MotorStorm 2: Evolution Studios Interview

We chat with Evolution boys Paul Hollywood and Nigel Kershaw to get the full picture on MotorStorm Pacific Rift.

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Kikizo: Your AI has been quite impressive to date.

Kershaw: We call it player-centric AI. There's basically three rules that govern it. Its primary goal is to entertain the player - that's what it does first and foremost. Then it tries to challenge the player by attacking him, or putting him in a situation where he has to react. And then the third goal is to actually win the race. So the AI's always got this awareness of where the player is and what the player's doing, and what other vehicles are doing around the player as well.

[Kershaw describes a race scenario from the perspective of the AI] So I'm in a big rig and the other guy there's in a big rig, and there's a guy there on a bike. So if I just kind of take control of the other big rig and the bike, and get it naturally into a position where we just sort of sandwich this poor guy on the bike - in front of the player - and then have it explode over the top of the player...

Kikizo: How have you managed to bump up the AI for Pacific Rift, then?

Kershaw: We refined it. The first one had some really good ideas, it worked really well [but] it was a lot more smoke-and-mirrors. Basically between the first version and what we've got now, we took all the stuff that didn't work very well and pretty much rewrote the system using what we'd learned from the first one. It's much better at racing around the track for a start - there's a lot less rubber-banding catch-up stuff going on, because the AI's a lot better at actually turning laps.

Getting round this track is much more complicated than in something like a [Formula 1] game. It's off-road, there's a hell of a lot more complexity to it. So the AI's generally better at doing that but also the whole gang system, the player-centric stuff, has been rewritten from scratch, so it's much more sensitive to context, so you'll see lots of different things happening around you, much more variety. We've even got situations where you'll get guys falling off their bikes, getting up, shaking their heads, wandering drunkenly across the track - just in the right place so you can take them out.

In a way it's contrived, but we try to make it look as if it's not contrived, just so it feels right - it's always giving you something to entertain you. We're not trying to simulate a race, we're trying to simulate a Hollywood script of a race.

Kikizo: Can you tell us a bit about the tracks themselves?

Kershaw: Each track is kind of hand-crafted around a theme, but they all sit into four rough zones. So we've got the 'earth' tracks that are all jungle, rotting vegetation, mud, canyons and slimey stuff. We've got the 'water' tracks that feature a lot of beaches, rivers and waterfalls, lots of flowing water around the area. We've got the 'air' tracks which tend to be really high up, sitting on the edges of cliffs or above the clouds, ten thousand feet up. And then the fire tracks that have this lava theme. They're very distinct from each other.

And we spent a lot more time getting the multi-route racing in place, so there's a lot more subtlety to the routes this time, a lot more choices you can make, just a lot more permutations to hone down.

Kikizo: What about the music? We can play along to our own tunes, right?

Kershaw: We've got about forty tracks in there, but obviously it won't be to everybody's tastes. We did start writing our own proprietary play-your-own music stuff, but then Sony started supporting the XMB in-game, so we binned all our stuff and just used that.

Kikizo: And how much time did you spend on that before Sony stole your thunder?

Hollywood: Not enough for us to get too annoyed!

Kershaw: The good thing about having user music support in there is that we can give less of a monkey's about anybody else's personal taste in music, and just go with stuff that we like [laughs]. To a certain degree.

Hollywood: We've also got photo mode in the game as well, so if you get one of those horrific crashes where you've got all mangled up, you can take a picture of it, save that to your XMB and show it to your friends.

Kershaw: Hopefully it'll turn into one of those things where people send you photographs of where you've fucked up. Touch wood.

MotorStorm Pacific Rift is out in North America on October 28 and Europe on November 11. Expect a Kikizo verdict soon.

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