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Blur

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Aftrunner Newbie

Aftrunner

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Name - Blur

Development studio - Bizzare

Platforms - Xbox 360, PS3, PC

 

From an Edge preview (lifted off a gamespot thread)

 

- It's set in real cities and uses a mock social network to structure the events (illegal street racing)

- Wipeout like Power-ups

- Release date Q4 2009

- It will movie from city to city (Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Brighton, Barcelona, Amboy & more)

- Each location will be themed using lighting

- Lots of nitro

- Up to 20 racers online and offline

- 4 player split screen

- Large variety of licensed cars, not as many as some other racing games though

- A kudos like system, which gives you point for combos and other in-race achievements which you can buy new cars with

- The usual ''zero to hero'' story

- There will just be 9 story cut-scenes (one for every city?), produced by the same agency as Gears of War 2

- Much more sophisticated damage-modelling system than PGR

- Photo Mode included, you can send pictures to opponents

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devil_angel Newbie

devil_angel

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well any hardcore rally fan would trash dirt.....I liked it as a game but they misused rally and tried something more arcade......i hated that aspect.....

Toca Race Driver Grid on the other hand is ok coz its an arcade racing game and is quite fun.....

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  • 2 weeks later...
HundredProofSam Community Regular

HundredProofSam

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IGN Hands-on

 

Excerpts below

  • Forget what you might have read; this isn't simply Forza meets Mario Kart, it's Project Gotham gone Nu Rave.
  • Blur takes the arcade excesses of its predecessors and runs with them, resulting in an experience more akin to the heady excitement of Mario Kart than the cold precision demanded by Forza and its ilk.
  • Yes, there are weapons, but their implementation has been delicately handled. Blending seamlessly with the racing, weapons are accompanied by audio cues that become instantly recognisable - whether it's the digital ticking of a mine or the sub-bass hum that warns of an imminent shockwave, they're part of an audio package that's just as impressive as the game's visuals.
  • Two slots are initially available (with more spaces unlocked as the game progresses), with power-ups being collected on track. There are the customary options; Nitrous provides a fleeting speed boost, Shunt produces a burst of EMP powerful enough to push a car off course, while Barge sends out a lateral blast that sends surrounding opponents flying.
  • Tracks are now marked out by hastily placed bollards – throughout the course of a race it's possible to see the traffic gathering behind the impromptu road blocks – and corners are marked by light projections, with chevrons lighting up building facades. The murky legality of the racing necessitates a nocturnal setting as well, with races taking place at either dawn, dusk or night - all of which serves to highlight the neon aesthetic that defines the game's visual style. It's a style that's present in the red trails that streak from car's tail-lights, the power-ups that float above the track and most explicitly in the weapons that fill the screen with electric splashes of primary colours.
  • The metropolitan centres that hosted Project Gotham's races having been replaced by their more downbeat fringes; London is represented but, in place of chic glamour of Mayfair and Piccadilly, the action has been shifted to Hackney, with the course taking players across the triangle of Shoreditch High Street, Great Eastern Street and Old Street.
  • A run through LA's storm drains and the desert expanse of Amboy form the other two tracks available in today's demo, both highlighting Blur's new approach to track design. The City of Angels' drains provide solid resistance to any opponents sent wayward by an EMP blast, while Amboy offers vast run-off areas littered with precariously placed obstacles – again proving an effective tool to dispose of the other racers.
  • Both tracks also underline another of Blur's key features – 20 car races, ensuring that driving is never lonely as the pack furiously jostles for first position.
  • The vehicles themselves are again drawn from real-life, though they're now pulled from a more diverse pool.
  • Game-friendly classes such as tuned cars, race cars and drift cars to some more idiosyncratic inclusions. Rat cars - scruffy looking vehicles designed for performance over aesthetics - feature, as do smooth cars which reduce the vehicle's form to its purest elements.
  • Manufacturers have given full approval to some of the variations on their models created by Bizarre Creations. Damage, only a half-hearted aspect of the Project Gotham series, is here a full-blooded feature, with bonnets flapping in the wind and cars shedding bodywork as they get involved in the hustle of the pack.
  • Even in its early state, it's a game that already looks to have balanced that much strived for ground of being easy to pick up but hard to master. The handling of the Dodge Challenger we spent most our time in was uniquely light and responsive and, while some of the complexities of Project Gotham's tail-happy system have been lost, a new level of accessibility has been gained.
  • More outlandish car models will be available, with the Transit Supervan - Ford's late eighties' eccentric that placed an F1 engine in the famed workman's vehicle - spotted being put through its paces on a virtual test bed.
  • One of the most surprising manifestations of Bizarre's new direction is in Blur's user interface, which borrows heavily from social networking sites. There's no doubting the influence of one site in particular, with the menus laid out in a way that will be familiar to anyone who's ever used Facebook. In the single-player game, objectives are laid out in the form of messages from other competitors.
  • While the UI is merely a cute nod to social networking in single-player, for multiplayer modes it has much more exciting ramifications. Custom groups can be set up, enabling players to define the parameters of online races for up to twenty people.
  • For the hardcore, it's possible to establish groups wherein weapons aren't allowed, and that's the tip of the customisation iceberg as whole rule-sets can be defined by the player and then filtered out to the world at large.
  • Four player split-screen is being offered - a commendable inclusion and a reminder of racing games past.

