Split/Second

[Hendo]

From the people that did Pure.

Eurogamer hands on

The sense of speed is the first thing that hits you, and it's something with which I hit myself repeatedly over the first few laps. Like the faster vehicles in Burnout Paradise or PGR, Split/Second's sleek sportscars hurtle down the track precariously, particularly with the discomfiting shake of the camera addling your senses. Cornering is muscular, demanding subtle correction and more braking than you expect. Initially there's a lot of understeer that I struggle to master.

Drifting plays more of a role than the hands-off demos communicate, too. You have to pump out a lot of speed into sharper turns, and maintaining positive momentum is satisfyingly difficult, even though the airport lap only throws up a few serious corners per lap. After bashing against each of them and gradually learning how far to push the back of the car out on subsequent attempts, I get Glancey to show me, and if anything the confidence with which he grazes the nose past the inside crash barrier is more encouraging than playing the demo. It's because he's not just competent, he's good; but it emphasises that while being good at driving in Split/Second is an art, it also isn't an end. If you can hit every apex in PGR, you can win those platinum medals. If you can hit every apex in Split/Second, you still have to worry about powerplays.

Powerplays, in case you missed the first half, are the set-piece attacks and demolitions that you can activate from behind the wheel. By driving well - with drifts, drafts and whatnot - you build up a three-stage powerplay bar locked to the underside of your car's bumper in a modest heads-up display. Blue icons then appear on items of scenery for regular powerplays, and red icons are highlighted if you have all three stages full.

The timing window for each is narrow - depending on your speed, obviously - but even with your eyes locked to the vanishing point by the intensity of the drive, you can work out most of what's about to happen: there's going to be a big f***ing explosion, and it's going to trash whatever the debris hits. In the case of regular powerplays, that means an explosive barrel launched from a helicopter is going to land on the car in front, or the carcass of a bus is about to be hurled in from the sideline. Super powerplays - the red ones - are going to bring the house down, or at least the entire airport terminal, and they're going to change the route.

As such, saving up reds when you're caught behind can be useful for clawing back a margin on other racers. If the guys in front have just sped through the start/finish line and spun off past Departures, you can drop the freeway ahead of you down a storey in a controlled demolition and bounce through the building, shortcutting them. Or you can use super powerplays for all-out attack, dropping Air Traffic Control onto the last corner as you exit the preceding tunnel. If you're out in front, icons at the bottom of the screen allow you to set off attacks in your wake.

The elephant in the room is the AI, which is certainly competitive at this stage, and something I worried about last time. After all, it's a potential contradiction: you're racing, but if you're ahead of or behind the other guys, the powerplays are moot, so you can't be too far ahead or behind. "We want to get a really exciting race with lots of powerplays triggered, so keeping guys at a certain distance - so that you feel they're right behind you - is one of the things we try to create," Glancey says. "But at the same time, you don't want really obvious rubberbanding. It has to feel like a proper race. We've got various degrees of pretty intelligent catch-up in there."

"One interesting problem that we have that other racing games don't have is that you have really major events on the track - you can take out almost the whole field with one powerplay - so we need to make sure that that doesn't adversely affect the competitiveness of the race."

At the moment, the AI dynamically changes behaviour lap to lap, and there are sensible concessions to fun. "The AI engineers really don't want to make the game cheat at all - they want all the power-earning to be real, so they'll only trigger powerplays when they can - but sometimes you have to go after the best experience," says Glancey. "So we do stage-manage certain things, like the AI will only trigger a powerplay when you can see it on-screen." That way the track layout never catches you off-guard. "You also want the player to get first dibs on powerplays, so the AI won't trigger the route-changing powerplays, but if it gets to the last lap, and you're nearby and haven't triggered it, we want to make sure that you see them, so the AI will trigger them."

Due next year on PC, PS3 and 360.

Consider me in.

[Hendo]

Yeah, I suck.

Nah, that Live thing doesn't update at the right time so it sends out my position when I start but by the time it's ready to update I've restarted because I'm in the "it's come first or nothing" frame of mind.

Pure is very good, I'm sure you can find it for 20 quid or less as it came out last September and probably didn't sell that well.

In fact, Play.com are selling it for 15 quid.

Mind you, the demo is pretty much what you get with the game, it's equally about doing tricks as it is racing. In fact, you need to do the tricks to get the speed to win, and you need a good speed if you want the room to do the tricks. But it's also about finding the right route too.

On topic, Split/Second sounds like it's Burnout but with the Mario Kart school of weaponry, so if you're losing you can do something to the terrain to slow the drivers in front down, or if you're ahead you can slow down the pack behind you.

Going by pure, if nothing else it'll be beautiful to look at and as fast as fuck.

