In fact Tudor reveals that when they approached night racing in Need for Speed: Shift 2 they kept to a ‘Resident Evil vibe’. If you lit everything up then there’s no challenge.
The same principle is being applied to Slightly Mad’s Project Cars, along with weather adversely interfering with your lap performance, he explained in our interview.
Tudor refers to their ‘best in class’ and ‘innovations’ discussions with racer fans at the beginning of Project Cars’ development. Weather, he says, is ”a bit of both.” Weather and its effects have certainly been done before but never really enough, argues Tudor.
”There are other games with weather out there, and we kind of hope that our looks the best. Certainly when you look at the individual spatters of rain on the windscreen and bodywork, the rain dripping into puddles, those puddles then drying out, we’ve gone above and beyond on that kind of stuff. Equally, it has added value for gameplay,” Tudor told us.
Night racing is another area the studio feels has been neglected, at least in authenticity.
”When we did night racing in Shift 2, we didn’t look at what other games had done because they were not authentic. They weren’t what it is really like for drivers, and you can go and speak to real-life racing drivers and they’ll tell you exactly the same. You need to know the track inside out during the day to even attempt it at night, because they don’t have giant neon signs pointing the way,” creative director Andy Tudor explained.
”There are some tracks that are floodlit, and there’s no challenge there, because everything is lit up super-bright. So we looked at Resident Evil. Really. It’s dark, you’ve got a torchlight, that’s it. It’s a scary experience, you know? If you were to turn the lights on, no challenge. The idea in Shift 2 was that if you’re going round the track you need to know it in the daytime, because at night your headlights are the only guiding light at all. If your headlights fail, you’re done.”
Then there are those damn Licker attacks… Fortunately Project Cars didn’t take too much Resident Evil inspiration.
”When it’s weather, it’s exactly the same. When it starts raining you’re going to have to have some strategy there, whether to come into the pits or not. Your pit engineer will tell you through the microphone of impending weather changes, as well as a bunch of other stuff. When you go into the pits you can change your tyres, do a bunch of other stuff, we’ve got a fully animated pit crew,” Tudor continued.
”When you go out again it is harder, you’ve got other things to consider, like puddles and braking points and sliding, and locking your tyres. And then, because it’s dynamic, it could go clear again. Now you’re like “do I stay out on these tyres, or go in again?”. It adds strategy, adds gameplay and that’s why it’s innovative, because it’s not just a visual effect that we layer over things.”
Check out our full interview with Slightly Mad Studios’ Andy Tudor, where he promises racer fans a full 1080p and 60 frames per second thrill, and beyond on PC. Project Cars releases on PC, Xbox One and PS4 this November.
