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So what are you trying to do with Rallisport 2?
Troedsson: In Europe, the original Rallisport Challenge was released at the same time as Xbox launched. In this game, we have tried to focus on what was fun in the former game, and take that one step ahead. I'm not talking about visuals and stuff like that, because for us that's eye-candy, we can always do stuff like that.
What we're interested in focusing on is what can be done with the Xbox Live play, what can be done with the single-player, how can we improve handling, what is fun with the game, what can we make even better?
We want this to be advanced, we want it to be something that you couldn't do on any other game. I think we're trying to hide a simulator within an arcade style game.
It should be easy to pick up and play and it shouldn't be a chore just to get the car to work properly. You should just be able to start the run. Also it should look like all the various difficulty levels of different racers are represented. There should be easy tracks, easy cars, but there should also be the very challenging long tracks, with races that last over ten minutes.
What kind of new features can we expect?
Troedsson: A new feature in this game is going to be night-time racing. We couldn't include it in Ralli 1 and we really wanted to see it in this one, but when we added it, we learned that it's really hard to race in those conditions - night being night, it's very dark!
We don't want to cheapen our game, we want to give players something that's hardcore - if it's tough in reality, it's tough in the game too.
Not too hard of course - it's got to be fun to play too, but it's still going to challenge the most hardcore player. So night-time racing is very special. If you play some of the stages where you're driving, for example, around 15 kilometres downhill, it's dark, it's raining, it's all mud - and you're racing a car with a thousand horsepower.
Perhaps if you use the hardest difficulty level with the hardest damage model, you're going to break the car. And if you don't drive carefully, you're not going to make it to the end.
What kind of control do you have over the in-game settings?
Troedsson: You can race the same track under various different settings, you can't change the night-time or the weather on certain tracks because those tracks have been designed specifically to drive under those conditions, but you can change the damage model; there are some tweaks that you can make.
Also when playing on Live, if you're setting up the game, you can set the rules. You can say: "this track, these cars, I only allow these camera angles for instance - we added the interior camera view of the car, which is something that a lot of people requested.
We thought about that, and a lot of the team felt that if we were going to add it, we need to make it more interesting; one of the ways of doing that is, in Xbox Live, to force people to use that view if they're playing in a race that you've set up.
So it's a small tweak but it's not so usual and it adds an element of fun for people who like that.
The genre's hugely popular in Europe with a lot of competition out there - the Xbox Live side of things aside, what do you feel you do better than games like McRae?
Troedsson: Although we look at other games in the same genre we don't make that direct comparison feature to feature because first of all there are various different platforms; we were comparing mainly to our former game, to see what we excel in and how we could better that.
Our physics engine for this is very advanced, it's a unique selling point because it's so advanced now, it really really works. It shows off just exactly how the car works.
We don't have to say we have added feature A and feature B to the physics engine anymore - it's there, it works, it doesn't need anything else. Even if you're driving the car outside the track, or you flip the car and it's sliding on its roof, it's still working.
How have you managed to make this game look so much better than the other rally games out there? We've been playing McRae 4 and loving it but this just looks leaps and bounds ahead.
Troedsson: As I said at the beginning, I don't want to sound like a snob or anything but the visuals in the game for us come in the background.
We accept nothing else than that the game should look so good that when people see it, they should find their jaws dropping. We just take that for granted.
I think that the demands that we put upon ourselves as developer because we want to put out high quality products, with the Xbox we have the opportunity to do it, because it's a console with a lot of power and resources in it, especially compared to the PS2.
The short answer is, I think, we have really good and innovative people working on the project, both programmers and artists who are pushing each other all the time.
Are you completely committed to producing games strictly for the Xbox?
Troedsson: Well, for now. We'll see what happens in the future.
Do you have an exclusivity deal with Xbox? Could a version appear on PC?
Troedsson: I'm not really into the deal, I can't really comment. It's not up to me, but I wouldn't be too happy for the guys who tried to convert this.
But in theory you wouldn't rule out producing a title on the PS2?
Troedsson: No. As a company we work on every platform - well, not really GameCube, but all the others.
So technically could you do Rallisport Challenge on the PS2?
Troedsson: Not this good looking, no. Not a chance. One of the things I mentioned earlier, the really long tracks, I think we'd have trouble doing those on PS2. We need the hard drive, we need the really quick DVD streaming.
That is something that was a real challenge from Ralli 1; we looked at the tracks and we thought well, they look good but they're really short - what can we do about that?
It's not like in real life, we want some longer tracks. And that's what the feedback from players of the first game were suggesting, too. So that was something that took a lot of development time, to get all of that visual quality to stream in.
Were you happy with the way the first game sold? It didn't perform as well as you might have expected in the UK.
Troedsson: You can always be happier, you always hope you sell more copies. It didn't sell that much, but it wasn't an established franchise; that's something that helps with momentum if you have something that's been done before - that will be very interesting to see with Rallisport 2.
I hope it does sell more because Ralli 1 was a real eye-opener for a lot of people, at least that's the impression I got when I talked to people and read the interviews, etc. So hopefully, yes, this will do better for us.
Tell us about the cars.
Troedsson: There are some really powerful cars in the game. Some of them have dual engines, others have about 1,000 horsepower, there are cars with four-wheel steering; it's been a challenge to get all these different types into the same game.
And when you crash the car now, you can go to a different view to see how the crash actually happens. The suspension actually works as suspension now as well. Everything on the car is connected - if you break off a wing then you lose the extra down-force that wing gave you.
It goes at a hell of a rate of knots - will it have a rock solid framerate throughout?
Troedsson: We don't think the game suffers that much from flickering - we have other tricks that take care of those issues. We're actually using every part of the Xbox; the game is actually made for widescreen in the first place - it looks better on widescreen and we're kind of disappointed we couldn't show it to you today in widescreen because that's when the game really leaps out at you.
Can you give us an idea of the release date?
Troedsson: Nothing solid, but it's Spring 2004.
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