peace

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HundredProofSam Community Regular

HundredProofSam

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IGN: Blur Q&A

Bizarre Creations' lead designer Gareth Wilson on life after Gotham.

 

IGN: First impressions of Blur will be that it's Project Gotham with guns. Is that an unfair summation?

 

Gareth Wilson: It's a totally different game. The biggest challenge we're going to have with this game is convincing hardcore gamers that it's actually any good. We put it into usability tests and people love it – people who haven't played racing games for years.

 

 

IGN: What do you think kept these people away from racing games?

 

Gareth Wilson: Complexity and punishing gameplay, I think. You wouldn't make a shooter where if you got shot once, you had to restart the level. In most racing games, if you crash once you have to restart the race. It's that punishing cost of failure – and not catering for people who prefer a more simple handling model.

 

Some games have had a noble goal but they've dumbed down a sim so they have to use assists. GRID has got excellent assists – you can switch them all on and it's quite easy to drive. The problem is the people that buy GRID and switch all the assists off, and the people that would want to buy GRID don't because it's a sim. I can see what they're trying to do, and it's very noble, but just won't buy it because it's a sim.

 

 

IGN: After so many years working on Project Gotham, were you getting tired of the franchise, and is this a game that everyone at Bizarre had wanted to make for some time?

 

Gareth Wilson: I think we wanted to make something different. When we finished PGR we didn't think 'let's make a crazy game with lightbeams and characters that talk to you' - there wasn't this grand vision at all. To be totally honest, we started and we thought we needed to make a more exciting Gotham. We started experimenting with lots of cars and we almost had this Days of Thunder, Nascar vibe – and it was better because there was overtaking and lots of car to car stuff, but it still wasn't as exciting as it could be. So we started thinking about having some special abilities to add some strategy to it.

 

We put those in, but it still wasn't really doing it – it was too subtle. That's when the power-ups came along and it was a very organic process. We didn't really have a clue what we wanted to make after Gotham but one thing we knew was that we wanted to make it appeal to more people.

 

 

IGN: Bizarre's previous games have had heavy ties to their hardware – even going back to Metropolis Street Racer which was a key Dreamcast title, and then Gotham effectively launched both Microsoft consoles. With that not being the case with Blur, has it changed the approach at all?

 

Gareth Wilson: Very much so, and also the place where we are in the console life cycle now – everyone's got a sim so I think if you're a real hardcore racer you only need one sim in your catalogue, whether that's Gran Turismo or Forza, Gotham or GRID. Now the 360 is getting towards the end of its life cycle, you start getting creative gameplay, like the PlayStation 2 had in Shadow of the Colossus or Okami; they never could have been launch titles. When the next iteration of consoles come out, making a sim then would be a great thing to do, but I'm not so sure if it's the right time for another serious racing game.

 

 

IGN: During the presentation there was an analogy about how playing most racers is like playing a shooter with only one gun – can you expand upon that?

