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The Project CARS creator is making an online multiplayer racer too: we took it for an early spin.
An MMO [massively multiplayer online] racer sounds a bit strange. Where are the elves and orcs? At first, you might just picture everyone driving around, causing mayhem on an open world, doing missions following a loose storyline and earning loot by drifting, like World of Warcraft on wheels perhaps.
As their name might suggest, though, Slightly Mad Studios is doing something something a bit different. World of Speed is the name of the game, and it’s currently in the pipeline alongside the studio’s racing sim Project CARS, but while they’re both authentic looking racers, they’re very different at their cores. We spoke with lead producer Pete Morrish about the game and got our hands on a hot lap around the London track too – can this be the Everquest of automobiles?
While founded in 2009, Slightly Mad Studios’ core team first got the engine block running nearly 10 years ago with GTR and GTR 2, two simulation racers that were aimed at fans of the genre and PC gamers, and still have communities today. After giving EA a hand with the Need for Speed franchise in the form of Shift and Shift 2: Unleashed, SMS is now working on two PC racers: Project CARS and World of Speed. While the underpinning technology between the two games is essentially the same, (letting the teams for each game help out on the other), they’re fundamentally different in scope, scale, gameplay and most importantly, price tag – or lack thereof.
Yep, World of Speed is free-to-play, but Pete Morrish assures us that it’s not “free” in the same way as many other games are. “A lot of the times when you say free-to-play, you're usually met with a sharp intake of breath,” Morrish tells us. “There's a good reason for that: A lot of free-to-play games are set up rather cynically in order to take advantage of flaws in the human psyche that we've all got, and these are all essentially skinner boxes with pretty graphics that optimise the transport of money from your bank account to someone else's. That's fine, if all you want is a slash and burn through a short-term community and sell out.”
It’s not fine with SMS, in other words. “What we want to do is do it the proper way, and build a community. We're in it for the long term. We've got a roadmap of several years. We think the way to do that, and the way that's been proven, is to treat your customers with respect and offer them things that you think offer value to them.”
Morrish assures us you can play and complete the game without spending a penny, and while Slightly Mad is keeping mum on what exactly you’ll be able to purchase, we imagine it’s more on the customisable end. Think Team Fortress 2 hats, rather than extra lives. You won't be able to buy a car that busts through the sound barrier on auto pilot and guarantees you the win, but you will be able to buy items that are not complete game breakers. You’ll be able to individualise your car with your own visual and performance preferences, and while visual customisation will only affect how your car looks, performance customisation allows you to upgrade the parts on your car, taking them to the highest level and giving you an edge for a certain driving style – which will come in handy for the team based gameplay.
How does it all look though? If you’ve seen Project CARS before, you’ll know that you’re in for a treat, with plenty of auto eye candy – and on a high–spec PC, the game is going to look top-notch with almost everything done to the exact amount of quality on SMS’ other game. Even if you don’t have a bleeding fast PC, you’ll still be able to enjoy World of Speed – as the “original minimum specs are pretty much Ultrabook level”, so you can play the game down the coffee shop, or wherever else you want to take your laptop thanks to the scalable Madness engine.
With around 60 different cars expected to be available when the game launches into beta later this year, you’ll have plenty of models to race, and they look fantastic, complete with full interiors too. “The cars are accurately modelled from manufacturer CAD data, some of them are laser scanned in while others have full photo builds and things like that too, so they're all done very accurately.” All of those cars will be split into different tiers too, starting off with lower city cars, up to sports cars, US muscle cars, coupes and all the way up to modern day hyper cars. “All the way from an old Russian larder puttering around on a two–stroke engine or whatever's in them, to a kind of Bugatti Veyron and everything in between.”
You’ll also have plenty of variation when it comes to driving those cars, as there are plenty of different tracks available. Morrish tells us, “We've got a number of real-life tracks such as Brands Hatch. We've got functional point to point races, so there are some nice courses inspired by the west coast of California, for example, that coastal road sort. One is based in Monaco, the Azure Coast, and what we're most proud of is our city tracks. So far we've revealed three different locations; London, Moscow and San Francisco.”
All of that sounds essentially the same as Project CARS, or frankly any other racer, but trust us when we say the gameplay is completely different to other rivals out there at the moment, especially online racers. Morrish himself is frustrated with online driving games, and lends us his own experience: “You start out, you crash out at the first corner, you get chucked in with a bunch of people who are much better at the game than you are and they streak ahead in front, and you don't have a chance in hell of getting back a point. So you turn around and you race around the track the wrong way and you try and smash people off the track… but they take umbrage and they chuck you off the server…”
“There must be a better way to do this,” he says firmly, and he thinks he’s cracked it with World of Speed. While some games have attempted to put their own MMO spin on the driving genre in the past, such as the failed Auto Assault (picture guns on cars, it didn’t end well), the direct inspiration the genre has on the game has allowed it to apply similar class-based mechanics, but to cars instead.
Morrish tells us, “We took inspiration from a genre of game that does community and team play properly, and that's MMORPGs. You look at the way they're constructed, and you get people who form a clan and as a team, they do raids and dungeons and missions and that sort of thing. Each person has their own specialised character that they've built up and have their own abilities, clothing and tools and stuff like that. You might have one guy who's a barbarian and has an axe made up of the skulls of his enemies, and his job in a raid is to go out and slice the legs off anything that comes close to him. If you're not quite that angry, you could choose to be a healer or a mage, and be more of a background character, healing and making sure the barbarian dude in the front is protected.”
“And we thought that was quite an interesting way to approach team-based racing. A lot of team-based racers out there are still about getting across the line first, and we took a slightly different approach with this whole thing. We're not just about getting across the line first, we took this kind of thing, the MMORPG stuff, that clan mentality, and we're introducing it to the racing game.”
How Slightly Mad is doing that is by implementing a gameplay mechanic that was first introduced in Need for Speed: Shift, dubbed Driver Score. You’re rewarded points for what you do on the track, whether that’s drifting around corners, slipstreaming your rivals, or nailing clean sectors, and in World of Speed, those sort of actions also come up as optional objectives in your race – and specific cars are much better suited to some objectives than others. The game has a pool of around 75 to 100 different objectives to start with, with plenty more to come as the game progresses. “You still have crossing the line first, and that gives you a certain amount of cache and experience points, but these objectives sit alongside those core objectives and give you more to do during the race,” Morrish explains.
“The first person across the line isn't necessarily going to win the race – the other racers might still be going for their objectives, and if they hit them in the last few corners, in the last 20 seconds, they could actually win the race.”
Say if a drifting around corners objective came up, you wouldn’t want to take that challenge on with the nimble and grippy Mini Cooper S, you’d want something with a lot more grunt that can powerslide it’s way around the course – and a car like the Dodge Challenger will come in handy there. Picking your car to suit challenges, especially with your friends or clan (Car Club, here) is key to dominating races. Choosing the right car for the right race and objectives ahead of time is how you’ll be able to rise up the ranks.
Heading into the actual game, we split into two teams of two. Right off the bat you can tell it’s unashamedly un-sim like, and it’s well, fun. Hitting the streets of London in a Mini Cooper S, we were instructed to “master several corners” to gain a boost of Driver Score, while one of our opponents was gunning for the “dirty overtake” objective, which equates to smashing our tiny Mini while gunning ahead. Hitting the turbo, we managed to dart away from our opponents, but that also threw us off our own objective of mastering corners, leaving our team mate to pick up on that challenge. Straight away you can see where the team based, class mechanics come into play, and while my teammate did his best to master the track, his Dodge Challenger proved too much for the sharper bends.
Importantly though, and essential for a free-to-play game, it’s easy to pick up and play, and the controls felt tight. It’s reminiscent of Microsoft’s classic Midtown Madness titles, which were all about bombing through the streets with simple, go-kart like controls. Fast, frantic and fun is one way to describe it, and while it still needs polishing, it’s shaping up to be an exciting racer to play, and it could shake up the way we play racing games online.
Of course, while it is a racing game, you might be tempted to strap into your steering wheel, but you’re better off playing this with a pad, or even your keyboard, as it’s just not geared up for realism – but that’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t mean racing game fans won’t find something to enjoy here. World of Speed may lack the verisimilitude of Gran Turismo, but rest assured you’ll find us on the starting grid when the beta rolls around. See you there.
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