IGTV: Colin McRae: DiRT 2 Interview Page 2

19 Aug 2009 at 13:38:48 by Tim McDonald

We've got a lot of information from the manufacturers and the drivers themselves on how these types of vehicles actually react. When you're driving a rally car, it's pretty nimble and agile, but compared to, say, the Hummer – which is a bit more bouncy, a bit more heavy, and definitely takes more to power around the corners; you have to brake more. It's almost like point and squirt: get your back end and then put your power down and hope it goes round. With a rally car, you can do a Scandinavian flick now. You can use proper weight-shift on the cars. In the game, you can drive like a normal grip driver like Sebastien Loeb who drives very clean, in straight lines. Or you can do Ken Block, Colin McRae style – get the back end out, drift it round, and use the power of the car to pull the car around. So the handling's quite versatile now and quite realistic.

With terrain deformation in the game we use normal maps to make it look like there is deformation, but... we actually tried deformation on the tracks early on in DiRT 2 and we found that it actually made the game more harsh, and harder to play. So we basically got rid of it. So track deformation, while visually the tracks look deformed – and of course, you can crash into a big barrier and cause tyres to go on the track and the player, if he ever hit those... but when it came to actually deforming the track, we found that by the time the eighth guy got onto the road he could hardly drive and it just wasn't a pleasant experience.

But surely that's taking away from the realistic aspect of the game. Was that the idea; to make it just a more fun, casual game?

Yeah, exactly. We want to make sure that everyone can enjoy DiRT 2. We have got lots of simmy options in – car setup, having full damage, having the real cars there for the sim guys – but the casual guy just wants to have fun with his friends and just have a laugh, and that's in there as well. We've very much had to go on either side of the community.

Just like in DiRT 1, we've got quite extensive setup options in there – we've got things like the gear ratios, the suspension, the ride height – so if you're on one of our Trailblazer tracks that's all about speed, they're quite flat, they're not as bumpy, you'll want to drop the ride height, get the gear ratios longer, and if you like to have your car's back end go out you can change differentials so you can actually induce oversteer if you want.

We have got plans for DLC. I can't really explain what it is fully -

Oh come on, you can tell me. The camera's not on.

No, no, I'll get in trouble! I think there'll be later press releases about it, but yes, we're planning DLC.

How many pieces, can you say...?

At least a couple! *laughs*

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