Interviews// ModNation Racers: William Ho, Director

SPOnG: That element of user freedom and creation is obviously one of the big reasons for adopting the Play.Create.Share motto that began with LittleBigPlanet. Were there any other reasons behind your approach to this game? Was it a case of making a racing game with community aspects afterwards, or did you build it with that entire aspect of play in mind?

William Ho: We had those design pillars laid out right from the start. We expressed it a little differently back then, but when we spoke to Sony about what we wanted to do with this game they were immediately on board. It was a perfect fit, because at the time they were just starting this 'Play.Create.Share' idea and LittleBigPlanet hadn't been released yet. It just made sense for us to partner with Sony.

In fact, when the game was in the design stages I didn't talk to anyone else about the project. It really was a match made in heaven. And they've been great people to work with on it. They have the same values in wanting to appeal to anyone and everyone. They don't want to make games just for a small subset of the market.


SPOnG: How active did you find the community during the Beta?

William Ho: Surprisingly active. We had seen some players who had completed 700 races in the space of a couple of weeks. There are a lot of hardcore racers out there, clearly. But there are also some who actually published a lot of creations too. It was a short window and we didn't give people a lot of hints on how to get on with it, so we were really pleasantly surprised at the activity we saw.

There was an average of around 1.7 published creations per user by the end of it. That's not including the ones that weren't published online as well, so it was a very short but intense window of activity. We were happy to see that.


SPOnG: No need for any kind of incentive to create then! They're already doing it! I remember an interview a while back where your producer Dan Sochan mentioned he would like lots more people to get involved in creating rather than simply playing other people's works. Did you ever have a worry as to what sort of things you guys should offer as an incentive to get that activity number up?

William Ho: We were never really worried about it because from Day 1 it was a priority to make the customisation process easy and accessible, yet powerful at the same time. We deliberately wanted to appeal not just to people who would race and then create, but also to those that might create before racing, or even those that only want to create.

There are multiple ways for people to engage with the game. Again it's about personal expression and how you want to be in the community. So it's your choice what path you want to take through the game, how how much time you want to spend in the various studios versus the gameplay online and offline.

So we were never concerned about it, but it was nice to have its popularity confirmed when we did start testing it with freinds and family during the course of the development and seeing how people tackled the game differently.


SPOnG: How do you plan to support the community? Media Molecule took the approach of sticking with the one game and supplementing it with DLC over time. Is that something you'll be looking at?

William Ho: We've created what's really a massive sandbox that people can go online with. Jjob one for me over the next few months is to monitor the community and see how people are using it and how they want to use it. We don't want to dictate how the community's going to evolve - we really want to be responsive. We're currently road-mapping DLC, and we don't think people are going to be sick of the Blu-ray content. But we know people will want to download new stuff, so we'll brace for that too. We're prepping new tracks, parts and various packs too.


SPOnG: How much content will be available on the disc from the get-go?

William Ho: On the disc you'll be getting 28 tracks, all very unique. Hopefully when you play it, you'll be opened to the possibilities of what you can do with the tool set that we give you in the studio mode. Our in-house designers have lived with these tools for the last couple of years and really pushed it to the limit here.

I think there's also a good bit of mystery about the tracks on the disc too - when you load a track you might think 'How did they make that?', and so you can get to dissect it in the track studio and reverse engineer it. Hopefully it'll inspire you to make some original tracks using some of the tricks we've used.

Alongside the tracks, the disc will have several dozen pre-made Mods and karts for you to play with right away, and you can go in and remix those too and publish them online.