FUEL Interview

Codemasters knows what it’s talking about when it comes to driving games. Need proof? Play Race Driver: GRID. Or Colin McRae: DIRT. That’s all the proof you’ll need. So when Codemasters announces a new driving game, you should take notice. Hence Fuel, the open world Mad Max-style racer from French developer Asobo Studios that’s played out on a mammoth 5,000 square miles map that’s created using new technology that blends satellite data and procedurally generated data together. At Leipzig Games Convention last month we got the chance to get our first look at the game, as well as chat with executive producer David Brickley, and found out just how a game this big can fit on one disc.

VideoGamer.com: What do you think the guys at Criterion think of your game?

David Brickley: (Laughs) Even within our own company we’ve got an awful lot of experience of approaching new driving games from a certain angle. It’s good that we’re being our own competition in that respect. It keeps everyone challenged, it keeps everyone competitive. With GRID and DIRT being so focused on licensed cars and licensed championships and really recreating an authentic experience, we just went nuts with this. It was just about looking at the world and going we’re not constrained by anything. We just wanted to do something totally different and see where it takes us.

We’ve been inspired by games that have gone out there. Test Drive is a wonderful wonderful game. The way it brought an online experience that was so accessible, you could turn it on and relax, not do anything. That kind of experience that online PC gamers had for many years that console has lacked. In the context of that map, which is one small corner of it, when the guy 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. One of the producers from Codemasters’ side, who used to be the principle track designer on GRID and on DIRT, very used to leading a team and sorting these kind of challenges, was able to look at the world from when we first saw it, analyse it, advise and set these guys a challenge to solve it. You’d get a build back two days later and there would be interesting things. Like you would be driving along a mountain path but the drop is 20 feet from your car, so you’d miss that ‘whoa’ experience. All of a sudden the road extends to the edge of the mountain. Simple things like that. But also much more complex things. The way they blend together the variety of the environments was a process that took years. It’s just a complete flip on how you would normally do it.

Criterion is obviously doing a city-based driving game. 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.

VideoGamer.com: When I saw the map I struggled to comprehend the vastness of the world. I wondered how many Paradise Cities you would fit in it.

DB: (Laughs) 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.

VideoGamer.com: Tell us about the GPS system on the HUD. In Burnout Paradise we found we would miss turns because we were too busy trying not to crash and couldn’t look at the map.

DB: It was inspired by some real world GPS’ that have come out recently which project a 3D arrow going forward and then turning right. They put it on the inside of the windscreen. So as opposed to something like Ferrari Challenge or an F1 game which would imply the racing line down here, because we’re up, down, left, right and all the rest of it it’s at the top of the screen. If you imagine in Colin McRae when you’re coming up to a turn it puts a little arrow there and it blends it in, it does something similar when approaching a change. You don’t need it all of the time, if you’re following the roads, then you’re following the roads. But if you’re going to change from one very diverse surface to another it’ll blend it in, warn you it’s coming up and then the point being you’re not taking your eye off of the experience to know when the turn is coming.

VideoGamer.com: Will you be able to share created missions cross-platform?

DB: Our intention is to use the Windows Live platform which means that on PC you’re sharing the same infrastructure. It appears to make sense from a development point of view. Certainly that’s the way Microsoft is pitching it to us. So we’ll see. That would mean then that those two versions are compatible. There’s no option to do PC and PS3 together – they’re direct competitors. They’d frown on that a bit!

VideoGamer.com: How will you be able to communicate to other players that you want to race with them?

DB: The on board computer is able to convey stored information that you have – where the next race is going to be, where you are. It’s not very story driven but to be able to look at the map and to know where a challenge is and where you are in relation to it, so you can set your mark and say take me there, or just teleport there, or hitch a ride on the copters we use narratively to drop you in a new vehicle are also the way that we get you from one hub to another, if you want to do it that way. You hitch a ride, it’s all below you in real time, so if you see an area you might like you say ‘oh I’ll come back there later’. Or you can drive there on your own time. It’s up to the player how they want to do it. We just didn’t want that feeling that you were forced to sit though it, or if you simply wanted to get there and teleport there, you could. But given the freedom we have, obviously we want to encourage the player as much as possible to drive out and explore and do it at their own speed.

VideoGamer.com: Any plans to do a demo? The Burnout Paradise demo was quite popular.

