Everybody ”has got a sim” by now, so convincing gamers to buy ”yet another” is real hard. Bizarre’s racer Blur arrives end of May, packing fun.
”Project Gotham Racing 3 was an absolute joy to work on – because whenever you work on new tech, the first thing you want to do is to make the most visually stunning videogame that you’ve ever done,” Blur lead designer Gareth Wilson told VG247.
”So you go, ‘wow, look, we’ve put 140,000 polygons into a car and we’ve got a physics engine that we couldn’t have even dreamt of a few years ago.’”
“But then once you get this far into the console cycle, then everybody has got a sim. Everybody has got a Forza or a Gran Turismo or Gotham or a whatever. So trying to convince people to buy yet another sim is just difficult, really.”
“It is very natural for us as developers to try to recreate reality with our new toys, but at this stage of the console cycle I think it’s important to focus on fun and new experiences, and different types of gameplay. Which is really where Blur has come from.”
Wilson says calling Blur a modern day Mario Kart is a fair enough comment, but they didn’t set out with that concept in mind. ”What we wanted to do was just to bring the fun back to racing games, really. To make a game where there is constant battling, constant chaos, constant overtaking, constant jostling for position,” he said.
”And then we wanted a mechanic that allowed you to move race positions in the game very quickly. And we tried a few things out and we found that the most interesting and exciting option was to use power-ups.”
Blur releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC May 28th in Europe. The Xbox Live multiplayer beta for Blur is still going but ends Monday (May 10th) so get in there quick!
