While only in Sydney for less than two days, I had the great pleasure of attending this years EB Games Expo, held once again at Sydney Olympic Park from October 3rd to October 5th. With many of the big name publishers and developers attending the expo during its fourth year, the crowds were once again huge as gamers once again descended upon the city for three days of gaming, cosplaying, Q&A’s, shopping at a giant EB Games store and even more gaming if time permitted.
After my time at the Microsoft Xbox booth interviewing both Ben Penrose and Marcus Smith, I quickly rushed over to Sony Computer Entertainment Australia’s PlayStation booth where their awesome PR team were kind enough to organize me an interview with Simon Barlow from Evolution Studios, who served as Design Director on DRIVECLUB. Without further ado or unnecessary fanfare, divert your eyes below for the interview:
For those not familiar with the game, can you share a bit about the concept behind it?
What we have tried to do with DRIVECLUB is tap into the car culture and car enthusiasm. We’re trying to recreate the emotional connection people we have with race-cars and high performance cars. But we’re trying to grow a more connected social experience out of this. We had this idea about ten years ago, and we kicked this idea around about how we can get car enthusiasts to meet online, share races and share stories. But ten years ago the infrastructure wasn’t really there, and it was a time where Facebook and Online Gaming wasn’t considered mainstream. So we kind of shelved that project,and it was only when we were looking at the PS4 and the idea of it being a “Connected, Shared experience”, we thought that DRIVECLUB is possible now and we could deliver on this.
Its a game that we have tried to make accessible and allow people to have fun with others and having fun with it while providing plenty of depth. If you are going to build a connected experience / a community around a game it needs to have longevity, it needs to have something in there to keep people playing – so you need that depth to it as well.
In talking about providing a connected experience, the decision was made to limit clubs in DRIVECLUB to six players. Why was that number chosen?
Purely because if you limit it to six people, the idea is that those six people know each other really well. These are your mates in real life or buddies that you play online with regularly – these are people that you know. We originally looked at more of a guild or clan structure where you could have hundreds or thousands of players in one club. But then you feel like you are just a cog in a machine without any unique role for you or being part of anything bigger. The number was originally twelve and then we reduced it down to six. Six feels like everybody has a purpose, everybody has a role within a club, everybody feels like they can contribute and get something out of it. Overall it feels much more personal.
How does the experience change when you choose to do a few single-player rounds or something not necessarily involving your club members?
However you play the game, if you are part of a club, it doesn’t matter what you do as it all contributes. We know that gamers are busy people and know your gaming time, particularly around Christmas, is precious – especially with a lot of games competing for your attention. We feel like gaming should be rewarding and however long you’ve got, those couple of hours should feel rewarding and important to you. We didn’t want to punish drivers in DRIVECLUB, we wanted to make sure that whatever you did in-game felt rewarding and meaningful. Playing on your own terms or synchronously head-to-head with other players, everything is connected and you are left feeling like you are contributing all the time.
The racing genre has proven to be a timeless classic in gaming. Because of this, how do you think that DRIVECLUB will manage to stand above the crowd?
I think its multiple things, and not really just one thing about DRIVECLUB that makes it stand out. I think the handling is really interesting as we picture it somewhere between arcade and simulation which is pretty difficult to do. Most games are either Arcade or a Sim, and that middle ground is really tricky to get right. But we feel we’ve nailed it, we’ve got a lot of experience in the team and we’ve been doing this for a long time. So the feel of the cars is very different and very rewarding – the cars feel so connected to the environment and its very different from most other racing games.
Also obviously the social aspect of DRIVECLUB is a real big thing for us. We’re trying to build a community around the game, and we don’t want DRIVECLUB to be a box product we launch and that’s it – or maybe just add some DLC or whatever… that’s not what we wanted for DRIVECLUB. What we wanted was a game that crew and expanded with the community, so we could work directly with them to make this a better experience. DRIVECLUB is ultimately a service… that’s what it is. Its a racing platform.
One issue with many video games that use online mechanics is that while they may be popular at launch, their community can dissipate over time. Especially as the game requires players need to join up to limited sized clubs for the best experience, how will you be enticing players to stay for the long haul?
The game has to be accessible enough that you can pick it up and feel like you are having a good time playing it, but if you don’t have any depth then you’re not going to have that long-term playability out of it. That’s kind of why we are launching this as a service. Because we’ve got a pretty good game right now, in fact it’s a very good game and we’re really proud of what we’ve got… and we’ve got new features coming down the line this side of Christmas. We’ve got a huge weather update coming and will also be releasing Photo Mode before Christmas as well. These are going to be free updates for the community. We’re hoping that if we keep giving the community more of the good stuff, we keep really working with them to refine the experience, then that community is going to stay there. If you look at any online games that have a very solid community, its because the development team works directly with the community and make the gaming experience together. We’re hopeful that we provide enough of a good game to get people hooked in the first place, get them into the community, and be part of DRIVECLUB. And then we keep people playing by growing that community.
