Split/Second Exclusive Interview

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from Split/Second, so I thought I’d remind everyone how promising it was looking with this extended interview. Enjoy…

Split/Second Interview: Nick Baynes, game director

Everyone remembers the crazy commentary present in old-school arcade racers. Is this a route you’re taking with Split/Second?
We’re not planning on including any commentary for a couple of reasons. I think it’s very much one of these love it or hate it things. I think it’s something that is very hard to do so that it works globally. The American market likes it but the UK thinks it’s cheesy, but if you look at what we’re trying to do with Split/Second compared to Pure we have a lot of technical risks and ambition and we’ve just decided to focus on what’s central to the game rather than say the peripheral things.

Exactly how have you balanced the insane speeds you can go and general control of the vehicles?
When you’re avoiding objects at speed – and some of our objects you have to drive around – I think in games like Burnout you have to swerve around them so if you go too fast you’re just not going to be able to do it. It’s funny with a lot of racing games: the main difference with how fast they feel is about the motion blur, the objects that are travelling overhead, the resolution and the detail in the textures. If you turned all of our effects off and you did the same with Need For Speed and Burnout, I think you’d probably find there wasn’t as much difference as you’d think. But some games exaggerate the speed a lot more using visual effects.

Your other big racer was Pure. Was there any crossover in development?
Split/Second actually started just over a year before Pure hit the streets. What was nice with the success of Pure was when we announced Split/Second people had a lot of confidence in the studio and belief that we could pull it off. I think within Disney there was always a confidence in the studio. I guess that’s why they bought us.

Is the whole Hollywood vibe deliberate?
I don’t think it’s particularly deliberate. One of our goals is to do something a little bit different in the racing space. When you do that you take it away from just pure racing then there’s always going to be extra elements to the gameplay. Inevitably they contain some sort of reward because that’s why the player wants to do it, so you almost need that risk there as a balance otherwise if there was no risk to doing a Power Play I think a lot of the fun would go. Even in regular racers there’s an element of risk and reward in terms of you taking this corner faster you’ve got to get your line more accurate.

With the vehicles we decided quite early on that we wanted to create our own cars for the game so the focus was more on the environments and the effects. The back story for the game is that it’s set in this reality TV show so we try to look at it in terms of if this was a real TV show, and we were genuinely constructing these sets and special effects what would we do with the cars. And we felt that we’d probably commission our own cars. We’ve tried to make sure that every car feels consistent within the Split/Second world and I think right now if you look at all the cars in the game and even though they are all different styles like the muscle cars they all look like Split/Second cars. They’ve got a nice look and feel to them.

Did you learn anything from Pure’s development and critical reception?
One of the biggest lessons we learnt from Pure was the importance of focus and not trying to do everything and doing what’s needed for the game and what’s right for the concept. If you look at a game like Split/Second the vehicles and things like customisation isn’t central to the game but that’s not to say it’s not present at all. We are doing some stuff in that area that’s unique and hasn’t been done before, but it’s not to the same extent as Pure.

What big Hollywood directors have been influencing Split/Second’s development?
There are certainly a couple of directors that have been responsible for some of the main influences. The thing for us was we have been looking more at core summer action blockbusters. It’s the same way something like Transformers can have larger-than-life explosions and stuff going on but it’s still suitable for kids. But the airport definitely looks like Con-Air, but it was hard to just pick one and it’s not just films in terms of the aspirations of what we want to do. We have been looking at videogames but outside of racing games. Modern Warfare in terms of the effects; even things like Half-Life 2 in the way they brought a couple of buildings down. Small scale but the way they used physics to do it.