Interviews// WipEout Pulse Interview with Tony Buckley, Game Director

SPOnG: One of the big new features in WipEout Pulse is the Mag-Strip – can you explain what this is and how it works?

Tony Buckley: Yeah, well WipEout ships float. They are anti-gravity ships (for those that don’t know!) But the problem with that is that if they suddenly go down a massive 90-degree hill or drop, they will basically fall off the track!

Now, the biggest thing is to retain how the ship feels, but we also really wanted to give the designers more scope to create more dynamic track designs. To do that we’ve introduced the Mag-Strip, which, as it sounds, is a magnetic strip on the track. As the ship goes over it, it is temporarily clamped to that section of the track. You still control left, right and pitch, but basically you are not going to leave the track while on the Mag-Strip. So we’ve been able to create more varied track designs.


SPOnG: So loop-the-loops and whatnot?

Tony Buckley: Yeah, but we haven’t overdone it you know. There are a couple of loops but they feel fun to play… and they also give you a visual reference which you’ve not seen in the game before. But we are conscious about not going gung-ho with this.


SPOnG: So it’s not suddenly becoming something like TrackMania!?

Tony Buckley: Ha! Definitely not.

I think we’ve implemented Mag-Strips to varying degrees in about 40 or 50% of the tracks. But predominantly the tracks are what you would expect. It’s just that every now and then you will come to a section of track – such as the corkscrew section on one of the first tracks in the game – which will make you go ‘Whoooah!’; visually it looks great, you feel the track has been twisted. From a playing point of view, you just have to hold your line through it. It’s worked really well, right from the off the designers said “we’ll use it but we have to be conscious of not suddenly having a roller-coaster on each section of track!”

SPOnG: You were talking earlier about the ways in which, in the single player ‘Race Box’ mode you can almost customise the single-player campaign in thousands of different ways and permutations – pretty much creating the game you want.

Tony Buckley: Yeah, Race Box allows you to create the single-player campaign you want – you select what the event is, set the timing times, set the speed class and so on. It’s basically allowing you to offer your own version of a campaign to a friend – so you can share it via WiFi or upload it to the net so that we can actually offer it out to other players.

It’s basically almost like a single-player customisation tool to a degree. There are so many permutations that we could put into a campaign – we could basically have offered hundreds and hundreds of different types of events. But the player might have been thinking – when is it ever going to end?! So what we’ve done is to create around 80 or 85 events within our race campaign, which gives the player a focus to unlock things and to play the game.

But after that is finished then the player might have a certain preference for a certain race type – so he might create a campaign that is all time trials or all single race… it just opens it up to players to play the game how they want and to be able to offer it to friends or the wider WipEout community via the net.