MotorStorm Monday: Crashing in Pacific Rift

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Today the staff at Evo are doing a little dance and breathing a huge sigh of relief. For today is the day of our fist gold master candidate, which as I write this is winging its way to assorted testers around the world ready for them to give MotorStorm: Pacific Rift one last hammering. This isn’t the end, chances are there still a few bugs to be fixed, but we’ve finished dessert, and are now just waiting for coffee and the bill. Phew.

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.

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64 Comments

5 Author Replies

  • Wow! They sure know how to sell a game … I think I’ll be picking this one up. :)

  • I will be looking forward to repeating my online adventures n M2!

  • Dang! As a unemployed vivisectionist I was really rooting for option #1 =(

    Oh btw, does anybody know if Pacific Rift will support adding music from your own library? Or adding music in the form of playlists, like WipEout HD does? *fingers crossed*
    Not that the default playlist in Motorstorm 1 was bad but with the hours I am putting into that game, it tends to get a bit tedious to hear the same songs over and over.

    Cheers!

    • Hi Aceman,

      You can create yout own custom soundtrack through the in game XMB. Personally I find the collected speeches of Winston Churchill the best thing you could possibly listen to while playing the game*

      *lie

  • my copy is already pre-ordered, i liked the demo and its gonna be even better so, i cant go wrong

  • I was curious do we get a Speedometer this go around? I know it’s not important but I missed not having it.

  • I’m buying this after LBP & Bioshock. I already reserved it.

  • Can you please patch in trophy support and Home support into Motorstorm 1? I will 100% pick up the game then, I really really want to.

  • Lol at “…fist gold master candidate”

  • 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 and tenderizer, rallycars in mudpool/rockhopper, atvs on raingod, mudpluggers on rockhopper, etc). Will there be any vehicle restrictions on any tracks this time around? We’d love a patch to the first one too!!!

  • @62 STFU
    anyways, i love motorstorm and il loved the PR demo, but can you do me on simple favor? tell me some of the OST

  • Thanks for heading to Florida. Next time come down to Miami it will be a blast for you guys.

  • @Kulczycky, we get your point dude…lol back to the subject, this is great news for us motorstorm heads… i can’t wait to ripped up the floor with this game… thanks peeps for the hard work

  • someone use the ban sword on the psn video troll please. Back on point, did i see a HUGE contrsuction dumptruck near the end of the video?? i know i saw something HUGE and YELLOW running over something :):):)And as for Photo mode, brilliant idea, i haven’t stopped taking pics on Wipeout HD and to be able to so the same thing in M:PR is going to be great :)

  • Is the game going to have in-game XMB soundtracks?

  • No disrespect, but this is the same information that we’ve been getting for the past couple of weeks – or dare I say since the game was first announced. I’m getting a little concerned about the lack of new information from this game aside from new screenshots and videos.

    I’ve yet to hear if they’re still implementing the ability to custom design your own driver or liveries; if some of these new tracks will be longer to race through than the previous ones; and most importantly what new online or single player modes there will be if any.

    Granted I still plan on buying it because the gameplay can’t be beat, but I would have to admit that I’d be a little disappointed if this sequel is still just as bare bones as the last game.

  • Will Motorstorm: Pacific Rift have global servers? One of the big negative points of the first game was that servers were region locked so that I could not play online against my friends in other countries.

  • Great news. Thanks a lot. Also, can you tell me if the Japanese version will be native English speaker friendly? We have a list of games on the PS forums for English speakers in Japan and I’d like to add MS:PR to the list. Motorstorm is listed as:

    “Motorstorm- English voice, Japanese menus (if you know kana and basic kanji, you should be ok)”

    Will Pacific Rift be the same or 100% bilingual?

    Cheers,

    Matt

  • I would like to have the option to create my own crash reel, fully equipped with slow-mo and effects.

  • With so many racing games out, I hope they put out a demo or we won’t know how good Pacific Rift is and will likely to skip it.

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