Bizarre Creations on Blur Pt. 1

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Last month we visited Bizarre Creations' Liverpool HQ to play the latest version of its racer, Blur - and it's changed pretty spectacular since we last saw it.

But this isn't the place for gameplay revelations - you can find those over in our updated Blur preview, or of course in the on-going Xbox Live beta test.

During our visit to the land of The Beatles and Stevie G we naturally managed to squeeze in 15 minutes with Blur's pair of lead designers, Gareth Wilson and Ged Talbot. Here's part one of our interview.

Ged Talbot, Bizarre Creations

The game's looking a lot better since the last time we saw it. What have you been up to over the last year?

GW: Basically when we got acquired by Activision we had to make a brand new engine that was multi-format. The engine we had with Microsoft was awesome at Xbox but didn't do anything else basically. So we had to work a brand new engine, a brand new IP and two years in - sort of around September time - it just wasn't really good enough yet.

We were having to make compromises to hit the release date - we really wanted to expand on the mods, improve the visuals, get the splitscreen stuff looking really good, make the power-ups ace... and we just weren't there. We went to Activision and said 'we don't think the game's up to our quality level'. It was totally shippable - it was OK - but we would've like to have had more time. They went, 'OK'... which was great.

You hear a lot of horror stories about Activision being this publisher that just churns shit out, but they certainly weren't like that for us - they were great. Really, really good.

GT: We'd spent a long time just getting the basics and effectively the game was just the basics; the power ups and the tracks. We didn't have the Mods and the challenges, we had to cut them because we just didn't get them in in time. I think people were seeing the potential that we were missing out on, like 'if we don't have this in, then are we going to be able to live up to the replayability goal that we've set?'

So as I was saying it was an unprecedented move for Activision to do. I wasn't expecting it. I was hoping for it, but I wasn't expecting it. Management made the decision and it was a mixed feeling in the office -on one hand everyone was like, 'thank god, we get to finish the game' and on the other it was like, 'we've been working late nights for a year, another six months of that'. We knew why we were doing it, we knew we had the backing of Activision and even when the shit hit the fan there was no blame, it was just get on with the game.

Gareth Wilson, Bizarre Creations

So we're guessing there was a lot of relief amongst the team that you got the extension?

GW: Yeah, it was a lot of relief mixed with 'oh no, we're going to have to crunch for another six months'. Everyone's so passionate about games at Bizarre and we didn't want to release something that wasn't up to our quality level.

GT: It was kind of a weird feeling. We knew that the game was finished - we were about to release it - but we also knew that it could be better, it could be better balanced. There were things that we weren't happy with. It was fortunate that Activision recognised that we had the heart of a great game in there and even though it wasn't quite finished it could be much more than it was.

So for them to take the unusual move of giving us an extra six/eight months was unprecedented for them.

We've noticed a lot of differences but can you run through with us exactly what you have changed since last year?

GW: The main thing has been working on the power-ups; we've made the power-ups much more strategic by adding alternative fires like shooting Mines forwards, shooting them backwards, we introduced new power-ups like Bolt - stuff like that. Then we also worked on the Mods in multiplayer and single-player.

The Mods that were available in September [2009] were OK but they were a bit weak - we didn't really balance them with the time that we had. It was like, 'Shunt does a little bit more damage, Nitro goes a little bit faster' but when we got the extra six months we were like, 'great, all of those great Mods that we cut because we didn't have time - like make the car invisible or drop a decoy power-up - we can now start putting into the game'.

They're loads better and they're really offering different strategies, like sneaking around with the cloak on or using the Drifter Mod to get Nitros - stuff like that. It just gives you different strategies when you're playing. It's cool.

GT: I think the game now is immeasurably better than it was then. I think it's much easier to play, it's much more fun because of the changes we've made to the power-ups, the longevity of the game has certainly improved because of the social stuff and challenges. Getting Twitter on board and social networks again is a massive thing for us.