[Chinzon]

Wow, they thought the "tall building falling onto the track" piece was so good they put it twice in the trailer. I bet it's in the game like a thousand times.

[retroed]

This is looking pretty good.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/10/27/eg-expo-splitsecond-video-does-the-proper-awesome/#more-64477

[Sly Reflex]

I played this at the expo too. Anyone disappointed in the direction Burnout has taken will love this like a pig loves rolling round in shit. It is very good, everything works really well and it runs really smooth and fast. It look beautiful in movement too, but then again pretty much all games do now, it is not often the graphics really suffer in this day and age.

[Hendo]

More info on this. Me wanty very, very much.

The basic idea of the resulting game, Split/Second, is that you earn power by drifting, drafting and driving like a loony, and that you can then deploy that power to set off explosions, collapses and other set-pieces to attack other racers. "The city is your weapon," Baynes noted, as we watched some cars being blown up.

Powerplays can also be used to open up shortcuts. "They often involve opening up doors which inevitably slam behind you," Baynes pointed out. Bad news for people in your rearview mirror. There are also route-changing powerplays, which are the really big ones - like knocking over a crane at the docks so that a nearby tanker starts to capsize, and you have to race across its sloping deck.

The game's vehicles, Baynes explained, were all homemade so they could "rip them apart and do whatever we want with them". The consistent factor, however, was that they all had to have a "muscular presence". "If you had a small compact car driving around while the world explodes, it could look a bit comical."

Black Rock was also keen to avoid looking too realistic, Baynes arguing that realism is actually rather boring, and exaggeration is the key to getting people excited. Hence Split/Second has tons of real-time light sources to make all the particle effects sing, multiple explosions on a timeline to make more of the powerplays, and really huge set-pieces.

How huge? Well, said Baynes, one of the animations has a footprint of two kilometres. We also got to see how some of them were made, beginning with concept paintings and storyboards for each route-changing powerplay.

Baynes then had one of his colleagues play through the Docks level, a bit of a Eurogamer Expo exclusive, which saw cars zipping in-between containers that were swinging on loose cables, and dodging through the fiery innards of a ship that had been exploded loose of its dry dock. Smoke absolutely poured off the tyres as the driver took turns at speed, and the quality of the effects was a step above even what we saw at gamescom.

Another detail we hadn't noticed before - the HUD, which lives on the rear bumper and shows how much power is in your meter, swings round to the front bumper when you hit the button to look behind your car. Neat.

After the demo, Baynes took some questions. Any DLC plans, asked one chap? "We are planning DLC. Right now, exactly what that is, is under discussion." And how many cars and tracks? "One thing I can reveal exclusively now: we're not going to have the same number of cars as Forza or GT! But we will have a decent number of cars."

Oh yes, and what about multiplayer? Eight players online, two players in split-screen, said Baynes. Asked by another Eurogamer whether the game was difficult to do online due to all the destruction, Baynes said it was "not as hard as we thought", thanks to some clever planning on the part of the designers, who used "a combination of pre-canned animations dressed with physics objects" to achieve the set-piece effects.

[retroed]

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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/exclusive-split-second-powerplay-vid

Looks ace.

[hinn888]

Thats gna be so chaotic online, cant wait

[Hendo]

Really looking forward to this.

[retroed]

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"Jason also said that the experience on both X360 and PS3 will remain exactly the same, both versions locked in at a solid 30fps"

Not 60fps ala Burnout, Ridge Racer. Still, solid 30 should still be decent.

Demo this week. I'll be trying it for sure.

[hinn888]

Its what we've been waiting for, the demo is now up! Queue it here!

[TopGunKnacker]

this game is awesome, hope the demo does it justice. dunno whether ill get this or blur first though..

[hinn888]

Yea the demo really didnt do it much bit im hoping it will be alot more! Like what Batman AA did.

The cars feel somewhat heavy and if you dont have any power bar or you do is drift & draft, or unless your you just drift. Theres not even nitro in the game which just seemed weird to me.

I have the say the explosions are very cool tho. A blue or red icon will appear above the opponents when its possible to do so. Cept for their arnt many reds on the track in the demo.

Also managed to glitch where the camera got stuck under my car so i couldnt see shit, so i ended up crashing into a coach and burning to death.

The demo was quite a let down, i had high hopes for this. Maybe a £30 buy? Multiplayer is definately where its at.

[Hendo]

Shame it's a very short demo but it looks fantastic!

I've been extremely dubious about the HUD being on the car and a short play with it hasn't changed my mind. Luckily, I switched to my favourite view of bumper cam and it's a proper HUD and doesn't distract like the one on the car does.

[spatular]

i only had one quick go of the demo, didn't think much to it but then demos can be deceiving, hopefully that's the case here.

[hinn888]

Achievements are out, nothing special.