An excluisve chat with Bizarre's Ben Ward

It’s been almost two years since Bizarre Creations finished PGR4 and was promptly purchased by Activision. Community-based, combat-heavy racer Blur is its first project under the giant’s umbrella. We chat to Ben Ward about cars and other tales of interest…

Along with EA’s Need For Speed: Shift, Blur seems to be a move away from dry, strictly realistic racing. Do you think gamers are tired of it?
I don’t think so. People are just making the genre live up to its potential, really, so like you say, the new Need For Speed game is moving in a new direction, plus there’s the stuff that [Split/Second developer] Black Rock’s doing, and that’s because people have universally realised that racing should be huge. It’s just unfulfilled potential.

Can you tell us more about the playlist-style custom groups feature in Blur and how it affects the way the game plays?
It’s a collection of races. One level is on the console. What that means is you’ll literally be able to tweak every single option of that group: how the points are awarded, how the rules are set up, what cars are available, et cetera. You can have up to five or six events in a group, and when the group’s finished, you can bundle it up and save it to the social network. From that point, other people can play it, rate it and comment on it. But if you don’t know anything about custom groups and user-generated content, the game’s engineered in a way that if you go to multiplayer, you’ll see a list of groups in a similar vein to the playlists in Halo 3. We’ll have our three or four Bizarre-shipped groups there, but then the next three or four are going to be the best user-generated groups; the ones that have been voted to the top. The second layer to that is what happens when you move online. At that point, every group has its own page on the web. There you can discuss them, put tags on them and vote for your favourite.

How was this particular feature conceived in the first place?
The whole thing came from the community. People were making these games for Gotham, and we weren’t officially supporting them. [Modes] like Cat and Mouse, Zombies and Last Man Standing – all these things came from the community, essentially. We did try and authenticate them by building them into the Gotham titles, and although 90 per cent of people were happy, there was 10 per cent that said, ‘You didn’t build it right.’ So we tried it again, and still didn’t get it right… so we thought, ‘F**k it, we’ll let them create their own stuff but with those tools.’ Making the rules is half the battle. It’s the YouTube problem, basically, taking all the s**t that’s on YouTube and filtering it to the top. We’ve taken a few leaves out of their book, adding tags and ratings. Hopefully, when you finally get the content you want, it doesn’t matter if it came from Bizarre or users. It’s just content.

How does the game strike a balance between accessible and hardcore play?
It’s through the car set more than anything else. It’s easier for us to do simulation, so all of the car physics from Project Gotham Racing are essentially still kicking around in Blur. All of the depth in driving is still there. It’s just using the environment design, car selection and driving assist to make it more accessible.

… continued