If you’re a keen reader of our website you may noticed that we had a bit of a hands-on session with Black Rock Studio’s new explosive racer Split/Second the other day. Well, we caught up with Game Director Nick Baynes to find exactly how development is going…

There’s been a lot of blisteringly fast racers of late how does Split/Second differ?
When you’re avoiding objects at speed and some of our objects you have to drive around them, 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 over head, 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.

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.

Pure had a risk and reward mechanic and now so does S/S. Is this a deliberate design choice?
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.

What’s the inspiration behind the vehicles?
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.

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 it 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.

It looks like you guys have been watching a lot of Hollywood movies, any in particular?
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 has 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.