MotorStorm Monday: The Inspiration for Pacific Rift

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.