FUEL Preview

VideoGamer.com: How confident are you that you'll manage to get the game out bug free?

SW: We don't get any more bugs than a normal racing game. It's more gameplay bug or collision bugs or something like this, it's not terrain too much. Because we have a 40km view distance if we have a giant hole in the ground we see it! You just have to go around the world and very quickly you will see this giant hole.

DB: Our QA is terrified. In the year we've had the game quality assurance, we've not had a single occasion of a car falling out of the world. By nature of the tech, I suppose. The biggest problem we can think of is almost gone for a start. Other things we're kind of making decisions to avoid them being problematic. When we say there's many helipads to get around is because we could let you teleport where you wanted, but that's an obvious cause of problems. How do we make sure it's free of trees? How do we make sure you don't end up on the side of something? To avoid that completely we just have many points that we know we can guarantee are safe. And in terms in the number of races, it's a lot, but it's checkable. When you think about GRID and DIRT, actually the amount of permutations you can have, it gets astronomical very quickly. It's not a new concept for the QA team.

VideoGamer.com: Given the current economic climate, everyone is having a hard time at the moment. How much is that weighing on you guys in terms of development? Does it change the way the game is being developed?

SW: No. Not at all. Asobo is now almost seven years old. We've done many projects that were profitable. We're owned by the employees so we don't have investors who are putting money into the company every month and say, "I'm going to go and put the money into petrol!" As we have had profitable games before we now have the financial security which allows us to see and look at each project on its own and try to make the best work without getting worried about price or whatever happens. We haven't changed anything. I would even say we have been so concentrated on the game... we have heard about it but it's not like we've been thinking about anything else. I know that gas went up and then back down!

VideoGamer.com: As people who make games, are you concerned to hear about the fate of other companies?

DB: I guess part of it is it's such a ruthless industry. I remember my first job was working freelance because the guy wouldn't hire full-time people. You've got no security. To be honest I feel I've been acclimatised to it over the years. It's just the nature of what it is. There is no security. Perversely that's part of the appeal. Yes it's horrible and it's terrifying... it's funny that the banks are terrified now, because they're the ones who thought they were safe. And they're not.

VideoGamer.com: Moving on from the doom and gloom... You guys mentioned you are doing a lot of work on the PS3 version of the game. Can you elaborate?

SW: We're spending a lot of time trying to make it visually similar on every platform. Today we're at the stage where it is the same look. We're now spending a lot of time optimising it for PC on all different configurations, on PS3, to take advantage of the hardware, to do everything the best way possible.

DB: The reason I wanted to make the point was that when you've got a cross-platform game, what we've found, certainly in the industry, is that people develop on PC and then the PS3 requires such effort that they just don't bother. I mean, the port of The Orange Box should never have ended up the way it did, for a game that good. It was buggy, and the frame rate... It needs dedication. It's a completely different structure in the chain. It's got a single processor and then it's got seven or six SPUs... Architecturally, it's effort - it's more effort to get the best out of it. But for a game like this, we really want all of them [the platforms] to have parity. But it takes effort.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think people are lazy with it?

DB: Lazy and underfunded. They just underestimate it. The thing is that the two machines, the aptitudes of the companies are so different. Sony's attitude has always been to get a bunch of hardware guys to figure out, "Is it going to be the fastest way of getting numbers and moving things around?" They did it with the PS2, a wonderful machine but it kept trying to develop two machines at once, it's just so much easier on PC. Start off in DirectX. The PC likes it, and the 360 likes it and it's such effort to concentrate on the other ones you just underestimate it.

VideoGamer.com: Would you agree with that too?

SW: Maybe it would depend on the games because some PS3 games are really great. We're putting a lot of effort on it, that's for sure. I wouldn't say in general it's not the case, and some PS3 games are just as good. It needs the effort, but if you do it it's going to be the same quality or sometimes even better.

VideoGamer.com: Back to the game, your weather system is selectable during a mission editor but in terms of the set races the big weather effects are going to be scripted, is that right?

SW: It depends on which ones you have. The big ones being the tornado, because it's actually a 3D object in the world which moves around and destroys stuff. If you want to do this in a race and you don't script it, like it might be doing stuff while you're far away and if you arrive and it's not there you just see ruins, it might ruin the experience. Whereas other effects are more, like rain, wind, fog, they apply to much larger zones, it's easy to actually duplicate as it is to turn off and on. If you're designing an online race and would want to use a tornado, which we don't allow, the first player's going to get the tornado and all the stuff and somebody who's behind he says, "Oh I'm not getting anything". It's very localised. Whereas if we turn on rain or wind or whatever, we apply it to much larger zones it's really fair because everyone gets the same conditions.

VideoGamer.com: Creating your own content is now a big trend, with games like LittleBigPlanet and the like. Does that create new problems for you guys in terms of deciding what you let people do?

SW: We're trying to give as much stuff as possible to the players. We've used the same tool to build our own races so we exactly know the things we can do which are bad. So that's basically how we filter out what you shouldn't be able to do. But even though when we filter something it's still so big that there's really no limit to the amount of races you can do and where you want to start and what you want to do. It's been used internally as a tool so we really know what works and what doesn't work.

FUEL will be released later this year on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. For all the latest previews and videos, head over to our game page.