During The Run’s preview event I got a chance to have a chat with The Run’s Executive Producer, Jason DeLong. Here’s what he had to say:
Eric Layman: When the game debuted around E3, one of the big things was “oh you get out of your car, there are these quick-time events,” and the reaction to that wasn’t so great. Even since that the buzz around The Run hasn’t been focused on those. Was it toned down, or was that all part of the marketing plan? Did you guys know there was a negative reaction to that?
Jason DeLong: What we wanted to do at E3 was just get people’s attention and have them talking about the game. For whatever reason they were talking about it, they were talking about it, which is good. At the end of the day, the getting out of the car was meant to be shown as something that was different and new about the game, but it’s less about the fact that Jack gets out of the car and more about the fact that we have a story in the game, and the story is told through gameplay as opposed to putting the controller down, watching a movie, and putting the controller back up again. So, for us, the getting out of the car and the quick-time events really are all in aid of telling the story and having a narrative. That’s what the big message wanted to be, that, for the first time ever in Need for Speed, we’re telling a story in the game. You could watch a cut scene or you could play a cut scene, and we’re more interested in playing cut scenes, which is why we did that. First and foremost, Need for Speed is a racing game and we didn’t want any kind of confusion after E3 about how much of the game was being out of the car, about how much of it was storytelling versus racing. We’re a racing game, and it’s important that people understand that.
Eric: Judging solely by the demo I downloaded from PSN, I would say the racing doesn’t really feel arcade-y and it doesn’t really feel sim. Was there a back and forth between the team about which way to go on that?
Jason: It wasn’t really a back and forth, it was a choice. We looked at the kind of games that were out there and how we wanted to establish ourselves. We knew we didn’t want to be full arcade, we didn’t want to go quite as far as Hot Pursuit did, but at the same time we didn’t want it to be a full simulation. So the idea was that we had some key words we used to describe the gameplay as we were developing it, and one of those was “human.” “Human,” in the story, “human in the story-telling and the cut scenes and so forth, but also in the gameplay itself and the idea being that these cars behave the way you believe they would behave. It’s not a full simulation, we do want to have a bit of Hollywood action but, at the same time, if you want to get behind the wheel of a 700 horsepower Super Snake and floor it, you’re not going to necessarily going to be able to drive it perfectly in real life. We wanted to tow that line between arcade and simulation. We’re not full arcade. We’re not full simulation. The cars are easy to pick up and play, you can get basic control and understand them and learn how to drive the car fairly quickly. But then we wanted to make sure there was a learning curve and that the people who are willing to put in hours and hours and hours to really perfect the feel and handling of those cars, that depth is there as well.
Eric: On that note, the racing surfaces; I saw ice, I saw dirt, is that cosmetic? Or is that actually playing a part in how your car behaves?
Jason: It plays a part. You’ll see when you play through the whole Run, how we introduce these elements in a different way. We start with traditional asphalt, there are no “gotcha’s” in the asphalt. And then we introduce wet roads which makes the handling a little bit different, then we go back to asphalt, and then you get into the snow levels. In the snow levels, there are icy patches and it definitely plays into the physics and gameplay…You can do any sort of standard race and feel heroic doing it, but at the same time we want to introduce these elements where we make things a little bit more interesting from a gameplay perspective.
Eric: When Black Box was thinking of what courses to do in a trek across the United States, did they have any certain areas they wanted to hit? How did they decide what the path was going to be?
Jason: We knew we wanted to do a cross country race because that’s just a very romantic sort of idea that’s never been done in a game before. We wanted to replicate actual locations across the U.S. which, again, has never been done in Need for Speed. The way we decided started with the cities and what cities we felt were iconic and important to visit. We chose San Francisco over L.A. because it’s more fun to jump down Nob Hill than it is to be stuck on the 405! From there it’s like, “OK, what other cities do we want to go to?” Obviously Las Vegas is a very iconic city and easy to understand. Chicago, likewise, and then New York which is our final city. That’s how it started, but what it developed into was really realizing that a journey across the U.S. is so much more than just the cities that you visit. In fact, the spaces between the cities and the route you take from city to city are probably more important. In going to (game engine) Frostbite 2 and just being able to create a lot of content in the game, we’ve got over 300 kilometers of track which is more than three times what we’ve seen in a Need for Speed before. That, for us, was the importance of selling this journey and really selling the variety of the terrain as you go across the U.S. because you start in San Francisco, and then very quickly you’re into Altamont, then you’re into Yosemite National Park, then you’re into Death Valley in the desert, then you’re in the foot hills of the Colorado mountains, then you’re in the Rocky Mountains and all of a sudden there’s snow, the plains, Midwest, and then farm land and so on. Selling that whole journey was really important to us.
Eric: You mentioned Frost Bite 2, was there any difficulty there? Did Black Box have a dialogue with DICE? Was it easy to use?
Jason: We partnered with DICE quite extensively to sort of co-develop parts of Frost Bite 2. We integrated things from their code base and they from ours to basically make the engine that Frost Bite 2 is. It’s a great tool obviously for visuals, it’s a beautiful looking game, our sounds effects are great, the audio is astounding, but it’s also a great tool for artists and developers. It allows us to create content very quickly and iterate very quickly. We worked with the Frost Bite team in DICE and we had a small Frost Bite team on our side as well. We worked very corroboratively to get our racing physics and car rendering techniques into Frost Bite 2.
Eric: Back to the demo, I believe there was some sort of arctic course where missiles fly out and start avalanches. Is that tied to the story, or is it just one of those things that looks cool as hell?
Jason: Actually that’s a couple things. It is a real thing. In heavily snow-packed areas like Independence Pass in Colorado they actually do close the roads to set off avalanches in order to clear the snow to prevent actual avalanches from happening.
