MotorStorm Preview & HD Video

Sony's Pete Smith convinces us that MotorStorm will be one of PS3's biggest early hitters. Latest media included.

Last year, Sony dropped many jaws with pre-rendered videos created to give an idea of what PlayStation 3 games would eventually look like. One of the games in the middle of the fracas was MotorStorm, the off-road racing game by British developer Evolution Studios, creators of the WRC rally series.

While the game wowed people at Sony's E3 press briefing in 2005, it was nowhere to be seen at its conference a year later, prompting guffaws from armchair critics. Then suddenly it turned up on the show floor, tucked away in a corner on the upper level of Sony's monstrous booth. What happened?

"We were always aiming to deliver a demo for E3," Sony's Pete Smith told us shortly after the press conference. "That was always the plan. Quite simply, we weren't ready for the press conference. Everybody really wanted to get the game onto the show floor when they saw the quality of the game, but we only want to show something at its top quality." Somehow, the days between the press conference and the start of the show were enough.

There was little that you could surmise from Evolution's target movie for MotorStorm at E3 2005, other than that it would involve lots of speed, dust, and pain. Smith told Kikizo that Sony is aiming for something different, something brutal. "We want the game to be more than just a race," he said. "The race is a constant battle from beginning to end between all of the opponents. It's intense action from the moment you start right until the end. You take your eye off of the action and you get taken out. If you start to concentrate too much on getting the best landing, or you forget about your competitors, it'll be the end of the race, or at least the end of your lead."

Taking the race off-road opens it up to a lot of new factors that don't affect an ordinary racer. For one, the type of terrain you're racing on and the sort of vehicle you're driving will influence how easy it is to retain control. Some vehicles, such as the bikes and trucks, love being in mud, while others prefer to stick to firmer ground. This is extended by making track surfaces more dynamic, as Smith explains:

"We want to give the player a different experience on every lap. So when you come to the first lap, the ground is pressed, it's untouched. If you're at the front of the track, you're going to be the one who's actually destroying it. However, after just one lap you're going to have ripped it up. There are about 20 vehicles going around on these tracks, so the track's going to give a completely different experience."

There are other ways in which the unflinching march of time is associated with courses. For instance, bikes will be able to use a ramp to get up to higher ground, but if you damage the ramp enough times on successive laps, it'll be destroyed, closing off that route for the rest of the race.

It's not just the tracks that you'll be battling. Characterization isn't something you would normally associate with a driving game, but Evolution is at least trying to give your opponents some semblance of character. Just like you, they'll be edging to stick to the best surface for their particular vehicle, and at the same time they'll try to shunt you of course. And when they're not trying to kill you, they'll be hurling epithets at you. Much like real competition, then.

One of the beauties of using this style of racing as the basis for a game is that it allows for a wide range of vehicles. Bikes, ATVs, trucks, rally cars - they're all here. There are seven vehicle types in all, with five members in each group, ranging from retro-themed variants to newer models and a few in between. Probably the best news, though, is that Evolution has implemented full damage modelling. " To try to get across the brutality of the racing, we've invested heavily in the damage system," says Smith. "We want to really smash these cars to pieces. That's been a big focus for us." And when you consider that there are up to 20 racers on a course at one time, the possibilities of quality crash-porn are high.

Acknowledgement that games these days are dependent on more than just the quality of the gameplay comes in the addition of custom tracks in MotorStorm. Smith says you'll be able to import your own music, which will undergo post-processing on the fly, integrating it more fully into the game.

However comforting it is to know that Evolution is making for a user-friendly aural experience, what drew most people to MotorStorm first was the quality of the graphics - or at least the quality of those early target renders. Tack a year of expectations on to that and the reality of the graphics as they look now is that much more sombre. Where the original footage seemed to teem with life, the latest images for the game and the video we've seen of it are more reminiscent of a pretty off-road racing game, but not much more.

Which leads to the question: Have Sony and Evolution overpromised to the point where people who remember the E3 2005 movies will see the final game and walk away disappointed? There are a lot of screenshots and movies here to help you come to a tentative verdict. We'll have to wait for the final code running on production hardware before we know for sure.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo