Interviews// Ridge Racer: Unbounded

SPOnG: What’s the thinking behind some of the Domination modes you’ve introduced? The Frag Attack, the Big Rig attacking police cars... is that just one particular scenario?

Joonas Laakso: Yes, that’s just one scenario. There will be other vehicles and different set-ups. The Big Rig Domination mode against the police is just something fun that you will hopefully end up remembering from the game. We were actually quite hesitant to show the Rig because... I guess it’s not really Ridge Racer-esque [laughs]! But the reception in focus groups had been so overwhelmingly positive that we wanted to share it with you guys at this stage and see how you like it.


SPOnG: What about the way the game is designed in general? Someone might look at Unbounded and say, ‘that’s not Ridge Racer. That’s Split/Second.’ Do you have anything to say to those who might take that sort of approach to the game before playing it?

Joonas Laakso: If you’re a hardcore Ridge Racer fan, and this is not the game you want... I’m very sorry [laughs]. But I hope that there is going to be more core Ridge Racer titles like 8 down the line. I’m going to be buying those games as well. So, yeah, I’m sorry if you feel that way, but I hope you don’t because I do feel that there’s plenty of scope in arcade racing games for other types of experiences.

Purely on a feature-level, MotorStorm and Split/Second are similar games, but when you sit down and play them both they’re very far apart from each other. Even something like the first MotorStorm and FlatOut, they’re very similar games on face value but when you play them they’re quite different.

In our case, much of it comes from the heavy focus on the physics side of things, so we want to feel the game world is a place where you can predict what’s going to happen because you understand how the physical world works. Also, we have taken the idea here that you can drive a car through concrete barriers and stuff, which isn’t totally realistic, but... [laughs]


SPOnG: I like that though, because sometimes when you play a racing game there’s a bit of environmental detail that sticks out of the track - like a door frame or something - that you always clip and when you do it stops you dead. It’s good to be able to just plough through it and not interrupt your game.

Joonas Laakso: Yeah, and we are actually playing towards your frustrations from other titles - our previous titles included. We really want to give you that feeling of power and give you the idea that you’re not going to be slowed down by things like that.


SPOnG: The Power is a curious name to call the charge meter in the game, by the way. Have you licensed Stan Bush’s The Touch to accompany that?

Joonas Laakso: [Laughs] No, no. Well, as you can probably guess, there’s been a couple of names for it. But we settled on The Power. It has to be able to deliver on a few things - a generic ‘Boost’ name didn’t sound hard enough. You get to take out drivers, plough through walls and have the ability to boost with it, so it needed an appropriate name. It also functions as a shield from damage - but not from other Power users. So there’s a fair amount of mechanical depth to it.

I think that if players manage to really get into the game, and they know what they’re doing in terms of Power usage it adds a new layer of depth to the gameplay. It becomes more than about racing lines - you’ve got to think about how to manage your Power and conserve it to be able to react to how the race is evolving around you.


SPOnG: How did you try to balance that? If you drift you build your Power meter up, but if you smash through walls with the Power it automatically refills to the max... Was it a challenge to try and balance that when you consider other players on the track?

Joonas Laakso: We really did it by just playing the game a hell of a lot [laughs]! We’ve had the basic mechanics in there for about a year now. The shield ability was actually a recent addition, but apart from that the Power has largely remained unchanged.

The multiplayer is something we’ve only been playing around with for a short time and honestly, I was a little bit worried about how it was all going to work. But having played it a lot over the last week or so at the office, I think it’s a great deal of fun when you’re playing with guys who know how to play the game properly.

The awards system really adds to the gameplay too, in more ways than just being an achievements system. Whenever you get one of these by doing various things - massive air, a particularly powerful hit or maintaining your top speed for a certain amount of time - you get an instant refill to your Power bar. So once you start to know what the awards are, all sorts of tactics start to come into play. There’s a lot going on in your head once you’ve figured out how the mechanics work.


SPOnG: Do you think that Ridge Racer Unbounded can become a splinter of the main series in its own regard? Do you even see it as a spinoff?

Joonas Laakso: Yes. I think a Namco rep said words to that effect at one point. So I consider it a spinoff, and we’d love to work on a sequel as well. Actually, regardless of how this game does, we’d love to work with Namco again anyway. They’ve been really nice guys, and the Japanese production team has been great. Much better than I would imagine it to be.

Certainly, there could be an Unbounded 2 and a Ridge Racer 8 at the same time on the shelves. But let’s hope it’s not in the same week of each other [laughs]! It may not be ideal that the Vita version is coming out a week before Unbounded is, because that has led to some customers being confused about what the relation is between the two games. There is no relation.


SPOnG: I’m curious. How was the relationship you had, if any, with the Japanese studio. Were they simply a point of reference, or did were they more hands-on?

Joonas Laakso: Actually, it’s kind of complicated. We don’t work directly with the Ridge Racer team, aside from the elements that we are loaning from them. There has been some music, some cars and other things - those are done in a very direct collaboration with the Ridge Racer team. But obviously they are busy with Ridge Racer Vita at the moment for anything else.

At the same time, there’s a separate Japanese production team with very senior people - some of them have worked on some of my all-time favourite games. Our chief conductor was a programmer on Tekken 3, which to me is the best beat’em up ever! So that’s very cool. They have these super-experienced guys working within this production team, and I have been surprised by how closely they want to be involved with the project.

With them, it’s very much hands-on. They want to get involved with fine-tuning the handling of the cars, how the damage and scoring works and everything else. But at the same time, they are not dictating things. They do let us decide stuff, but they also let us know how they feel about things.

But there is no Ridge Racer ‘bible’ so to speak, which I was a bit surprised about. We didn’t get any sort of directions which forced us to have this element or that feature for example. The only issues like that have been in terms of logo use and if we wanted to use one element that came directly from a previous Ridge Racer game. There was talk about featuring Reiko as a mascot or put forward our own character for Unbounded - if we had chosen to use Reiko, the process there would have been very involved.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

Joonas Laakso: Thank you!