One of the big things we wanted to do on that subject is… we’re releasing a free version of the game on PlayStation Plus, and there’s no micro-transactions in that… we’re not trying to nickel and dime people with this. You can happily play DRIVECLUB for free without spending a single cent playing the game if you want to. That was very important to us. We’re not being cynical about it… and are trying to get the game into many people’s hands as possible and saying “Be part of the community”. There’s no segregation, you’re not going to get preferential treatment if you pay for the game versus someone who gets it for free and all modes and features are available. The only difference is that if you buy the game, you get more cars and more tracks. We’re not feature locking or region locking, the game has global servers so anybody can play with everybody else. We’re just trying to be very open with people.
And you are planning this to be a permanent addition to the PlayStation Plus library?
We’re in for three months right now, but we are treating this quite differently. We’re part of PlayStation Plus but we are in addition to the usual PS Plus games library – so we’ve got a slightly different place there. The reason for that is that DRIVECLUB is a different experience, and the reason we offer it on PlayStation Plus is different as well. It’s almost like a bonus for people on top of what they already get out of PlayStation Plus. I don’t know how long it will stay there, and it depends on how popular it is. We have a negotiation with Sony to decide how long we want to stay in Plus for, and if its proving popular with us and we are building a popular community with it then we will stay in Plus. But if you want to upgrade the game, its a one-stop upgrade with no microtransactions, you just buy the upgrade and that’s it. Right now its a pretty cheap price to upgrade – cheaper than retail. We want to give people a good deal with that. If you buy the game, if you upgrade to the game – it doesn’t matter if it comes out because you still get to keep the game then.
Do you see development continuing for the next year or more?
Oh easily. We’ve already released a schedule for the next 12 months and we’re planning at least 12 months ahead and are thinking about what we are going to do the year after that. We have a vision behind the game, like what we want to achieve with it, and we’ve got a whole bunch of content planned both free and paid for. In-fact, the major content updates will all be free – things like the weather update, new tracks, new locations even – they will all be free. But we’ve left some gaps in the schedule because we want to work with the community. So, we’re in a position where we need to have some dev time available to kind of support the community and work on some new features. We hope that the community is going to surprise us with some new stuff.
Because you are marketing towards a retail and PlayStation Plus release, are you expecting that players will be tempted to jump over to the retail release?
We haven’t really got any expectations for that to be honest, as we are not doing this to make money… the free version is not there to secure upgrades. The free version is there to help make the community grow. If people want to keep playing it for free then they can do, and we are not going to suddenly switch off the servers for them. But I am kind of hopeful that there is enough there to entice people to get into this community, and if they feel like they are getting rewarded and a community they want to be a part of, then there is the single-upgrade that they can pay for and get full access to everything else. I don’t know how big the uptake is going to be, there’s like 10 million PlayStation 4’s out there at the moment and like 80-90% of those people having PlayStation Plus… there’s huge numbers. If even half those people download the DRIVECLUB PlayStation Plus edition then we’ve got 5 million people day one. That’s a pretty big community! So, I have no idea what is going to happen… and that’s kind of exciting.
While originally set as a launch or near launch title for the PlayStation 4, DRIVECLUB has been delayed for the past year. While this may have been a long time for those looking forward to checking out what you have to offer… what has this delay allowed you to deliver as compensation for the wait?
I think we just improved the game in every area to be honest. We felt we needed it… we had a pretty good game at the time but we had a really ambitious vision for DRIVECLUB but we weren’t quite there… so that’s why we delayed it. But that’s enabled us to do all kinds of things. We had pretty much an entire art team with an extra year of development, so the weather update for example was directly a result of that extra year of development. We’ve massively improved the visual quality. We’ve been able to add a number of bespoke anti-aliasing passes to the visual image as well. I think if you looked at it at Gamescom last year and you look at it here now at the EB Expo, its such a different game and experience. I think its just better in every area.
Because video game development is a growing market, what message do you have for those looking to get into a role like yours?
Well its really different from when I started. I’ve been in the industry for over fifteen years now and while right now you could do a degree course in Game Design, Game Theory, Game Art and the rest of it, back then there was none of that. You didn’t study to get into the games industry you just kind of got into it out of luck most of the time. But nowadays I think there’s so many opportunities for people and a lot of companies, Evolution Studios included, offer work experience placements. So if people are taking a year out from their studies we have work experience placements. So I would just say that, it depends on the role if you want to take.
If you want to be a artist, programmer or designer… Designer is most probably one of the hardest gigs to get into as percentage wise, designers are the lowest represented in games companies… we have like four or five designers on our team out of 100 so its a really hard role to get into. Designers have to do a bit of everything – you have to know a bit of code and a bit of art. So I would just say to people who are just starting off… if you want to get into the games industry… it is probably worth thinking of taking a course, a college course… or a degree course… and find something you like. Its really important to get a broad overview of game development, but I would focus on a particular area… either 3D art or 2D art, game programming, server programming. Whatever it is that interests you… stick with that. And that’s kind of your way in. Because the industry at the moment because the team sizes are so big, there’s less generalists then there once were and far more specialists. There are dedicated teams responsible for specific areas of game development… so pick the thing you enjoy and stick with it.
Thank you very much for your time Simon!
