On the time trial front, you can upload ghosts and best times to the leaderboards. Monumental had to apply for extra leaderboard space – Greg reckons they have over 390 in total. There's a monthly one for each track, so you can have battles with your mates. There's a world's best leaderboard. There's a ghost leaderboard, so you can download your friend's ghost. There's also a monthly reset on the leaderboards, which gives plenty of players the opportunity to get a ghost up, so you don't end up with the same ten or so racing supermen sitting pretty and untouchable up there the whole time.
In terms of art style, Harvey Parker,
MotoGP 09/10's lead artist, said that the game borrows heavily from the street raving genre – more so than any of the previous games (and having been working on them since 2001, we guess Harvey should know). “Being able to press reset, with Capcom – it's come to Monumental now – we're able to do a lot of new things that we've been wanting to do for some time”, he said.
They've tried to look at each race as Hollywood might look at it. “So if Michael Bay were to come to one of these events and film it, what sort of post-processing effects would he use? What sort of colours would he use?”
Harvey went on a cinematography course to learn more about colour theory and how that's used in films and, in turn, how that could be used in games. Monumental has used techniques such as slight colour desaturation if you're overtaken, or a more “euphoric” look if you gain a place. “Things that you might be familiar with from first-person shooters – little things that help you along your way, that you may not pick up but that you just feel are rewarding.”
The light is constantly changing and this, Harvey said, is to help give you a sense of speed. “These tracks are fairly safe”, he explained. “Where, as a street racer, you've got lots of things around you and you're whizzing past them at 200 miles per hour (and) it feels very fast, on one of these circuits everything's pushed away for safety, so what we have to do is recreate that tunnel effect.
“And we can do that by maybe adding a little bit more scoring to the track than is actually there, subtle light changes so you feel as if you're travelling at speed - and it's all keyed in to speed - maybe a few more shadows on those tracks that aren't at night, and that helps create the sense that you're travelling through things. It has much more of a volumetric feel with the speed blurring and things like that. The vignetting - I worked on a game called
Pure where we used a lot of that sort of stuff. I worked at Climax Racing that's now developing
Split/Second, some of that early stuff we were able to pull onto this.”
Harvey said all that a lot better than I could have. What I would add is that it actually works. Whenever I get a choice of track in
Forza 3 I go for something windy and mountainous, because every time I hit a long straight on a race course I lose the sensation of speed and, because I apparently have the attention span of a five year old with ADD, get bored. That didn't happen here. The long straights I've seen come with a very definite sensation of speed, to the point where I found them to be some of the most exciting parts of the game.
All in all,
MotoGP 09/10 is looking like is should be a solid addition to speedfreaks' game libraries. It's currently scheduled for March - keep your eye on it.
