With Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Project Gotham Racing 3 among the most impressive and best-selling of Xbox 360's initial run-out, is there room for one more high-profile urban racer? Well yes, if it's Burnout Revenge the latest incarnation of Criterion's groundbreaking series.
Recently, I talked to the game's Executive Producer, Matt Webster, about transporting all that automotive carnage to Microsoft's shiny new machine. Along with some lipsmacking Live features, it seems the team has gone all out to bring JG Ballard's vision of car crash porn to the next-generation.This is going to hurt...
You're following two high profile racing titles - PGR and NFS - onto Xbox 360. Have your team had chance to take in the pros and cons of those titles, and how they exploit the 360 hardware? If so, what have they learned? Of course. We followed the NFS development on 360 fairly closely once we finished the PS2 and Xbox versions of Revenge, and clearly were keen to see what PGR3 was doing. However, we had a pretty clear direction of our own to work towards. Personally, I think that NFS is one of the best games on 360 in terms of the overall experience. I think that team really nail it with visuals and audio.
Did you start the Xbox 360 code from scratch or have you been able to port over the foundations of the game from the Xbox version? Our aim was to create the showcase version of Revenge, and that was obviously a game that already existed on other platforms. Much of the foundations for the game were brought over from Xbox, but of course there's a ton of work that needs to be done to get a game onto 360 with rendering, audio, Live etc so it needed a significant effort. We spent much of our time and resources looking at the new features that we wanted to execute on, and of course in the areas that are most important to us, which is when a car wrecks.
How long did it take to get things running on Xbox 360? With our development framework, you can get things running fairly quickly although they'll look pretty ugly! We had a core team on 360 at the same time as development work was closing for Revenge on the other platforms. They were looking at the physics systems, the shaders, online, etc. Actually we looked at the early versions just the other day and it's pretty funny when you see how the game looked the very first time it was running!
What have you added to Burnout Revenge for the 360 instalment? When looking at what we wanted to do to make this version the showcase, we knew that we needed more than just moving the game to HD. However, we also knew that we had 10/10 gameplay and content. So we looked at the areas that we wanted to excel in and Live was one of those areas.
Microsoft were kinda pitching it that you weren't getting all of the available power of the next generation if it was hooked into the net. So we chose to dovetail in to that and make online a focus. Of course, we wanted to take the visuals to a new level, and audio as well for that matter. We hear a lot about HD, but not a lot of people are talking about sound can be enhanced creatively with this hardware.
How will you be exploiting the improved Live facilities? We took advantage of the unique relationship between EA and Microsoft in the online arena. We've created two brand new features for the 360 version. We refer to them as Live Revenge and Save & Share.
Live Revenge, put simply, is a system that persistently tracks who you take out (and who takes you out) online and then tracks how those relationships change over time. The way that this is presented to the player is in introductions and communication.
For example, you and I play a game for the first time online. You take me down. Invisibly you are added to my Enemies List, this is Burnout's version of the Friend's list! Next time we enter a lobby together, the game recognises this fact and tells us that there is a relationship between us. When we go to the next event, my game shows me your car, and your gamertag and essentially taunts me, it tells me that you are one up on me and that I need to settle the score. Whilst this is going on, YOUR game is showing you MY car and gamertag and telling you that you are one up, that you should press your advantage, and that I'm going to be coming after you!
Essentially the game is facilitating creating grudges between players. We continue to race and fight, you take me down again, you go two up, and so on....but there's a twist. We took a leaf from the way sports fans create their rivalries. It doesn't matter that Man Utd beat Man City for the last three games that they played, all that matters is that Man City beat Man Utd in the last game. So for us, you could be 25 takedowns up on me, if I get you once, the scores are settled!
And this is where it ratchets up. The next time we come together, we're shown as Arch Rivals! So the game calls out players that you are up on, players that are up on you, players that you have settled scores with in the past, and of course, the common enemy, the player with the highest rank, so everyone always has a target!
We realised that most online games were just about the experience, nothing we really remembered. We wanted to get people feeling more deeply about the game that they are playing, for it to not be just about winning, but for taking out people AND winning... that's the Burnout way!
Save & Share is also a product of our relationship with Microsoft. Burnout always has great action and there's always tons of fans wanting replays. But they don't want replays, they want the content of these replays, the highlights, the concentrated action. So we've create replays of every event in the World Tour that the player competes in. They are able to have simple control over the replay, fast forward, skip back, pause etc. Then the cool but is that once you have found the part that you want, you hit the record button and save up to 30 seconds of that action to HDD or MU.
So this gets you the save part of the feature. I can the view my clips and if I think one is cool, I can simply hit the SHARE button to put it into my own server space online. Every Burnout Revenge 360 gamer has space for up to 3 clips to be shared online for their Friends to go an view. You can also RECOMMEND clips to your friends. We've created a really simple system that allows you to see what your friends are sharing but not only that, to help players that may only have one or two friends, we've created a Burnout community. Every player that you have competed with online gets added to a Recent Burnout Players list, here you can browse clips that they may be sharing, you can download and recommend their clips as well. So it can potentially become viral. If you get a clip that is downloaded or recommended enough, you can get your action into the Top 20 list..and of course, there's an achievement attached to that!!
What specific technical features of the hardware have most impressed the dev team? Apparently the VMX unit is a nice piece of kit! This allowed us to do the localised scratching of the car for example (amongst a lot of other things)! I think that people are just scratching the surface of what is available to us, as happens with every generation. I mean, look at PS2, if you go back in time and show someone who bought a PS2 on day one a copy of Black, just imagine what their face would look like!
Have you added new features to the physics engine to take advantage of the extra computing power? How will crashes be improved as a result? One of our goals was, of course, to make the crashes on 360 look like nothing else. We rebuilt all of the vehicles to add more detail and therefore more ability to wreck. In addition to the deformation system that bends and twists the cars in a crash, we've added scratching, scorching and crumpling to them. Watch the cars take scratchses and crumple when they take non-fatal hits and of course how they scorch when an explosion goes off! We've also add many more particles to the crashes, every car has discreet car parts that are ejected and we do this based on how Hollywood creates car wrecks, as that is most peoples frame of reference, rather than real life.
What are the key new effects open to you on Xbox 360? How are you making increased use of things like HDR lighting, subdivision surfaces and other demanding techniques? One thing that we really went for was our Per-pixel Vector Motion Blur. We took the decision to create a real motion blur, rather than a full screen effect that most people apply. What you see in the game is blur that is applied per pixel based on the direction and velocity that it's moving in. This made a massive difference to our sense of speed in the game. When we first turned it one, it made the 160 cars (the slowest) seem like the fastest, so it needed a little tuning, but it makes such a difference to the game that it's worth the cost per frame!
Do you feel the Xbox 360 version of Revenge evolves the series in gameplay terms? How? I do. All you have to do is play the game online and see Live Revenge in action. Personally I think that it's a feature that a lot of games can benefit from and I think that we've only just scratched the surface in how it helps players feel more deeply about the game that they are playing.
We set out, as I said earlier, to make the showcase version. So with the audio, the new crashing systems, the higher resolutions, the lighting, the tints that we apply, the particle effects and the fact that we've tightened a number of events, and added 10 new crash junctions that were just not do-able on current-gen then I think that we've achieved what we set out to do.
Burnout Revenge is due on Xbox 360 in March.
