Like the previous demo we are offering you both a single player and a split screen multiplayer race, but this time we let the veterans of MotorStorm.com choose their favorite track, Razorback. With its thick jungle, colossal waterfalls, dank caves and a multitude of routes, the Razorback is an ideal taster of the off road thrills and spills MotorStorm: Pacific Rift has to offer, so grab it and give it a whirl.

There are few more entertaining things you can do with your pants on.

For those of you not used to playing online, it can be a scary place, with reputedly full gaming automatons waiting to humiliate ‘noobs’ and trash talk while they are at it. Well you’re wrong.

For every game god and trash-talking idiot, there are dozens of fine, upstanding specimens of humanity just like you or I; keen but fallible, competitive yet polite. This blog post should arm you with a bit of knowledge and enthusiasm to get you off your butt and get racing MotorStorm: Pacific Rift online, where the real challenge is.

First off, I recommend that you use ranked matchmaking. This is going to put you into a race with opponents of the same online ranking as you. If it’s your first time, then that means you’ll be playing along with other online virgins.

Second thing is to use your favourite vehicle for the track that is chosen.

Thirdly, don’t be afraid to veto tracks that you just don’t like racing on.

Practice a little. Spend some time in time trial mode, download some of the ghosts of people who excel on particular tracks, and watch what they do and where they drive. You’ll pick up some invaluable tips on getting the best out of each vehicle and each track.

Be aggressive! Don’t let the other racers kick sand in your face. Get into the pack and mix it up a little, especially if you’re driving one of the larger vehicles. Of course, if you’re on a bike and everyone else is in a monster truck, stay clear.

Nurse your boost. Don’t be boost crazy. It’s most effective when you boost for long periods of time, so don’t throw it away on a few little squirts.

Pick your moment to overtake. Don’t just ram the guy in front, as it will probably end in tears for both of you. Follow them and watch what they do — they are bound to make a mistake — then hit the boost and go for it. Of course, if you’re in a monster truck and they’re in a buggy, just roll over them like a fat girl playing twister with Oompa-Loompas.

Most of all enjoy yourself. There is nothing like racing against real people. Sure your not going to win all the time, but that’s the fun of it.

Til next time,
Nigel

First thing to remember – getting gold on these, especially later in the game, is supposed to be hard. However none of them are impossible…I’ve completed them all myself with a good few seconds to spare, and I’m not that good at the game.

Second point is to expect the unexpected. Some of the speed races follow pretty standard track loops, while others mess with your head by gallivanting all over the tracks in strange directions. If it’s your first time in a particular speed race, don’t just sail through a gate expecting to be lined up perfectly for the next one. Be cautious and pay attention.

Third point is practice. Unless you’re some kind of god, you’re not going to get these babies the first time out, especially on the later levels. Give them a test run first, and learn where those illusive gates are.

Fourth point is to learn to drive efficiently. In a previous blog post on the time attack mode, I offered some tips on improving your driving, and these hold true in speed races, too.

• Conservation of momentum - Braking (obviously) and hard turning all reduce your speed. The fastest laps are the ones where you brake and turn as little as possible.
• Explore different routes - Each track is a myriad of routes. The optimal route for each vehicle will need some searching out to find.
• Exploit your chosen vehicles’ advantages - Clear the route – After each lap your timer resets, but any objects you have knocked around the track will stay in those positions. You may want to use a warm-up lap to clear the track of obstacles before going for that hot lap.
• Hang time is slow time - Time spent in the air over jumps is lost time – you’re not accelerating. Keep the height and distance of jumps down to a minimum.
• Turn in the air – While in the air, you still have some control over the direction your vehicle is facing. Use this to line yourself up for a perfect exit when you land.
• Nurse that boost – Save your boost for the long straits. Boost is more efficient if used in long bursts, as each time you hit the boost, the first ’surge’ costs you quite a lot.

Fifth point is be careful with the time – early on in a speed race, crossing a gate will reward you with a generous slice of time on the clock. Don’t get complacent, because the later gates will give you increasingly less time on your clock. Getting a good bank of time early on will allow the odd mistake later in the race.

And lastly, chill out. Relax and don’t get too stressed. You can think too hard when playing a racing game, so just sit back get into the groove and enjoy the ride.

If you’re not familiar with Time Attack in the MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, it’s a game mode where you attempt to get the best lap time possible using one of the vehicle classes on one of the 16 racetracks in the game. It’s different than regular MotorStorm racing, as it’s just you on the track with no opponents to worry about, and it’s all about getting around the track in one piece. If you crash or manually reset the track during the course of a lap, then that time will not be uploaded to the online leaderboards.

