Article Intro
Eastern Bay
What was this track based on?
Damien: From the outset, we wanted to create the fastest-feeling Burnout track ever. The visually impressive and chaotic sprawling lanes of the Tokyo highway were the obvious choice to base this course on.
The early dawn lighting scene distinguishes Eastern Bay from the other tracks
Eastern Bay is also the only Burnout Revenge track that constrains itself to one drivable location: the freeway roads. We had no alleyways, warehouses or back roads to drive down - we just wanted to concentrate on creating an insanely fast flowing track that attacked the senses.
What makes the gameplay individual on this particular track?
Damien: As I mentioned, this track did not have the luxury of diverse driving surfaces and locations like our other courses. The entire routes were set on the elevated freeways and slip roads, meaning we were constrained on what elements we could put in the track and had to come up with gameplay and points of interest that used the architecture of the freeway. This, needless to say, offered us a few challenges.
But overall I don't think you will find a more intense feeling of speed and panic in Revenge then when you are driving at 210mph in the oncoming lanes of one of Eastern Bay's tunnels - it's just mental!
We decided to take advantage of the rural setting and offer diversity to the player in our track design by creating drifts and inclines that would otherwise feel out of place in an urban environment.
What were its stylistic influences, and how do these differ from the other tracks?
Damien: We wanted White Mountain to feel clean, crisp, and cold and bring across the element of danger you feel by being in a perilous environment/situation.
We wanted to make the player feel as though they are climbing up the mountain and so we changed the landscape and atmosphere to be less inviting the higher you climbed to hit the danger factor home. Couple this with the intense bloom and whitening of the sky that blinds the player in areas, I think we achieved our goal of creating the feeling of a hazardous environment.
One of Eastern Bay's many tunnels
What were the challenges in creating this track (given restrictions of hardware, game engine, etc.) and how did you get around them?
Damien: Eastern Bay is the longest track in Revenge; it was an absolute mammoth to construct with a dense polygon mesh due to the multi-level roads.
I had more performance and memory issues with Eastern Bay than any other track I worked on. The road layout meant our polygon budget was blown, the long straights in the track caused endless draw distance problems and resulted in us having a lot of textures stored in memory.
We had also pushed our 'backdrop' technology as far as it would go so it was evident we had to optimize the track - luckily we have a very talented team who analyzed every meter of track to find areas where we could claw back performance.
It was a dark period in my life but we managed to get the track running without comprising on the look and aspiration for the track.
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