Fuel's open world would fill '4 Blu-rays'

Paradise City a 'postage stamp' in comparison, says producer.

Upcoming Mad Max-style racer Fuel's game world would fill about four Blu-ray discs if it was developed using traditional methods.

That impressive claim comes from Codemasters executive producer David Brickley, who also revealed to VideoGamer.com in an interview to be published later today that Paradise City, from Criterion's Burnout, only amounts to a "postage stamp" when placed on top of Fuel's open world.

French studio Asobo, which has spent four years developing new technology that blends satellite data and procedurally generated data together, has come up with a mammoth 5,000 square mile map for drivers to explore.

He said: "In the context of that map, which is one small corner of it, when the guys showed us this technology, if you were to build it in a traditional manner it would fill about four Blu-rays. A gargantuan amount of data, just enormous. The challenge for us was to say can we come up with a race experience generated according to an algorithmic rule set, procedural generation, which is of a standard that is indistinguishable from one that's been done by hand? That was my first thought when I looked at it. It was like is this going to work? And the answer they gave me was it's all about the angle of the curve, the pitch of the race track."

When we asked Brickley how many Paradise Cities would fit into Fuel's gargantuan game world, he replied: "I did a little Power Point internally to do it and it zoomed them in to each other. It's like a little postage stamp because I think it does like four kilometres or something."

Despite the comparisons, Brickley told VideoGamer.com that Codemasters, which has a reputation for excellent driving games (Race Driver: GRID, Colin McRae: DIRT), "didn't have to infringe" on EA-owned Criterion's popular Burnout series, which made the jump to open world racing with Burnout Paradise last year.

"Criterion is obviously doing a city-based driving game," he said. "We didn't have to infringe on that. And they probably compliment each other quite well. It's diverse. It's gone the other direction. Even Test Drive was all about roads, whereas with this game it's trying to give the player the best of both. There's fully off-road races but there's also races which are just designed to be fun on roads and have got road balanced vehicles."

For more on Fuel, which is due out in the second quarter of 2009 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, check out our game page.