Eric: Oh wow.
Jason: That’s actually a moment in the story where Jack has chosen the route that he’s taken and he gets to a point where the road is closed because they’ve closed it for avalanches, and he can’t really go on. However, another racer races by and breaks through the barricade and gets ahead of (Jack), so his only choice is to get behind the wheel and try and do it. And, of course, the middle of that race is when the start doing the blasting for the avalanches, and the avalanche occurs while you’re racing.
Eric: I noticed there were certain characters, rivals. The loading screens gave some information about them, are they going to play a role? Do they have a personality beyond that loading screen or are they just another obstacle to overcome?
Jason: Basically we wanted to have some key cars throughout the game that we want you to pay attention to and that you see multiple times throughout the race. They’re not as fully realized as in cut scenes and things like that, but the idea is that there are moments throughout the race when you’ve got your standard sprint races, time attacks, and battle modes, but every once and a while we throw one of these rival races in. You’re going one on one against another individual on a course, and, in some cases, you beat them and they’re never seen from again, and, in other cases, you beat them and you’re still both in the race, and you’re going to meet up with them later in the race as well. The cool thing about the rival battles is that when you finally get to the final rival battles against these individuals you actually have a chance to win their cars. When you replay the run or go into challenge series or online you can actually use their cars as well.
Eric: Tying back into the narrative, you take certain liberties with what you want to do with the game, but I didn’t see a reason why (Jack) had access to all of these cars when the game started out.
Jason: Haha, well we don’t go too much into Jack’s past beyond the fact that he’s in trouble with the mob and he’s known as a driver in the past, so people can write their own back stories as to how Jack got a hold of all of these cars.
Eric: Autolog came from Criterion last year with Hot Pursuit. Did Black Box have any trouble incorporating that into the game, or were they really anticipating it, like it fit perfectly in?
Jason: Yeah, Autolog was a great addition to the Need for Speed franchise and one that we wanted to continue to support. Obviously it’s become a big part about what Need for Speed is about. Asynchronous competition with your friends is a great motivator. For us, there wasn’t a challenge to it, but it was more about trying to figure out how to integrate it into The Run’s story. The Run’s story mode is a very big part of our game and we wanted to make sure that the Autolog feels engaging, so we did a couple things. One was that we wanted to actually compare your times to your friend’s during the race. With Hot Pursuit it’s just individual events and you go in that individual event against your friends. This is actually about, “how fast did you get across the country?” compared to your friends. Stage by stage; how many stages do you own? How many stages are you the leader of? We wanted to make sure we integrated it that way.
The second part was, we want people to know all the time, without having to do any research, how they were doing against their friends. By putting this real time Autolog indicator on the HUD, where it’s not a case of through checkpoints at the ending of the race you can see how you’re doing, you know second-to-second how you’re measuring up against your friends all the way through. From San Francisco to New York, you’re always measuring up against your friends if they’ve completed the stages ahead.
Eric: I assume once you beat the whole game you’ll be able to go back and cherry-pick the sequences you want to do again/
Jason: Yes, exactly. You’ll have the ability to go back and replay stages and try and set better times. You can actually choose different cars as well, so if you go back and replay a stage you can do it in a different car than you did on your first run through.
Eric: Would it be any car that you earned or just the tier of car for that course?
Jason: The cars that you earn that are in that tier.
Eric: We were doing some multiplayer and it listed out some goals pre-race. For example I saw one that said, “use nitrous to pass three people.” I assume that’s for the entire playlist of races you’re supposed to do?
Jason: Yes, that’s in that session. In each multiplayer playlist has a series of sessions within them and the idea is that it’s not just about finishing first. There are actually additional objectives that you want to try and complete. In your example, nitrous past three people, that’s what you need to do in that session to get some XP you can use to level up your driver.
Eric: Is it the same set of goals for every playlist or is it randomized?
Jason: There’s a whole series. We’ve got twenty objectives per playlist, essentially, and they can be done in any sort of order.
Eric: I had head part of your explanation of this before, but with experience points you can buy cars?
Jason: The EXP that is awarded to you is your driver level. The more EXP you get, the more your driver level increases. As you driver level increases you get a series of different awards that are given to you. When you start the game fresh and you’re driver level one. You essentially don’t have any driver skills and you have a limited number of profile icons and things like that. Completing the different levels gives you multiple driver skills and other things. Maybe it would be the ability to use nitrous, you get the ability to earn extra nitrous for driving dangerously. You get the ability to use extra EXP for driving dangerously. You get things like drafting abilities. There are a series of driver skills that you get as you level up. We also have other awards that are given, things like profile icons to customize your badge for online play. In some of the later levels we actually have exclusive cars that are given via driver level. The whole purposes of gaining EXP, whether through the single player Run or the challenge series or multiplayer, it all contributes to your drive level.
Eric: I think that’s all I’ve got except, well, did you get to meet Christina Hendricks?
Jason: I did get to meet Christina Hendricks
Eric: You did?
Jason: I did! We were with Christina actually for her performance capture. All of the cut scenes are done with performance capture. We did it at House of Moves in Los Angeles, and we actually captured both her and Sean Faris. We captured their body movement, their facial animation, and their voice performance all at the same time, which we actually hadn’t done before. Usually you do you the voice recording and then you hand animate the face, but we actually captured it all at once to really get the performances out. We even went so far as to do something called E.O.G (Electrooculography), basically eye tracking, and it actually allowed us to get subtle movements in their eyes. We actually captured all of that. Doing a full performance capture with them was really great to help us tell the story in a way that was believable.
Eric: Awesome, well I believe that’s all I have. Thank you for your time.
Jason: My pleasure.