 

Gareth Wilson: If you look at other games in other genres, they're easy to get into but they have depth and different styles of gameplay. Racing games have that, but it's very narrow – in fact most racing games don't have that accessibility to begin with and you have to learn very quickly to drive, and once you've learned how to do it there's a narrow level of mastery. What we wanted to do was expand the strategy – in Halo you've got to learn how to use a grenade, you've got to learn how to use the different weapons and learn the different characters, how Brutes are different to Grunts who are different to Elites.

 

I'll give you an example of an event in this game that's cool; you go to the Long Beach docks and you meet this guy called Drake - he's this badass guy who looks like someone out of ZZ-Top. He's conceived the idea of mines – so before you meet him you've never seen mines, and when you meet him you have to go through docks while he's dropping them and you're avoiding them. He's like a boss, the sort of thing you'd expect in any other genre of game. If you manage to get past that you get to a one-on-one to defeat him – and Rymer, who's your mentor, gives you a shield perk, so you use the shield perk to defend against the boss. It's that level of gameplay that doesn't happen in other racing games – but it's quite a risky strategy.

 

 

IGN: There's a lot more going on in the game – you say how it's more accessible now but in a lot of ways it seems more complex...

 

Gareth Wilson: It is but it's all about introducing stuff all the time, so at the start of the game it's just nitrous pick-ups, you're in a simple car that doesn't drift. It's all about easing people into it and layering stuff later on.

 

We're trying to make it as accessible as possible and you're right, it is a lot more complicated than your average racer – you've got perks, you've got pick-ups, so the complexity of control is higher, but the cost of entry is lower. You don't need to understand draft, you don't need to understand the apex. If you're feeling adventurous or you're an experienced racer, you can pretty much ditch the grippy car and move to the Dodge Challenger, which is a gruff, PGR-style drifting beast.

 

When we talk about the Drake thing – that's about two hours into the game, so it's not like that's the first thing you do. If it was something like Mario – the bosses in that are quite complex things, you have to pick up this to do this thing and then when he's red you can do this – but it's played by five-year-olds. It's just a matter of scaling up slowly.

 

 

IGN: The Kudos system is gone – but there's a fan system in there. How familiar will that be to players of Project Gotham?

 

Gareth Wilson: The Kudos system was all about skilful driving and this is still about skill but it's less about precision and drifting. You can still get fans for doing drifts, but that's not the be-all and end-all of the system. It's more about using the power-ups – that's where you get your fans.

 

The idea is that you can do a simple power-up move that is just shunt and that gets you a certain number of fans - but you get more fans by doing upgraded shunts. You can modify these moves so if you did a shunt that flipped the car it was aimed at, you could start chaining these things together - do a shunt that collides a car with another car and then flips those two out results in a combo multiplier. The casual players will just shunt some people and get some fans, but the more experienced gamers will realise that if they nitro overtake someone and then shunt someone into a parked car then that's a shunt crash, which again is a multiplier.

 

There are other examples, like if someone's just hit me and I hit them back within 10 seconds - that's a revenge multiplier. It's a layering of combos on top of a simple system. One thing we're not doing much of is, in Gotham, you had continuous moves that were extremely difficult for users to get their head round.

 

 

IGN: One last question – Geometry Wars is synonymous with Bizarre's games – will there be a new version within Blur?

 

Gareth Wilson: No – Stephen [Cakebread, the driving force behind the Geometry Wars games] is not ready yet. Geometry Wars came out quite recently and he's a law unto himself. He decides when it's ready, and it's not just yet.

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HundredProofSam Community Regular

HundredProofSam

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I'm okay with them dissing GRID and sh*ting all over serious racers, but Facebook in a game - DO NOT f**king WANT!! I've been able to steer clear of it all this while and I don't need a game to shove it in my face.

 

 

 

peace

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Bulovski Newbie

Bulovski

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oh you should visit Facebook - it's the worst time waster on the planet. There will be people inviting you for thousand 'games' and you will see inane quizzes being taken (the latest trend in fb), and witty status updates. But I wonder how the facebook interface will work with a racing game?

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