Article Intro
Central Route
What was the Central Route track based on?
Barry: Hong Kong. The main reason for this was the architecture - there were to be no open vistas of far-off countryside. Central Route was all city. Hong Kong has the awesome juxtaposition of the soaring towers of the financial district with the claustrophobic low-rise back-alleys of the "old town."
Capturing the architecture of Hong Kong
What were its stylistic influences?
Barry: As the lighter responsible for the overall "mood" of the visuals, I immediately wanted to recreate the muggy, overcast, humid atmosphere of Hong Kong and spent a long time creating textures and tweaking lighting values to get the look I was after.
In particular, I aimed to create the feeling that the tops of the skyscrapers were "merging" with the grey sky, and that the upper windows reflected the sun far more than the lower windows. Combined with the bloom, the overall effect I was after was to create a visual contrast between the ground level and the upper atmosphere.
The ground level was lit in dull, muddy, almost dark tones whereas the upper level, using the techniques mentioned above, shone into the heavens. Call it my tribute to the "Celestial Empire" of China. Central Route remains to this day my favourite Burnout Revenge track, mainly because of the visuals and the happy memories I have of working on it.
Lighting the "Celestial Empire"
What makes the gameplay individual on this particular track?
Barry: Without a doubt, the shortcuts on Central Route are a masterclass in elegant, expert Burnout track-building. The exit of each shortcut segues perfectly into the entrance of another, and if you drive it well enough it's possible to drive 80% of the circuit off the main roads. Also memorable is a fantastic drop down from a roofed walkway just tailor-made for aerial takedowns.
Did you have many challenges while creating this track?
Barry: I still think of Central Route as being one of the more graphically advanced Revenge tracks, and in lesser hands it would have been an optimization nightmare. Thankfully I had two supremely gifted modellers (Ming & Mark) to work with who made mincemeat of the track's technical difficulties.
The main obstacle was actually recreating the architecture of such a well known city as Hong Kong from 4,000 miles away. Sure we had photo reference, but we wanted to capture the atmosphere and "mood" of the city too - no easy task given that we had never been there.
One of the art team's many moodboards - reference artwork used to communicate the atmosphere and visual qualities of Central Route
Providence stepped in, however, in the form of Ming - not only an awesome artist, a ridiculously hard worker and a great bloke all-round - but also happened to be born and raised in Hong Kong! Ming swore blind that as an avid gamer and HK resident, he had never seen a more authentic recreation of Hong Kong in a game. That was good enough for me and so my vast ego expanded accordingly.
Any particular favorites on this track?
Barry: I am particularly proud of the "old town" areas of the track - the back-alleys, shops and tenement flats of old Hong Kong. Here at Criterion we always strive to create visuals that do not look computer generated. I love these areas of the track because they are dull, ordinary and "real" - in a non-digital way!
The back-alleys of old Hong Kong in all their glory
There are also quite a few Crash junctions in Central Route...
Richard: The Central Route Crash course was one of the most satisfying to work on, mainly because we gave ourselves time to really plan it with the design team, who would be setting up the Crash events on it. As we did with all the other Crash Courses, we really wanted to add an extra dimension beyond that of the race tracks, by adding multi-level areas with extra vertical and horizontal elements.
I first built a whitebox version of the Crash course to get all the gameplay right. It was almost a miniature track in itself - a small circuit filled with outrageous Crash opportunities (which ultimately was the brief for all the Crash courses except Motor City's, which was a point to point due to its being the prototype.)
I then handed the whitebox to Ming to make it beautiful, which he did a great job of. The brief was to take the artwork created for the Central Route race track, and dress the Crash Course with it, but to add an extra bit of visual "spice" to make it subtly stand apart.
What were the stand-out moments of the Crash course?
Richard: My favourite parts were:
- The quadruple layer raised-freeway section, where you could start on the scaffold high above, and then tumble down over the stepped roadways below. This was also my favourite vista in the game.
- The death-defying hill with obscene amounts of cross traffic and the huge intersection at the bottom, complete with trams criss-crossing all over the place.
- The Underpass entrance, which made for some memorable Crash events.
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