There is a different board for each of the eight vehicle classes on each of the tracks, as well as an overall board for each track showing the very fastest times regardless of vehicle used.

Since launch we have had an embargo on members of staff posting to the Time Attack leaderboards, in order to give you guys a chance to get comfortable with the game. Now that embargo has been lifted, and we’ll be on there looking to give you a run for your money (although looking at some of the times that have been posted our ‘leet skills need a bit of work ;-))

Are you struggling to get onto the leaderboards in Time Attack?

Here’s a few tips that might help:

• Conservation of momentum – Braking (obviously) and hard turning all reduce your speed. The fastest laps are the ones where you brake and turn as little as possible.
• Explore different routes – Each track is a myriad of routes. The optimal route for each vehicle will need some searching out to find.
• Exploit your chosen vehicle’s advantages
• Clear the route – After each lap your timer resets, but any objects you have knocked around the track will stay in their new positions. You may want to use a warm-up lap to clear the track of obstacles before going for that hot lap.
• Hang time is slow time – Time spent in the air over jumps is lost time – you’re not accelerating. Keep the height and distance of jumps down to a minimum.
• Turn in the air – While in the air you still have some control over the direction your vehicle is facing. Use this to line yourself up for a perfect exit when you land.
• Nurse that boost – Save your boost for the long straightaways. Boost is more efficient if used in long bursts, as each time you hit the boost the first ’surge’ costs you quite a lot.
• Watch and learn – If you want to know how some of those really fast times are down, take a peek. Download ghosts from the leaderboards and see if you can keep up.

Early on, there was a bit of a problem with the online leaderboards for some players. This has now been fixed, and we have more than one million scores posted online to-date across all race modes.

Thassit for now, good luck getting those fast times!

So MotorStorm Pacific Rift has been out for a week now, and you’ve driven the AI into submission around the testing tracks of the island, and your kid sister kicks your @$$ in split screen. So what next. Well how about a bit of online play? There’s a few different ways of experiencing Pacific Rift online, here’s the low down and some tips -

Matchmaking
We wanted to ensure that players could find another game quickly, but also that once they got into a game they didn’t have to rely on the host to get the race started. There are two options when matchmaking: Ranked or Casual. Ranked pitches you against players of a similar skill level whilst Casual will put you up against anyone and everyone. Matchmaking will, quite simply, group players together who are looking for a game, pick a Ticket for them (a race setup) and get them into a race as quickly as possible. And don’t worry, if you don’t like the Ticket that is randomly chosen for you – it’s possible to veto it (if you get a majority vote).

If you can’t find a matchmaking game (Ranked or Casual) when you search the reason simply is that no-one else is currently searching for another ranked game. The system relies upon there being other people looking to play, so as the servers get busier it’ll get easier to find games, so don’t be disheartened if you can’t find a game first time around, the more people looking for games, the more games there will be.

Custom
On top of the matchmaking it is still also possible to create a game of your own and let others join (privacy is optional). This session will stay up as long as there is a single person present and you can configure the race at any time in the lobby to create your own experience. Custom games do not contribute towards your ranking, but they still track your statistics.

Ranks
Competitive play is important online, as the best races are most often the closest. So by implementing a ranking system which grades players based upon how many players they have beat and been beaten by, it allows us in conjunction with the matchmaking to gather players of the same or similar ranking together to provide the fairest and most exciting possible racing experience. There is also a Ranked leaderboard which lists every player, showing who really is the best MotorStorm player in the world.

Groups
Playing online is always more fun with friends, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible to do so. We’ve done this through Groups; these are quite simply a way of keeping friends together. They are initiated by sending a friend an invite; when they accept they become part of your Group, and wherever you go they then go with you, until they decide to leave (or if you choose to kick them from your group). Groups can be up 12 players, but when playing Ranked it is only possible with groups of 4 or less (to avoid cheating).

General
On top of these 3 major improvements, we also made online play global, so that wherever you are in the world you can play against anyone else who happens to be online. There is now the ability to check and compare other player’s statistics, side by side, and not just online statistics, either: this includes all the offline ones, too. We’ve improved the voice chat – not just in terms of general quality, but also the number of players that can talk simultaneously: in the lobby up to 8 players can talk at once, and during an event it’s 4 – that’s twice as many as in the original MotorStorm!

It means you all can enjoy MotorStorm Pacific Rift and we can all go on holiday. Except by this point, the UK is accelerating into winter in typical rainy, cold fashion. So it’s the Southern Hemisphere for the sun worshippers amongst the team, and a catching-up on a big pile of games in a darkened room for us redheads that find the sun overrated.

