Para que no se diga.
Entrevista a Bizarre.
-DailyGame: It’s obvious you’ve put more work into the environments. Can you describe the work you've put into the environments this time around?
Brian Woodhouse, Executive Producer: The main thing we strived for in PGR2 was to make the cities more alive. By re-writing the engine from scratch, we were able to increase our polygon and texture count. This gave the artists a lot more freedom to create the cities. Also a lot more lighting and shadow effects were added to try to give the scenes real depth and photo-realism.
-Given the success of games like Midtown Madness 3 and Midnight Club 2, where races have several possible paths, have you given thought to creating multiple-path tracks in PGR 2?
Yes, we did it give it some thought, but we decided that we wanted to create more of a true racing game and also not stray too far from what we’d built on in Gotham 1.
-Part of the appeal of Midtown Madness 3 is that all vehicles are immediately unlocked online. What are your plans for online play in PGR 2? Will players need to unlock a car in order to use it on Live?
At the start of the game the user will have a choice of about 30 cars from – these will range from the compact cars all the way up to the big supercars. In order to race any other car online, though, you will have to unlock it. The joy of the Kudos tokens system is, though, that you can unlock any car first, there is no order.
-Let’s talk licensing for a minute. How long did it take to get permission to re-create storefronts, what was involved, and how did mom-and-pop owners in Moscow react to having you propose that their store appear in PGR 2?
Microsoft’s licensing department handled the entire shop front licensing for PGR 1 and PGR 2, from the moment we started researching the cities for version 2 in early 2002. Microsoft worked on the city licenses, and this continued up until Art freeze. Getting the licenses for each of the cities ranged in difficulty depending on the local laws for each country. In Moscow, for example, as long as we kept the shop fronts as real as possible, we didn't need to approach the shop owner, while in Edinburgh we needed to get permission from each of the individual shop owners.
-The kudos system at E3 seemed a bit more forgiving. Was this based on feedback, your own intuition or a little of both?
To be honest it was a little bit of both, although we did get a lot of feedback saying that the game was too hard so it was a conscious decision to make the game more approachable.
It wasn’t just Kudos system tweaks that made this though, a lot of effort has gone into the difficulty levels. We now have 5 levels, with Steel being the easiest and Platinum being for our hardcore audience, by doing this we hope the game can be completed by anybody who buys it (although rewards will still vary depending on what level you’ve done it).
-Will amateur racers have their own set of records on the Xbox Live Leaderboard apart from the players with mad racing skills, or will online races take place with everyone set on the same level?
The scoreboards will contain everybody’s Kudos score so you can see how good you are compared to everyone in the world of Xbox Live, so they won’t be split. In terms of online play there is no difficulty level, we wanted to make sure that everybody is on a level playing field and that they don’t feel cheated.
-How many cars are you planning to include?
In the final version we have 104 cars, these range from the Mini Cooper to the Enzo Ferrari (with a whole host of track specials, muscle cars, classics, SUV’s, etc. thrown in for good measure).
-And you pay Kudos points to unlock vehicles....? Are there some vehicles you’ll only be able to unlock this way?
When you first start the game you will be given two cars out of each class, and you then have to exchange Kudos Tokens to collect the rest – apart from five bonus vehicles, which you get for completing the game at the various levels.
-There’s talk of support for 16 players.... Does that mean we might see tracks in PGR 2 that are wider/larger/longer than those in the first?
When racing online there will be maximum of 8 players in a race. In terms of tracks, we have tried to make them as varied as we can: we have Moscow with its wide roads, Florence and Barcelona with their tight corners and also the Nurburgring with its huge sweeping bends.
-Why did you decide to keep damage from affecting a car’s performance and handling?
We decided to keep damage from affecting a car’s performance because it was very frustrating for users. For instance, if you are playing online and get smashed into the first corner, then your race is virtually over and you’ll just either quit out and find another game or come in last place.
-Sounds reasonable. So aside from racing, ghost cars and leaderboards, do you anticipate using Xbox Live in any other way?
We hope to have downloads in the future, at the moment we are unsure what these will be though.
-Of the numerous gameplay enhancements over the first PGR, which two or three do you think players will most enjoy? Do you have a personal favorite?
I think the major one people will enjoy is Xbox Live. It’s great to compete against real people and also judge yourself against the rest of the world, and also see how people get the big Kudos scores by looking at their ghosts. Secondly, I think the tweaks to the Kudos system will open the game up to a lot more people, whilst also keeping the hardcore gamers coming back for more.
My personal favourite would have to be the single-player scoreboards; even when your friends are offline, you still feel as though you’re playing against them by trying to beat their scores.
DailyGame would like to thank Brian Woodhouse and the entire Bizarre Creations team for taking the time to chat with us while they're gearing up for the release of PGR2.
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Resumen
La entrevista no es muy inteligente y no han seguido mucho el juego antes de realizar algunas preguntas.
Nada más empezar podremos elegir entre 30 coches, 2 por cada categoría.
Los tokens te permitirán desbloquear cualquier coche, no importa el orden, los más malos menos tokens, los buenos más.
104 coches disponibles. Creo que los bonus cars solo serán completados si pasas las pruebas en todos los niveles de dificultad.
En Moscú no han necesitado ningún tipo de permiso para recrear los comercios que aparecen, al contrario que Edinburgo. Todo a cargo de MS.