MotorStorm Monday: The Inspiration for Pacific Rift

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So a quick catch up. We finished MotorStorm, we thought it was pretty damn good, we knew we needed to make another one, but feeling a bit knackered, we decided that a bit of a vacation was in order. Skip forward a month or so to us sunning ourselves in Hawaii, beautiful place, lovely ladies, and most importantly for this yarn, lovely scenery. Dense jungle, lava tubes, mountains, swamps, volcanoes the works…. Lo, a MotorStorm epiphany ☺

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.

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68 Comments

  • sweet, this is the first time i have looked forward to a monday lol and i played the demo considering it was old its still prety fun. who agrees with me when i say this is goiong to be an extremely awsome game?

  • I have two comments.

    First, It’s really nice to hear about the tuning – in the original Motorstorm you couldn’t choose certain vehicles on some tracks because you would get smoked. In other words, most tracks favored certain vehicles. It’s awesome that now there’s a minimal difference in lap time amongst vehicles as long as you choose the proper route. NICE JOB.

    Second, as someone else mentioned in a previous post, the AI in level 4 races in the original was quite annoying. I believe the term ‘rubber band’ is used but it was basically 11 vehicles versus you the player. What I mean is AI would go for the wreck against you so you don’t win even if it meant they didn’t win either since another computer controlled vehicle would win. That was very frustrating since the natural behavior would be to go for the win.

    Third, I’m curious about the online lobby options. You guys did a great job with the original with host migration, settings, mirror mode, etc. Can anyone verify the lobby options for PR? Any drastic changes?

    Also, some vehicles weren’t playable on certain tracks in the original(rigs on raingod/rockhopper, rallycars in mudpool/rockhopper, atvs on raingod, etc). Will there be any vehicle restrictions on any tracks this time around? Don’t be afraid to patch the first one too!!!

    Lastly, I can’t wait for this…thanks for all your sacrifices to make the second of a hopefully long-lived series!!!! WooHoo!!!

  • Whoops I meant a few comments not two!!!

  • Answer for anyone asking “Why did they use an old build of the game for the demo?” This is because a dev team wants to devote all of their time to the finished product. Demos are the worst thing to happen to the game industry honestly. They require the dev team to split up and have a separate team work on pounding out the demo code. It is not a simple task of grabbing one level from the finished game and saying here you go. You do need to make it run without the rest of the game there. So they take the stable build, set aside some time to get a working demo then get back to finishing the game. That is why demos are a bad idea, just let the devs get the best game to market. Sure huge teams with unlimited resources can make a demo team and have no worries but most companies cannot afford to do this and ALOT of games have suffered because of this. Just look at the bugs you get in EA games because their teams were broken up halfway through development. (This is fact)

  • When is this coming out? I need to head over to my local game store to preorder…

  • at jezzyrider, october 28th

  • theres only one thing im really hoping you improve on this motorstorm: loading times

  • hi, i bought qore and got the demo/beta and loved it, i never played motorstorm before, but after i played that demo i had to barrow motorstorm, and im loving it, the terrain is the most important part (except maybe not crashing :)) anyway i like to use the bigrig, because i love semis, i can win a race with a big truck against a dirtbike, and that (and the crashs) is what makes the game so much fun for me, but one question. where next?

  • Thanks for the update. I am a fan and I plan on buying this on day one. I have two questions though:

    Can you play online and split-screen at the same time?

    Is there a replay feature (so I can record and watch any amazing moment in the game)?

  • Please do a collector’s edition w/ the soundtrack! I loved Motorstorm’s featured music, and been looking for a bunch of them. I’m loving the demo..(still playing it, split screen racing is insanely crazy, can’t wait to run over my friend’s w/ the monster trucks!) and I can’t wait till the official release.

    (By chance I found one of Motorstorm 2’s featured songs: Pendulum – Tarantula, but what is the name of the two song’s featured in the Demo?…)

  • Being someone currently living in Hawaii, I hope you enjoyed yourself! I’ll be interested to see how much of your inspiration for Pacific Rift came from the visit.

    I’m really psyched for the game: I really enjoyed the first one, and the second will be even better. It’s great to see so many great titles like M:PR coming to the PLAYSTATION 3. Good luck with the game, guys!

  • Got mine already on pre order.

  • Hello from Europe!
    I played the closed demo and i was a bit disappointed about the graphics. I know it was an old build demo but why we get something like this? I´m unsure now if I should buy your game! I’ll wait for some reviews about MS.

  • Developers’ ghosts sounds awesome. Earning a trophy for beating them sounds immaculate.

  • sweet, i can’t wait… and the trophy’s make it double the fun… good work peep’s keep it up.

  • Lunatics unit!!!
    lol, can’t wait for Motorstorm: Pacific Rift!

    ‘A storm is coming.’

  • The first one, was probably one of the best launch titles, of this generation, in my opinion.

  • Played demo, and it is great. Technically improved in many folds. Interactive vegetation, a lot more particle/dust simulation, more texture. But of course I haven’t touch water and lava simulation yet, that would be crazy… all this put pacific rift on the top of any other games in this category.

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