Can you give us an example of how you’ve made the track design process simple and accessible?
Generally in games where you can make your own track it’s all about dropping set pieces and that can work OK, but we found that you have to have a pretty good idea of exactly how you want it to look in the end. You have to really plan it out and that can work well for the hardcore, but it ends up making it less accessible for newcomers. So we ended up coming up with a system that we call ‘drive to create.’ You just use the same controls as you do in the racing - as you’re driving the track gets released out behind you. We found it was a really simple way that was intuitive to people and also allowed for a lot of exploration. We give users some logic so they can’t directly intersect their track - it’ll always bring you a little bit up or below to create under or overpasses. But effectively you can drive around and just explore the track creation and at the end you’ll at least have a driveable track that you can immediately auto populate and then start racing on.

What kind of limits will you be imposing on user creation in terms of track design?
We really tried to reduce as many limits as possible and make it a pretty open experience. Tracks are always a loop, always a circuit, so there are no point-to-point races, but beyond that we try to allow the user to express themselves and create some really cool experiences. They can delete sections of track and make it open up all of a sudden to off-road or Baja sections and then funnel into a tunnel. We’re really trying to keep that as open as we possibly can.

Will people be able to create any kind of circuit they want or will the tracks have to be grounded in reality?
I wouldn’t say it’s realistic. We’ve got a lot of very cool dynamic elements that you can put in there, like launchers, obstacles, breaking bridges, those sorts of things. So it’ll be really exciting for us to see how people tie all of these together.



What kind of power-ups will feature in the game?
What we’re trying to do with the weapons is create some that have never really been done before in an action arcade racing title. There are some of the classics you would expect, including the straight missile and the seeking missile, but there’s a new one we showed in Cologne at Gamescom, a sonic weapon. It creates a sonic boom around your kart, and there are different levels. At the first level it creates circular rings that come out from your kart and damage anyone within your area. Then there’s the second level, where you can launch the weapon ahead of you and it creates the same sort of damage. What we’ve tried to do is create weapon classes that have very different styles of gameplay. Those are the only ones that we’ve announced so far, but there are a couple more we’ll be announcing over the next couple of months that I think people will find very different and also quite interesting.

Can users create their own weapons?
It was something we talked a lot about. We decided for this version of the game not to allow users to create their own weapons. It’s something we definitely want to investigate and pursue in the future, but we wanted to focus on creating a solid, balanced racing experience that allowed the creativity and customisation to come out in the tracks, in the characters and in the karts.

How does the kart racing handle and is it comparable to any existing titles?
I think we’re actually fairly unique in that way. Obviously a lot of us have a hardcore or arcade racing background, so we tried more physics models that way, then we went to a much simpler kart model and we found that neither was exactly what we were looking for. So what we did was create a physics system that’s somewhere in-between. It’s still very easy to pick up and play, it drives intuitively and your kart doesn’t feel like it is on rails, but there’s that physicality in the world when you’re bouncing off other karts or hitting walls, so the collisions feel real and impactful. And so it’s taken a lot of tuning and tweaking to get there because it was a physics model unlike a lot of us had used before, but it was important for us to get that right feel.



How would you describe the visual style of the game, and how much variety can we expect to see in terms of themes and styles that players will be able to use for their creations?
In terms of art style we really took inspiration from Urban Vinyl and that’s where the idea of creating the characters from a blank model [came from]. It’s up to the user to decide how they want to decorate, paint and design their character to reflect their personality. I think you’re going to see a huge variety in terms of different art styles. The themes we’ve shown so far, the desert and the alpine look, obviously look very different in terms of the terrain, buildings and props that are on offer, as well as the water and the sky even. We’ll be announcing more at the Tokyo Game Show and more after that. Right from the beginning, from concept, we tried to create things that were very different in terms of how they looked visually but also in terms of the types of gameplay experience they would allow for, so doing the off-road sort of dune-buggy style driving in the desert feels amazing, versus the tight winding path around the mountain hills and the alpine theme. There’s a huge difference there.