Jak X Combat Racing Q&A (Page 2): Interviews

Jak X Combat Racing Q&A (Page 2)

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The vehicles in the game will be customizable with various paint jobs, and snap-on parts. Are all of these purely aesthetic, or will players also be able to do things to their ride to improve performance?

Richard Lemarchand - Some of the vehicle customization - like the snap-on parts and paint jobs - is indeed purely aesthetic, so that players can freely change the look of their cars to whatever matches their personal tastes and preferences, without having to worry about screwing up a particular performance profile that they like. However, the cars are also customizable using a rewards-based upgrade system - as they play through the game, players will be able to tune each car individually for its acceleration, top speed, armor class and turbo consumption, giving a good wide range of meaningful configurability across the different vehicles in the game.

Does track design require any special considerations with players trying to blow up the competition in Jak X when compared to more conventional racing games?

Dan Arey - One of the things that really sets Jak X apart from other racing games is the topography of the tracks and courses. There is a ton of variation and incredible visual imagery, which compliments the look the Jak franchise is known for. But this game isn't all about the beautiful scenery. It's called "Combat Racing" for a reason, and so the courses facilitate great multiplayer engagement and interaction. The tracks are designed to be aggressive and fantastic in nature, and full of surprises. There are also a lot of off road elements allowing our track designers to really come up with some amazing course challenges for players on a second by second action/reaction basis. But we're not talking about kiddy kart tracks by any means. This is a serious racing world with real physics, killer weapons, and high speed racing vehicles screaming around tracks that keep you twitching.

Just how much additional content will people be able to unlock in this game through the planned connectivity between it and the upcoming Daxter PSP game?

Dan Arey - We've always loved secrets in the Jak series, and with the Daxter PSP game we now have a whole new avenue for crossover! Naughty Dog has a great relationship with Ready at Dawn, and we have even assisted in the story extension, voice talent, and the character development to make sure the game is true to the universe. This is a wonderful new avenue where two games on two different platforms can add play value to the other. While I don't want to give away too much of the surprise, there will be secret characters to unlock for each game and other goodies the players will be very happy to find!

Will the game have any sort of story mode, or is it simply a race among the characters to cure themselves of Krew's poison?

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Dan Arey - In true Naughty Dog fashion, we are taking a genre (in this case, racing) that has been traditionally light on story and are adding a whole narrative adventure for the single player game to give players more emotional involvement in the action. There will be a full 45 minute cinematic story and new characters (as well as old favorites) building off the previous stories from the series. The difference is this is not a huge "save the world" story. We

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concluded the trilogy with Jak 3 in his finding out who his father actually is and who the Precursors really are, and we felt that chapter in Jak's life as a superhero was passed. The Jak X story is at its core about the past coming back to haunt. It's about loyalty and betrayal, and realizing that what you cherish the most in life is not the big wide world, but the people and friends closest to you. Oh yea...and there's a ton of kick butt racing action in the mix!

What exactly does the "Advanced Rigid Body Physics" in the game do?

Richard Lemarchand - It mainly handles collisions, crashes, bumps, impacts, explosions, jolts, knocks, pile-ups, sideswipes, slams, smashes, thuds, thumps and wrecks! Seriously, we treat all of the cars in the game as if they were real physical objects, and as you play we are constantly performing math calculations in the background of the game to ensure that when they crash, they respond just as they would in the real world. This makes for some very spectacular and realistic-looking wrecks, but it also makes the handling of the cars feel more solid and convincing. As well as treating the cars overall like physics objects, we do a lot of complex math modeling of their engines; each car has a fully-working drive train under its virtual hood, with unique amounts of power output, torque, and a hand-tuned automatic gearbox. It's a real challenge to develop a fun game using so much real-time physics, but we feel that it's worth it, and we're getting a lot of great feedback about the results.

While most of the game's modes like Death Match, and Time Trial are self-explanatory, Time Box isn't. Could you explain what Time Box mode is about in Jak X?

Richard Lemarchand - Time Box - which is a working title, - is a little like the Timer Chase bonus missions from Jak 3. The player has to complete a number of circuits on a particular track, and has to do it within a strict time limit. However, the time limit is way too low, and there's no way the player could get around in time without a little help! So we've littered the tracks with smashable power-ups that temporarily stop the clock – some stop the clock for just a couple of seconds, but others give a big ten-second bonus. With a combination of smart driving and careful turbo-boosting, the player can beat the clock and set a new record!

What sorts of destructible elements are in the game?

Richard Lemarchand - The tracks and arenas are littered with breakable objects that the cars smash through as they tear around the tracks. However, my personal favorite destructible element in the game is the cars themselves! One more feature of the physics system that we didn't mention yet is that the cars' snap-on body parts are deformable in real-time. That means that wherever the car gets hit, the body parts in that location will get scraped and buckled, and will start to work themselves loose. The looser they get, the more they flap around, until eventually they work free and go tumbling down the track behind the car. Coupled with the deformations that we make to the car chassis when it finally crashes, this means that the cars get spectacularly mangled when they get into trouble! Luckily, the parts auto-regenerate with the application of a little Green Eco...

Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share about Jak X?

Dan Arey - We're just very excited to get this game into the hands of players. Just as with Crash Team Racing, there is a deep intrinsic play addiction to the type of focused head-to-head action that racing (and combat racing, in this case) provides. With the online and multiplayer elements in Jak X, we hope to take this to a new level, and we feel we have a game that will give players a great ride. We still get people telling us that CTR is one of their favorite party games, and we hope that Jak X: Combat Racing both online and single player, will have the same legs, or in this case "wheels," for some time to come.