Once were all rested its back to the development bunker to finish off the DLC we have lined up for you guys in the coming months. We’ve got a pile of stuff waiting in the wings, and, you’ll be glad to know, a lot of it is free. We’re going to try and give you something new to play with every week, and we’ve also got some major packs in development that should be on the store after Christmas.

In the meantime, get those Time Trial lap times up on the leaderboards (you’re lucky as I’ve put a moratorium on our QA guys posting up there for two weeks, to let you guys get good at it), have a laugh with split screen, and enjoy this next bout of brutal off-road racing.

Laters!
Nigel

Number of pizzas consumed during development: 1,454
Number of Chinese takeaways consumed during development: 4,231
Number of curries consumed during development: 678
Miles of toilet roll used during development: 37

There is something deeply satisfying about a vehicle designed and built to be driven off-road. Call me weird, but forget Ferraris, Porsches and such – give me an old Land Rover (not your modern shiny SUV, I mean your old series 3 boneshakers with leaf springs and bench seats, preferably covered in dirt, and a healthy dose of rust) then you’ve got me all tingly. Space frames, roll cages, fat tires, the fuel economy of a battleship and not a curve in sight are where it’s at, and hopefully you’ll see my peculiar brand of automotive perversion throughout MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.

You probably think I’m weird, and you’re probably right.

But it’s great to create a game where the brutal beauty of off-road racing machines is shown in all its diversity. A game where is not just all about how fast your motor is, or how much bling you can stick on it, it’s about driver skill, it’s about ruggedness of the vehicles and it’s about the variety of situations these machines have to deal with.

And it’s also about pitting a variety of these machines against each other. From the very start of the first MotorStorm game we knew we wanted to build something where a bike can share a race track with trucks, ATVs and big rigs. MotorStorm is like some latter day automotive cola advert, we’re a model of diversity and harmony, with all shapes, sizes, colour, ability and looks (scratch that analogy, you never see ugly folk in a cola advert). Pacific Rift has all kinds of vehicles, which ultimately boils down to eight distinct vehicle classes.

Cue obligatory shopping list -

The Bike – It’s my personal favorite. Yes you die a lot, it comes with the territory because you’re the most fragile thing on the track. But its maneuverable, hair-raising and loads of fun to drive.

The ATV – Sure footed and sturdier than the bike, the ATV is one of those marmite (A British, yeast based spread, either the food of the gods, or Satan’s toe jam, depending upon your point of view. Common British parlance for something you will either love or hate. IMHO the pinnacle of 10,000 years of human civilization) vehicles, you’ll either love it, or think it’s like a bike, but not as much fun ;)

The Buggy – I like the buggy in Pacific Rift. The handling model for the one in the first game just wasn’t quite right, but we’ve gone back to the drawing board and completely re-worked it. Agile, and rear-wheel driver, means there’s lots of oversteer to be had. Its also really stable in the air; when describing how it should behave to the designers I wanted it to be cat-like in its in air stability, and I think they’ve done a real good job.

The Racing Truck – This is the vehicle class you want to start with. Its fast enough, its tough enough and its sure footed enough. Steady and reliable, and slap -in-the-middle across all the traits.

The Rally Car – Acceleration akin to a fighter jet makes it awesome off the line, but it’s a thoroughbred and as such you’ve got to nurse the Rally Car through the technical and rough bits, as it’s basically a road car with better suspension. If you try and do anything too rugged with it, you’re going to get screwed. Always look for the flattest, smoothest line. However, if you’re a MotorStorm: Monument Valley connoisseur then don’t expect the rally car to be the all-conquering online car of choice this time around – the tracks are much more cunningly balanced this time around.

The Mudplugger – the forgotten son of MotorStorm: Monument Valley, the Mudplugger has had something of a facelift and a handling makeover ensures it not just a slower racing truck this time around. This is especially true as its major trait, the ability to cross any kind of terrain without blinking an eye, is more relevant this time around with our increased track diversity.

The Big Rig – The immovable object of MotorStorm. The Big Rig is great for bullying, and has a really good top sped, just try not to slow down as its acceleration is more supertanker than supercar.

Monster Truck – We’ve shouted a lot about the Monster Truck in the early press, and we think it’s a fantastic addition to the lineup. We wanted something to sit at the top of the MotorStorm food chain, something that the other vehicles (with the exception of the Big Rig) are afraid of. I’m pretty sure that not many of you have driven a real monster truck, so we’ve taken a few liberties with the handling model, creating something that feels like a monster truck ought to be, rather what they actually are. You see in real life these are fragile machines.

