Blur Preview

VideoGamer.com: How many power-ups are in the game? What makes a good power-up for Blur?

PM: Loads of usability tests. So we’ve got Activision US getting people in every week and playing the game, giving us feedback on perks and doing loads of data mining into how they use the perks, how long they hold the perk before they use it, how accurate the perk is.

BW: We’re not allowed to call them perks!

VideoGamer.com: In the demo we saw there was one called a perk…

BW: The idea behind it right, was originally back in the very first iteration they worked kind of the same as Call of Duty perks in that you decided on them before the race. We played it and iterated on it and it didn’t work. If you picked the wrong power-up before the race then you were screwed, essentially. That’s how we moved onto the on-track experience. It evolved. It wasn’t like we played Mario Kart and said that’s what we need. We tried loads of different things and that’s what came through as being the best.

PM: At the moment we’ve got five power-ups and those power-ups might not be the ones we ship with. We might ship with other ones, we might ship with more, and we might ship with a little bit less. It all depends on what’s fun and what we get back feedback wise from usability. We’re still pre-alpha so we’re still designing new ones; we’re still putting new ones in. The set that you saw today was just where we’re at but that could change.

BW: The way they’re introduced in the game is one at a time through the storyline. So the first few races we have nothing but nitros. A couple of races in you’re introduced to a mine or something like that. You’ll learn each of these power-ups in turn and then you’ll meet someone in the world who knows how to add a power-up slot so you can pick up two at the same time and cycle between them. So the way that they’re introduced is a lot more subtle, a lot more interesting to the player.

PM: So you’re not thrown in at the deep end.

VideoGamer.com: Is Bizarre done now with hardcore sim racers?

PM: The hardcore sim is still there. It’s still in our game. You’ve still got a sim game in there. If people want to create a simulation group, they can. It’s still fundamentally in our game.

BW: We’ve got a lot of F1 fans at Bizarre who are really into hardcore racing, so I think people still love simulation style games, but Blur is an attempt to try something new and different. Who knows what’ll happen in the future. It might swing all the way back and we might end up doing the most hardcore sim ever next time, I don’t know!

Blur is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC this autumn.