El33tonline Exclusive: Interview with Stephen Viljoen on all things SHIFT 2 Unleashed - Part Two

SHIFT 2 Unleashed from Slightly Mad Studios is due for release next week around the world, and to get ready for this exciting new racing game you can read part two of El33tonline’s exclusive interview with Slightly Mad Studios’ Stephen Viljoen, as we learn about the company’s use of Autolog in SHIFT 2 Unleashed, the world of car manufacturer licensing, why polygons don’t matter anymore, and many other morsels of great information!

(You can find part one of this interview over here.)

El33tonline: El33tonline has been thoroughly enjoying the inclusion and use of ‘Autolog’ in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, and SHIFT 2 Unleashed also uses this online social and competitive tool.

How has Slightly Mad Studios extended the usefulness of Autolog (with new statistics being tracked and compared) and how has this information been streamlined so that it’s easy for gamers to compare race times and points scored to those of their friends?

Stephen Viljoen: Autolog does indeed feature prominently in SHIFT 2. It’s pretty much the glue that will keep you and your online friends stuck to the challenge of out-doing each other. The game provides an extensive interface where you can track all your Autolog records, compare it with your friends, your region, or the whole world. You can issue recommendations to your friends for specific race styles or specific events in Career. If you beat a friend’s record in a career event then you earn XP which in turns advances your driver level.

This hooks Autolog directly into your profile growth which makes it a lot more rewarding and addictive. You can save photos and replays of your record laps and races. You can then share these with your friends and use them to provide proof of your racing prowess, or just use it to brag to the world about what a great driver you are. Autolog is a significant part of the experience that will keep you coming back for more, over and over, until you’re top of your friends’ leaderboards.

El33tonline: SHIFT 2 Unleashed boasts a massive line-up of cars to play with from manufacturers such as Audi, Porsche, BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen, with a number of exotics including Lamborghinis, a Bugatti, Aston Martins and of course the Pagani Huayra.

Could you talk a little bit about what goes into negotiating the inclusion of these cars in a game like SHIFT 2 Unleashed, how these manufacturers help you in bringing their cars to virtual life (providing designs, photos, video and ‘visitation rights’), and whether or not they still frown upon having the in-game representation of these cars physically damaged in any way following crashes.

Stephen Viljoen: The licensing and business negotiations of signing licence agreements with these manufacturers are all handled by EA. They have a long-term relationship with most all of these companies and do a stand-up job of getting us the cars that we want to include. Once the licence agreements are in place, we normally work directly with a point person at each manufacturer.

This person then provides us with basically anything and everything that will help us to recreate their cars as accurately as possible in the game. This mostly consists of CADs and stock photos, but they typically also arrange for access to the cars so that we can take highly detailed close-up photos of the cars, record audio, and just get a general ‘feel’ for the cars.

Most manufacturers are not keen on us damaging their virtual cars, but they all understand that this is just how things are. We simulate what happens in real life and it’s obviously completely unrealistic to pretend that you can smash a car head-long into a wall and it doesn’t damage at all or just sustain minor scratches. They’ve finally bought into this mindset (it took some serious selling though!), and this has made our lives much easier.

We still at times get a manufacturer that has a knee-jerk reaction when they see the first screenshots of their damaged cars. During the development we had a significant manufacturer (who will remain nameless) withdraw their license and asked us to remove all their cars from the game, because they weren’t happy with how their cars were damaged. Our response was “Fine, have it your way, we’re not changing the game though.” A few weeks later they came back and asked us to please include their cars again. It’s just a matter of them grasping that we’ve moved beyond what was previously OK (ie, no damage).

They still monitor very closely what we allow to be damaged though. For example, we agreed that at no time will the cockpit ever become compromised and that the driver model will always be presented as ‘safe.’ The rest of the car is fair game though.

El33tonline: With this in mind, what is your take on the inclusion of ‘hundreds of cars’ in a racing game versus ‘merely dozens,’ or even a few core racing machines to focus the game? Is it always good to provide such a wide range of choices, even if any one player may never use or see 95 percent of the cars?

