There’s a lot of context to get across, however, with each race given some kind of basis in the storyline and characters. Chudley says the big question was: “How can we tell this story without shitloads of cutscenes, and how can we make the racers engaging in their own right?” And his answer was a social network. He’d started using a Facebook app that allows members to post pictures of their cars and make a wishlist of those they desired, with the aim of comparison inspiring interaction. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we have that in the game?’” he explains. All characters portray their lives through the social network, which also forms the user interface for the entire game. They will send messages to the player, congratulating on good performances and inviting them to events or issuing challenges, as well as posting videos and pictures of your races. Some special events will be unlocked by driving exceptionally fast on some tracks, with a character sending a message noting the time and asking whether you’d like to try your hand at some time trials. “So rather than flood the player with the traditional singleplayer, multiplayer, time attack, arcade mode – all that crap you get – you can tailor the game to the way the player is performing, and what they’ll be interested in doing,” Chudley says.

Wilson gives an example: “You meet Morrissey and Kahn in London, and Kahn’s attitude isn’t like that of the game. He’s almost like a Need For Speed character – rough and aggressive. He spanks you at first, though, so you leave London in disgrace for Brighton to pick up some guys and come back to beat them.” It sounds dangerous – the game will be forcing players to lose a race, players that are very used to restarting whenever they feel themselves doing badly. “Not really,” he counters. “We spike the difficulty in certain places. It’s not impossible to beat Kahn the first time, but it’s hard. We just move straight on, miss out the results and option to retry or continue and you get a message from Morrissey that he thinks you need some help to defeat these guys. Shooters have been doing this for ages, but nothing like it seems to happen in racing games – you just go for first, restart, retry. In shooters there’s a big robot you can’t kill until you get the big gun.”



Naturally, the interface will extend to the multiplayer mode, with players being able to post pictures taken in photo mode (now allowing players to annotate snaps) to their opponents. “’I took this picture of you upside down with your car covered in sparks… erm… ha’,” Chudley offers as an example of its usage. “You get this banter going across, between the AI and you in the story, and in the real world, too.” But the social networks of multiplayer and singleplayer will be kept entirely separate. “That’s a very clear decision we’ve made,” he explains. “We were going to, but it started to compromise the story, because a character would say, ‘You’ve never raced in London before – come and join us!’ but you might have played there with mates the night before online. We wanted to have a clear story arc and a clear sandboxy multiplayer.”

And sandbox is an apt word for the options Blur will give players to create races. It’s clear that Bizarre has been very carefully watching Bungie’s work with the freedom it has granted users to make their own gametypes and share them online in Halo 2 and 3. It’s also a result of seeing the rampant popularity of Cat And Mouse, an informal gametype invented by players in PGR2 in which teams of drivers in fast cars must compete to push their ‘mouse’, a driver in a slow car, usually a Mini, over the finish line first. It was included as an official mode in PGR3, but it’s clear that for all Bizarre’s pride that it had been invented and had become so popular, it was also a little galling that it distracted players from all the proper content that the developer had made for them. “People online gravitated towards Cat And Mouse. That’s all you could get. We made this game, and all they were doing was Cat And Mouse. So we thought we should expand that,” says Chudley.