It seems like the game's expanded three or four times in a very short space of time, just because we've had the opportunity to put a lot of those ideas we had to put on the backburner into the game. It's been hard but we're now proud of the game we're about to release and we're now seeing that it's going to be a success. We're hoping that the beta is going to show that and help us put the last one or two points onto the score.

When we met with you last year you stressed that power-ups were only part of the game and that racing lines and all that hardcore PGR stuff still played a big part. Now a year later, you're outright saying that power-ups will win you the race. Has your opinion changed then?

GT: Maybe not our opinion, but the message has changed slightly. We've never seen ourselves as a company that makes simulators; we've always seen ourselves as a bit in-between.

GW: I think last year we were in a bit of a mixed place. We were thinking, 'do we want to make a racing game or do we want to make a battling game?' And we very clearly decided in September that we want to make a battling game, a car combat game.

Racing is still super, super important - don't get me wrong, when you play it you'll see that being a good racer will help you win. The handling is still PGR style, it's not cars on rails or anything like that, but you need to be good with the power-ups as well, using them at the right time and setting your car up with the right mods for the race.

What I love about this game is I can never beat Ged [Talbot, co-lead designer] at PGR - he kicks my arse all the time. I just can't beat him, he's a Platinum player and I'm a Silver/Gold player, I just can't beat him over six years. In this game I beat him quite often, which is ace. Although he's a good driver, I'm better with the power-ups than him. I think I can multi-task better than him, I can manage my power-up bay better than him, I can make sure I've got the right power-ups at the right time... so we're much closer, which is cool.

Would it be fair to say that you weren't betting the whole farm with the previous game design then?

GT: Yeah, I'd say so. I think the realisation that we've actually got an action game rather than an all-out racing game has been cemented in our minds. I think one of the big changes for that is that we're all playing every single day, so the realisation that we're actually playing an action game is quite clear in our minds.

I think one of the things that we've learnt is that you have to set your stall out and you can't really go out with half measures and say, 'it's a little bit like this, a little bit like that,' because people are like, 'well, what is it then?' So yes I think we have been a bit more clear about what the game is.

We're also still maintaining that all the things people like about our games are still in the game; the visuals, the gameplay, the handling model is still essentially the same. A lot of the things that we focused on when we were making PGR we're still focusing on now, but the message has moved.

GW: I think it just wasn't fully realised because we'd just hadn't had the time. It's a brand new IP so for the first six months of these two years we were just really working out the focus and what the game was.

Normally in development when you start your two-year process you've already nailed the game completely, but we'd just finished PGR4, then we had a load of DLC and then we got bought by Activision and we just didn't know what was going to happen yet.

We had to get to know those guys so the development schedule was really constricted and by the time we got September it just wasn't ready. We hadn't really realised what we wanted the power-ups to be. So with that extra six months we could make them more powerful, because we hadn't had the time to balance the game and we had to make them a bit weaker and less game-changing as we'd like.

You have a big, loyal, hardcore racing fan community. How do you intend to win them over now that your game is, to your own admission, more of a battle game?

GW: The beta, really. That was the view we had with the reset in September. Because we had a little bit more time we thought, 'multiplayer's badass, what we need to do is get the game into peoples' hands'. So we thought, 'let's do a beta on Xbox'. No-one does multiplayer racing game betas - I don't think one's ever been done before - but we really wanted to get the game into peoples' hands because we knew that once they'd played it they'd really like it. That was really the strategy.

GT: I think the beta has a lot of uses. I think in some ways it's about us testing the network and various aspects of the game; the balancing of the challenges, the ranking system and all that stuff. But yes, I'd say one of the great things it also allows us to do is to stop people thinking about what the game might be like and actually getting the hands on it and discovering what it's actually like.

We are hoping that people realise that yes, this is a Bizarre Creations game and it's as good as any other Bizarre Creations game, but this extra layer that we've put on makes it more of an action based game even though the skill side is still there.

Andy Robinson