DB: Yeah. It came out before. Obviously there’s an awful lot of desire from our marketing team to get one out in advance and get people hands on with it. We will determine if there’s a way that we can offer it in a digestible piece. The Test Drive demo was a funny one because it just didn’t get across the game. Maybe Burnout being smaller worked in that sense because you could see they were all locked but you got a sense of where it was. Test Drive just did not work as a demo. I think it really damaged it so we need to be very careful about that because it was a fabulous game. You wouldn’t give the whole thing away for free, it wouldn’t make sense. So if you were going to give somebody hands on it’s got to get across what that game is all about. So we’ll monitor it. Obviously there’s a desire on the company’s behalf to do it but it’s got to covey the right impression about the game.

VideoGamer.com: So it’s still undecided on whether you’ll do a demo?

DB: Yeah. We’re far enough out to not have to have any concrete plans on that yet. But the nature of how games are distributed these days, it’s so much easier to get a game on Marketplace or on PSN.

VideoGamer.com: What about DLC? Are you considering it?

DB: Yeah. The mission editor is a great way of giving real longevity, but what we’re really hoping for is to get enough feedback from the community to drive the DLC beyond that point. With such a free form approach that we’ve taken to the design, it’s kind of been like let’s not over design it, let’s just give the tools to the players to be able to have fun. We’ve got some vehicles that maybe haven’t made it into this iteration of the game. They didn’t quite justify themselves. But if we get enough ideas from people that really lead it in another direction – it’s going to be quite straightforward to blend in a new race structure, a new type of vehicle or a new suite of challenges. The other extreme would be an entire new world.

VideoGamer.com: Making it even bigger? Or a new world all together?

DB: What they pitched to us, and what we signed up was that there was going to be five of them. The technology can do that. I mean the actual rendering of the landscape. Because it was actually using satellite data and fully recreating it in real time. And it was like… (laughs).

VideoGamer.com: How do you fit all of that onto a disc?

DB: The tech does it. This is the thing. I wish I had a tenth of their brainpower to conceive of how they’ve done it. But generating the landscape is something we spent four years trying to figure out. Filling it with content? That’s why there’s not five more maps. That’s why we thought, let’s just get the best in.

VideoGamer.com: So it is conceivable that you could make available via DLC an entirely new map?

DB: Yeah. Because you’re not talking about a 20 gig download. You can actually do it in an extraordinarily small amount of space, without sacrificing. Everything is pre-alpha, but you can see from the graphical quality on show, even pre-alpha, you put it side by side with another racing game it really holds up to it well. Whereas in the past, or even with an MMO you accept that the scale has a downside, and that is that you can’t quite have as much animation. I honestly don’t know how they’ve done it. To not have to make those sacrifices and to make it all seamless…

VideoGamer.com: When I looked at the map the first thing I thought of was an MMO racer.

DB: It was one of the original ideas. We kicked around an awful lot of ideas. With the console audience the thing about MMO is, and obviously at Codemasters we’re running a few of our own, we’ve got a lot of experience of just how much it costs to support the infrastructure, the community support and all the rest of it is very intensive, and if you can charge a subscription for that you can do it. If you’ve got your Xbox and you’re already paying for Xbox LIVE, we can’t ask somebody to pay over and above that. We can’t bank roll, much as we’d love to have a persistent online world, which already exists, there is actually a development server in Paris running that, that was what Asobo spent many years making, but to have data centres in America and here, and 24/7 support – huge amount of money. It’s not something we could sustain without having a subscription. The console audience just wouldn’t have it.

VideoGamer.com: Will the PS3 version support Trophies?

DB: Yeah. And lots of scope to really make it not an afterthought as well. There’s just so much potential. With the guys talking about even finding a nice view, there’s a reward for you. It’s a really nice natural fit for Trophies and Achievements.

VideoGamer.com: Will the 360 Achievements be different to the PS3 Trophies?

DB: Well the market is 50/50. Unless you are Sony or Microsoft you can’t really shove all your weight behind one platform. You want to give gamers the best experience that you can. Given that the approach is the game, the things that are fun about the game, there will be a lot of parity between the two. But where possible we’ll try and get in something different.

VideoGamer.com: What about PS3 Home? Will the game support that?

DB: It’s not in our current plans. We’ve not had enough information on it. That’s not something that’s currently on our road map. We’ll see what happens.

Fuel is due out for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC in Q2 2009.