New dev interview
Anthony Hanses: Hello, this is Anthony Hanses with PS3Portal.com, on the final day of E3 2006. I am here with Paul Hollywood. He is the art director on Motorstorm for the PS3. So, Paul, what can you tell us about this great game?
Paul Hollywood: I can tell you lots of things about this game. What I'll tell you is we've been working really hard on this game getting ourselves ready to show at E3, and we're really proud to be showing off Motorstorm. I'm gonna talk about some of the next generation features of the game. Mainly we've got dynamic terrain defamation. What this basically means is, on the muddy areas of the track, as the vehicals drive over, they cut ridges into the road, as you can see here.
What this means is that through persistance, over the number of laps, these ridges will keep building up and not only does this affect the visuals but it affects the gameplay as well, so no two laps are ever the same. Also, we're utilizing the massive power of the Playstation 3 for such graphical effects as toe mapping, bloom, high-dynamic range lighting, motion blur, depth of field... we also have state of the art A.I. technology, and we're using Havok physics. And all these different systems are running on seperate SPU's, so that's why we've been able to get such performance out of the PLaystation 3.
AH: Great. Great to hear. So how long has Motorstorm been in development for?
PH: Well we've been working on Motorstorm for about two years, and a lot of the pre-production work on the game design and the concept and what have you. Last year when we showed the trailer at E3, that was like a visualization of our concept. So now, we've actually built up our technology from scratch, from the base down. Everythig here we've worked on; the engine, the physics engine, all the models, all the environments. And all that's been created from nothing.
So we're about-- we're due to be a launch title, so there's not much more to go. We'd say here about 50% complete. So that's for the foundations, the technology foundations have been set, and now we just gotta add content. We're building 12 tracks for the game, there are 35 vehicles, and what you can see here is seven vehicles, one representing each class in the game. So you got big rigs, racing trucks, buggys, ATVs, dirt bikes. In the final game, you'll be able to play any of these vehicles in the Motorstorm environment.
AH: So do you have any online features planned for this game?
PH: Of course, yeah. We're planning 16 player online, and also we're going to have downloadable content, which could be possibly new tracks, new vehicles, or even new game modes.
AH: Great. Well thank you for your time sir, and we look forward to playing the game.
PH: Thank you very much.