Yes, they can crush cars, prance around arenas and get rednecks all exited, but they’re not exactly robust, or maneuverable or particularly good at keeping up with the likes of a rally car. The Monster Trucks in MotorStorm are fast, angry, practically indestructible, and above all, loads of fun.

And ultimately that’s what it’s all about: fun. It’s a game. If you stop and think ‘That’s stupid, no one would ever do that on a bike/truck/etc.’ Then you’re missing the point, loosen up a little.

But rather than browsing through vacation brochures, I thought this impasse would be best spent writing a few blog posts which answer some of the questions that have been floating around the internet about Pacific Rift. The first one of which I noticed is how many people I’ve seen decrying the fact the lovely little pause camera from the first game isn’t present in the recent demo.

Well guess what? We’ve taken it out because we’ve introduced a photo mode to the main game, essentially the old pause camera on steroids. Hopefully it will be a good substitute and give your greasy little paws something to do while the game is paused, other than just going to the khazi. No doubt some of you will probably use it for rubbing our noses into any graphical glitches you may find, or taking comedy pictures of dismounted drivers looking like they’re humping trees, but hopefully more of you will use it for grabbing some ace action pictures of the carnage and destruction we’ve worked so hard to give you in the game. You see we like the carnage in MotorStorm.

Years of doing more sanitized racing games, coupled with an unhealthy obsession with breaking stuff really made us try and push the boat out with the amount of things that falls apart in the game.

This desire for destruction gave us a few headaches when designing the game. The problem with racing games (and Motorsports in general) is that crashing is probably the most spectacular and exiting part of the whole affair. Unfortunately, crashing is also mutually exclusive to winning.

After much deliberation we were left with two solutions to the problem -

Option 1 – Every time you crash in MotorStorm one of our army of in-house vivisectionists ritually sacrifices a cute kitten to punish MotorStorm players and make sure they learn that crashing will only lead to kitty Armageddon.

Option 2 – Make crashes look awesome, dismember the vehicles, spew bits across the track, crumple them, crush them and toss the drivers into the path of other vehicles causing bigger and more spectacular crashes. Most importantly allow players involved in the crash to savor the carnage and then get back into the racing with as little time lost as possible.

Guess which one we picked?

The levels of destruction in the first MotorStorm were pretty good, but this time around we really wanted to go to town. First off we developed a completely new vehicle deformation system that realistically crumples mashed vehicles into twisted wrecks, as well as throw components across the track. The end results are, in our honest opinion, smashing (excuse the anglo-centric pun). Secondly we took a real close look at the way we throw ragdoll drivers around, because breaking cars is amusing, but seeing your driver fly through the air to land in a crumpled heap only to be run over by a monster truck, tossed around and end up as a hood ornament on a big rig is the pinnacle of the whole MotorStorm experience. Don’t worry though, it’s more ‘Tom and Jerry’ than ‘Faces of Death’. Good clean wholesome fun.

So, crash a lot, enjoy it, and send us your photo mode screenshots of all that lovely carnage. And if you’ve used photo mode to take pictures of things you think we got wrong, please address them to -

Uzbekistan Automobile and River Transport Agency,
3 Usman Yusupov Street
Tashkent
Uzbekistan

Till next time.

So while that may not have been exactly how it happened, and skipping forward numerous months of diligent coding, designing and modeling, we now find ourselves nearing the date when our latest MotorStorm baby will be flung into the big, wide world. As M-day approaches, what exactly are we doing? Well, for the past few months we’ve been polishing it as hard as we can. And, like most videogame developers, we’re mainly men. So we can polish pretty hard.

But there are also those little bugs. The sheer number of little annoyances, errors and mistakes that creep into any sizeable bit of software is quite often staggering. Four and a half thousands of the little guys to be precise. But the end is most definitely in sight, and the game is almost ready to ship.

So with the bug count right down, those of us not trying to fix the last ones are spending our days playing the game. You’d think we’d be sick of it by now, but spilt screen has given even the most jaded member of the team something to have a laugh with. Especially now that there so much more variety in the tracks, and they’re balanced to the extent that there’s probably only about a second or so difference in lap times with different vehicles – if you choose the right route. And route finding is the secret to being good at MotorStorm. Just picking the most obvious one and turning the same lap over and over again without any deviation is going to get you a little way into the game, but to really conquer the harder AI you are going to have to find the bits of track suited to your chosen vehicle.

If you want to know what we think are the best routes, download our developer ghosts and see the lines we take, and if you’re up for the challenge, try and beat our ghost laps, there’s a trophy in there specifically for doing that.

More next Monday.