Stephen Viljoen: I think there’s definitely a balance to be had. Variety is normally a good thing, but then it has to actually be variety, not 20 of the same model with just a tiny variation in the front bumper (that most people won’t ever notice) just so you can claim you have ‘X’ hundred cars in your game. Our approach is to provide the player with a few key models from each manufacturer.

As an example, we have a Honda S2000 in the game. We don’t provide all the slight cosmetic model variations that for all intents and purposes are still really the same car. This way we provide the player with around 150 cars where each car is significantly different from each other, either in performance or in manufacturer brand (or both), and therefore worth owning. We don’t count a car as a separate car when the only difference is the paintjob or a bodykit (an approach that all our key competitors ascribe to). If we did that our car count would be around 800.

SHIFT 2 no longer has a limitation on how many cars you can keep in your garage, and you can even have multiples of the same car in case you wish to keep one stock and totally bling the other one up.

El33tonline: Following the release of Need For Speed: SHIFT, what constructive feedback did you get from players and the press and did you use this feedback to improve SHIFT 2 Unleashed? What were the core improvements and additions Slightly Mad Studios wanted to include over and above the original title?

Stephen Viljoen: I think the key area of useful feedback was in regards to the physics. When we created SHIFT, EA was still very unsure about going full-out for a simulation experience, and SHIFT therefore was really just an initial move in that direction. The overwhelming feedback clearly indicated that the community by and large was ready for a ‘proper’ racing simulation, not a ‘semi-sim.’

We still accommodate the player who wants to ‘take it easy’ by providing plenty of assists and simpler driving models. We now have an ‘Elite’ mode though that strips away all the hand-holding, provides a fully detailed damage model (you can even break the wheels off the car), and fully exposes the proper racing physics to the player. There’s an extensive visual telemetry system that provides the player with a detailed real-time breakdown of everything that’s happening with the car (tyre heat, shock travel, g-forces, and so forth).

There’s a fully-featured tuning system where you can tweak the car to your heart’s content and then take it out for a test-drive to try out your new settings. You can even change the setup while out on the track and immediately try the changes. These and many more features helps to truly immerse the player in a proper multi-dimensional racing experience.

El33tonline: Gamers love numbers when discussing highly anticipated titles, and it feels as though it’s been a while since polygon counts for cars have been discussed for any recent racing game. Are you able to tell us the raw polygon counts for the cars of SHIFT 2 Unleashed, and what these number are like in-game? Also, are you able to tell us what the ‘polygon budget’ for any one scene in a circuit is (i.e. what we’ll be seeing as we hurtle down the track)?

Stephen Viljoen: We’ve sort of ‘lost count’ of the polygons. Other areas such as fill rate, post-processing, HDR [High Dynamic Range], and so forth have now become the key areas when rendering a next-gen scene. The actual polygon count doesn’t really make that much of a difference anymore, unless you go completely bonkers of course and try to push billions of polygons per frame, which will just kill all performance. That’s why you don’t really see it discussed anymore, and the companies that do make a big deal of it is really just blowing smoke.

To illustrate the point - SHIFT 2 features a completely new render engine. We now feature, amongst other things, night racing. Yes, many games have done ‘night racing’ before, including some of our own previous titles, but what we’ve done with SHIFT 2 is take night racing to a whole new level where it is truly the frightening experience that it can be in real life. Driving along, having another car pull up behind you, lighting up the inside of the car’s cockpit, and seeing the shadow of your car playing against a barrier ahead is quite something.

When you’ve whacked a barrier and broken your headlights, you’ll find yourself in pitch-black night. Suddenly what was your opponent a minute ago now becomes your only ally, as the only way you can find your way around the track and actually finish the race is by the light of his brake lights. This can totally change the play dynamics and adds a whole new level of immersion to racing. Providing the player with this sort of experience can only be done by pushing next-gen rendering technologies, not by adding more polygons.

Sincere thanks again to Stephen Viljoen for taking the time out of his extremely busy schedule (during the run-up to the release of SHIFT 2 Unleashed, no less!) to answer our questions! And for providing such rich answers!

You can find the first part of this interview over here, and definitely look forward to playing SHIFT 2 Unleashed!