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FUEL screenshot

We're sure you know what fuel is, but we doubt you know much about FUEL, Codemasters and French developer Asobo Studio's upcoming open-world Mad Max-style driving game. Luckily for all you petrol heads, we cornered executive producer David Brickley and Asobo co-founder Sebastian Wloch to lift the bonnet on one of the most interesting driving games of 2009.

VideoGamer.com: How would you describe the actual racing itself in FUEL compared to something like Motorstorm 2, which will probably be the most immediate comparison?

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Sebastian Wloch: It really depends on the type of race because we have lots of them. For example, we have circuit races, like the one you have seen on the Yellowstone with the quads. In these races usually we have a rather tight track, for example for the quad usually there is a couple of possibilities, a couple of paths you can take, like two or three possibilities in some areas. With ramps, to jump over rivers, these races are very different from the first one you have seen, which is an ATV race where you start on a mountain and you go down to the hub, where the track is more open and you have checkpoints to go through, but only three or four. In between the checkpoints you are free to do exactly what you want and the track is not closed on the sides like the one on Yellowstone where you basically have water on one side and houses on the other side. And the Tornado race you have seen is even bigger. There you actually start from somewhere, you see the ending, it's pretty far away, you get less checkpoints and at some points you can actually choose your route. Depending on the vehicle you have you might not take the same routes. And finally we have ATV races without any checkpoints in which you really make your own strategy depending on the vehicle you take.

If you go from A to B and there's a tarmac road which goes maybe not straight, you're going to take a tarmac vehicle and take this route. If you take an off-road vehicle you're going to cut a lot more and get a more straight route. So I would say compared to the game you just listed it's more that you can do short cuts, you can get out of the road wherever you want, you're not constrained into a tunnel, which means if you take the exact perfect route you're getting a real track racing experience. But at any time you can change your mind and say, "I'm going to do this...". For example, you're playing online, you want to take the perfect route and someone pushes you out of the road you don't have to go back or reset. You can say, "OK, if this brings me onto an alternative route which is just as good, I continue and you don't lose the time". In a tunnel race you would have just hit the wall and restart. Sometimes a lot of very good racing games try to do A or B, two cars and then it comes back together. But here it's just all the time. Wherever you go you can cut. Whenever you see a curve you can cut, you just take the risk. If you cut out of tarmac there's going to be more bumps. You might lose control if you're at the edge of the speed of the car, you're taking more risks. But it's more opportunistic gameplay because whatever happens in the race you're more free to change your direction. When it's totally open races, I would say it's even more about strategy. You see all the motorbikes going this way, all the monster cars going that way. You have a motorbike and you can say, I'm not following the other motorbikes. I'm going to follow the other guys - so maybe it's going to pay off. There's a bit more of a strategy. If you see that some group is going nowhere and you see somebody else that's going fast you say, OK I'm going to go after this guy.

David Brickley: There are great lessons to learn from those titles. MotorStorm is such a fantastic game to play online but they made their decisions according to the tech they had available. And there are lessons in that respect. We did find it impossible in some ways to find the right reference for what we felt we wanted. MotorStorm is a fantastic game but many people remember the FMV more than anything and what that seemed to promise. When you sat down and played it, it's a great circuit racer but it was a mirage. When these guys developed the technology in certain ways [you thought], "this is real, man". You look at something like MotorStorm and then get the lessons from it, but really it's a whole other offering to say that CG movie is never a reality, or that freedom or that drama or that spectacle. Those are great lessons but we didn't have to be constrained by having to have a turbo system. You try going ten feet off the racing line in MotorStorm and you're back where you were.

VideoGamer.com: Were you disappointed by MotorStorm in terms of its promise?

DB: I think everybody must have thought that first video was so shocking and so spectacular. I confess when I imported it from Japan and then sat down and played it I was shocked by the limitations. Not to say it wasn't a great game because it was, but that video, along with the Killzone one, set out to get attention. By God it did that. I think anything after that was going to be a bit of a comedown. To be perfectly honest when these guys come up with an engine that says we can render by an order of a magnitude bigger than anything that's gone before, then it's like, OK, we're going to have to approach this in a completely different way.

VideoGamer.com: One slight problem I can see is, if you're playing online the only person that gets FUEL points from a race is the person who wins. If you take a very competitive game like CoD4, even if I play as a beginner and I consistently lose then I still get experience. Is there a risk that by having a race where you only get points for winning? Is that going to be a bit harsh on beginners?

DB: I think in applying it to a genre in the way we've become accustomed to, then yes that would be a risk. Some of the biggest inspirations for FUEL have come from things like Cat and Mouse in Project Gotham 2. That was a huge inspiration because we thought somebody's taken something which wasn't meant to be and then couldn't apply any rules to it, it was just, "You take that car, we'll give you a minute and then we're going to rage after you". They made their own experience out of basic building blocks... When we talk about the career, it's really there to give people an introduction because the world is overwhelming. You sit down for the first time and you don't know where to go. All of these things we wanted to make digestible by the player so that once they get comfortable with it they can get to enjoy what it's really all about, which is the Mission Editor, the variety, and finding their way through the world. Things like our currency, our FUEL, are there to basically allow a sense of progression, as something to cling onto when you get to the world, because we're used to structure, we're used to being handed things. That's why they're all there. They're not as big a factor in the game as they would be in CoD or any other racer, where you've got a limited amount of content and you want to get as much out of that as you can by putting in replayability. The replayability in this game is over time, finding your own way through. Don't follow our GPS, that's just there to help you in the beginning. Over time it's you discovering it for yourself. That's how it balances out. It's so hard to explain. It's such a different approach because the tech is simply different to everything else.

VideoGamer.com: Is DLC something you guys have been thinking about much?

DB: Yes definitely. In terms of adding the building blocks we'd love to look at it when it's in the wider world and the kinds of things people are doing, and put in maybe enhancements to the race editor to allow them to give structure to what people are doing in their own way. It's impossible to do an open beta on a console at the minute, which is really frustrating for a game like this where it's exactly what it needs. The world is there, here are the vehicles, then sit and watch what people are doing. With an MMO you can do it, but with something like this, yes we can add cars. When these guys first brought us the game they were actually saying they could make a game five times this big, because the technology takes satellite data and just does it. It was going to be an accurate representation of pretty much the whole United States. And we thought... maybe not! The more we looked into it it was like, "You know what, we've probably got a big enough game here". But we could add a whole other world to be honest and it wouldn't be an enormous download.

VideoGamer.com: It must have posed you quite a few problems working with a world this big. Does it force you to think differently in terms of the way you develop the game?

SW: We have developed lots of tools, first of all teleportation. We have had a testing team from the beginning of the game just cruising the game, reporting bugs. Our development building tool had to be rethought at the beginning because it was made to do little dungeons, you know? All of a sudden the same tool has to do 100km large worlds. Lots of different things we had to change to improve to actually make it feasible. Also we had to build new tools to allow people to change things in the world which they didn't like. It's a different approach when it gets this big.

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