BLACK ROCK’S SPLIT/SECOND | BETA
f there’s one undisputable thing about UK games developers, is that they are very good at racing games. Sure, excellent work is done by Polyphony, Turn 10 and Black Box overseas, but they are outnumbered by Codemasters, Criterion, Blimey, Evolution, Sony Liverpool, BigBig, Eutechnyx, Ubisoft Reflections, Bizarre Creations, Midway Newcastle – and, of course, Disney’s Black Rock Studio. Next year sees the studio release its second title, Split/Second. But the game is very different from the usual racing fare that UK developers are so good at. Yes, there are unlicensed muscle cars and a power bar mechanic, like Burnout. There’s a tightly honed arcade-meets-sim edge to the racing, as seen in Race Driver GRID. And like Black Rock’s debut game Pure it shows an exuberance in both visuals and sound. Yet the key for Split/Second isn’t just racing, but the environments you race through. In a bid to capture Hollywood pyrotechnics, the game is set in a television series, with all the courses acting as giant soundstages. Most importantly, “the courses are changing while you are racing,” says director Nick Baynes – but the changes are driven by the player.
Clockwise from bottom left: audio director Steve Rockett, technical director David Jefferies, game director Nick Baynes, art director Steve Uphill and studio head Tony Beckwith
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USER-GENERATED DISCONTENT The pitch runs like this: as a racer in a highstakes reality TV show, you’re competing with other drivers in urban street races, with drifts and clever manoeuvring filling up a power bar. So far, so Need for Speed. But this is not spent on nitrous, but ‘powerplays’, on-screen destructive events. Throughout the tracks are environmental objects and explosive effects of varying size that can be activated once drivers have racked up the requisite power – deploy them at the right moment, and you can take out the cars ahead of you or coming up from the rear. Powerplays range from the small-scale, such as an exploding bus, through to a collapsible airport radar tower which splits in two, crumbles to the floor and diverts traffic onto a runaway – right up to the more audacious, such as a plane falling from the sky and crashing on said runway. It’s a mix of cartoon-style, hyper-real and glossy mayhem designed to make players pay attention to the world they are travelling through rather than just where they are speeding to. And that’s the point. “It’s classic car chases with vehicles flying through glass windows and smashing through buildings – we don’t want this to be like every other racer with cars bolted to the ground like Scalectrix. We want gamers to think every other driving game is boring after playing Split/Second,” says Baynes. Hyperbole? Sure, with the game only just revealed after a carefully orchestrated tease by Disney’s PR, the team is excited to talk. But tour the Brighton studio to survey the work that is going into Split/Second, and it’s clear that after Pure this game is no sophomore slump, no ‘difficult Second album’. And, most DEVELOPMAG.COM
importantly, it is designed to set the studio apart from the ten other UK studios famed for racing games – and is backed with the technology and style to realise that aim. WORLD’S BLOWN APART Gameplay wise, the idea has been fine-tuned to place emphasis on the environments as something to remember, rather than memorable for their shortcuts. “With almost every racing game the tracks you experience when you first buy the game are the same no matter if you play them during the first hour or the 20th hour. You might have a faster car – but it’s the same environment. In Split/Second as you unlock more powerplays there is more depth to the courses and more variety when you revisit them,” says Baynes. Likewise the game opens up similarly in line with player performance, he adds, pointing out that as drivers get better, they’ll unlock powerplays quicker – directly binding the addition of new track elements to competency and gameplay. “That also lets us approach racing from a fresh view – instead of a career mode in a racer, which just forces you to revisit old tracks with better opponents, here we give players environments that have the potential to be totally different after a few hours’ play.” And while all the powerplays are essentially unlockable scripted events of various magnitude, it’s still a stark contrast to the structure of other racers, which the Black
Rock team think will be characterised as lifeless once Split/Second is released next year. They don’t say it outright, but the team clearly want spectators to think days are numbered for UK-made rivals like GRID, DIRT, Burnout – and now even Need for Speed, whose sim spin-off is being made in London. PLAYABLE DEMON So how is the Brighton studio realising what is a high-concept racer? The core gameplay idea has been devised (but still open to tweaking – Baynes and the team admit that there’s still at least eight months of work to be done on the game overall, specifically areas like AI and juggling the fairness of powerplays triggered by NPCs). Which leaves APRIL 2009 | 31