According to Paul Hollywood, Art Director at Evolution Studios, the development of the game has been rather rapid in the past few days. In fact, they've been working so much on the title that they just received the latest build of the game that's currently on the show floor from England last night, so they quickly brought it over to the convention center and set it up. While the build was only about fifty percent complete, it was showing off a ton of effects, such as real time deformation of the track, HDR and motion blurring, tone mapping on the cars and the mud to show the additional layer of dirt that gets caked on vehicles, and depth of field. While Hollywood stated that it's been difficult to get the game up to the level of presentation that was shown at last year's Sony press conference, he thought that what they had was pretty impressive so far.
Once we jumped behind the wheel, it was pretty hard to disagree with him. The game itself will be set in Monument Valley at the MotorStorm Festival, a massive multi-sensory event out in.
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The implementation of Havok for the physics really was impressive as other competitors took out fellow drivers -- at one point, three drivers teamed up to drive the big rig into concrete barriers, at which point it exploded into a shower of sparks and car parts. Even the rogue wheels of this truck sank into some of the ruts of the dirt where previous cars had driven before firmly coming to rest in the mud. Even better were some of the celebrations and curses that were hurled at cars. Some drivers flipped off other racers, while some shook their fist. One guy on an ATV grabbed his crotch as he taunted a wreck that he passed. Obviously not one for the kids, but a lot of amusement for the adults.
MotorStorm is still planned for the launch, and we'll have more info whenever it's released.
