorm quickly proved Sony’s new console had plenty of power under its hood. Stunning visuals, supported by real-time terrain deformation, made it a must-buy for the hardware’s early adopters, whether they were racing fans or not. The team at Evolution Studios followed the adrenaline-pumping, arcade-y hit with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, a sequel that built on its predecessor’s strengths while also adding some scary-real foliage effects. Not to be outdone by its older brothers, the upcoming MotorStorm: Apocalypse is blowing the franchise up - literally. As the subtitle implies, it takes place in a coughing-its-last-breath world, where blockbuster special effects continuously remind players of Earth’s rapidly approaching expiration date. We recently spoke with the game’s director, Matt Southern, who offered plenty of details on what can be expected from this end-of-the-world racer, including why it may be the title to justify that looming 3D TV purchase.
AtomicGamer: Did you work on the two previous MotorStorms on PS3?
Matt Southern: Yes. I’ve been at Evolution for six years, so I worked on the Rally games that we made prior to MotorStorm. This is the first MotorStorm I’ve been director on, but I’ve been involved in all of them.
AG: The first MotorStorm was a launch title for the PS3. What sort of advancements have you guys made since then in terms of getting the most out of the hardware?
MS: We have kind of an internal mandate to try and squeeze as much as we can out of the PlayStation and do more and more. It happened on PS2. If you look at our first PS2 game and our last one, you say “They’re really on the same platforms?” We have a team dedicated to optimization so that we can constantly squeeze more out of the PlayStation. These are massive, dynamic events that we really didn’t think were possible until we started doing the R&D for this game: new lighting effects, the ability to have five new vehicle classes rather than one. We’re getting more and more confident with the tools and the hardware.
AG: Terrain deformation was sort of a big deal on the first game. Have you guys built on that further for Apocalypse?
MS: A little bit, yes. We’ve kind of had one or two key technologies for each version. Terrain deformation was the one in MotorStorm. In Pacific Rift it was the foliage and the way you could go through those branches and bushes. It really felt tactile and real. All of those effects are still present. But the big one this time was real-time damage and destruction. It’s always got to have a bearing on gameplay for us, which is what we’re trying to do with this.
AG: What’s up with the story? What’s the narrative justification for these guys even doing this? Are they just insane?
MS: Yes. They’re just crazy. MotorStorm is a bunch of crazy guys who have turned their backs on ordinary life. They tour the world on a repurposed aircraft carrier, looking for places to hold these festivals of off-road racing. And when they find out that this city is going to be abandoned due to an earthquake, they say, “Let’s hold our first festival of urban off-road racing. Let’s go into this city, but let’s subvert all expectations of street racing and be as anarchic and as crazy as possible.” And what they discover, pretty much as soon as they arrive, is actually these quakes aren’t done and there’s also a military presence and they’re going to have to get themselves the hell out. So over two days, they race as many times as they can, and then everybody has to get the hell out.
AG: It looks like, based on what I’ve seen, a ton of cool physics effects are at play. How do you balance people playing it as a racing game, but also seeing all the cool stuff? You’re going so fast, it seems like you could miss a lot of the stuff that’s going on around you.
MS: Yes. I mean, the 3D helps. You play it in 3D and you certainly don’t miss that stuff even when you’re focusing on racing. In fact, the 3D helps to judge your racing line, judge corners, judge your position in relation to AI, the technical layer of racing. We have found that a pattern emerges where people play the game, they spot the cool events. They really enjoy it. It feels like a big action, blockbuster movie. They choose to play it again and again and start to focus down and not just focus on the race line, but begin to notice the performance attributes of each vehicle, the way that surface properties affect the race and the handling, and the way that it now happens dynamically during the race, so that they can go, “You know, actually, the first time I played this, I found it difficult to miss that collapsing skyscraper. But now I’ve noticed that it’s, for example, burst a water main and it’s created a bank of water that’s much more suited to a Mud Plugger or a Monster Truck. If I ride a bike, I now need to ride on the heights that have been created by the damage.” So it’s an emerging gameplay that we worked really hard to balance, and really make people see that even for an action racer, even for a game that isn’t a simulation, there’s a real deep layer of gameplay to enjoy and discover.
AG: Did you guys look at Disney’s Split/Second at all? That’s obviously a very different game, but it does have a similar thing going with those blockbuster effects.
MS: Yes, it was announced once we were way into development, so we decided to stick with what we had. In fact, throughout the development, what I’d said to the team was that racing as a genre isn’t exciting people in the same ways that an Uncharted is or Call of Duty. So let’s take our inspiration from a wider range of games, genres as we can. That’s why, for example, when you race multiplayer, there’s a whole layer of rewards and perks to unlock as you progress. But more importantly, what we’ve always tried to do at Evo is to try and be inspired by movies, by comic books, by documentaries, and by going to racetracks and racing real vehicles and have as broad a range of influence and inspiration as possible, so that when, inevitably, games come out that try and do similar things to us, it kind of doesn’t matter. It’s a kind of back and forth between all the racing game developers in Britain as we try and outdo each other.
AG: This being the third console game in the series, have you refined certain things, maybe removed things that you didn’t like in previous games?
MS: We haven’t removed a lot. We do look at a lot of criticism of the game. For example, the progression from one race to the next, a lot of people felt could be improved, which is why chronology and change over the fourteen races is so important, and the ability to unlock parts as you progress. Also things like AI was criticized. Pretty much every racing game you ever play has an AI that knows where you are as well as what it’s doing and compensates. Now we’re really trying to make that invisible as much as possible, so that the AI is there to win and also to entertain, but not in a way that feels that we’ve choreographed it. So we’ve massively overhauled the AI. With every version of the game, we’ve finessed the boost mechanic. The game isn’t just about boosting to go faster. Because it overheats the engine, we look at ways to add tactical layers to that. In Pacific Rift, we added the fact that when you drive through water, it cools the engine down. If you drive through sources of heat, it heats the engine up. Now, when you fly through the air, that also cools the engine down, but only if you decelerate, if you take your finger off the throttle. So you can win the race without using that, but to set the very best times, you need to add that tactical layer to your gameplay. This time, if a helicopter up in the sky fires a rocket towards you, that’s going to overheat the engine if you get anywhere near the point of impact. It’s kind of a combination of adding tactical layers to the gameplay and still trying to make it spectacular.
AG: What can players expect from Apocalypse‘s multi-player? Anything new or different online?
MS: Yes, tons. We’re trying to reflect the fact that as this generation of hardware has matured, more and more people have started to play online. But core gamers, and I class myself as one, as opposed to real hardcore gamers, often are put off by playing online because you just get humiliated really quickly. I play Pacific Rift, and what I said to our guys was, “Look, mentally, I’m not trying to win this race, I’m trying to not lose.” I really want to overhaul the matchmaking. I want to look at games, for example, like what the first Modern Warfare did, where playing online has bespoke set of rewards, so if I’m finding it difficult, if I persevere, I will be rewarded for that and it will become easier for me to do and I’ll get better and better. So we’ve got a massive ranking system now to progress through. We’ve got an overhauled matchmaking system to make sure you’re never paired against people who are the best in the world. You can unlock perks as you race, so you can make the vehicles faster or more resilient or make the engine cool down faster so that you get more boost. Also, I can play it with somebody in the living room, who might be better than me, against others online. So we can play split screen against others online and get a helping hand…have someone do the ramming for me. So we have a very bespoke single player experience now with a very light back story and a very open and customizable and more flattering online experience.
AG: Where do you go for MotorStorm 4? How do you top the Apocalypse? Have them race through the nine circles of Hell maybe?
MS: Well, it’s the end of the world in one particular part, so we can maybe go somewhere else. But in all honesty, when we were making Pacific Rift, we came up with this idea and we started making it midway through. This time, we’re not making any sequels right now. We’re going to take some time to do some prototyping, some R&D, see what else we can do with this platform, and really be a little bit more open-ended. So I’m really not bullshitting you when I say who knows where we’re going to go next.
AG: As a development team, do you guys watch a lot of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay movies for inspiration?
MS: I took the whole team to see 2012, which kind of packed out the cinema. Lots of tweeting going on. Lots of having fun in the flicks and really trying to take visual inspiration from those movies. But also things like comic books. Also, we read books on why buildings collapse. I really tried to get that into the physics and take a broad range of inspiration and really try to be ambitious and sit alongside action movies.
Thanks to Matt Southern for getting us to buckle-up--not that it will help much--in anticipation for Apocalypse’s April arrival.
