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Motor City
What was this track based on?
Scott: Motor City (as the name suggests) was based on Detroit. That doesn't necessarily mean that we were trying to copy the city verbatim. As ever with Burnout, we're always looking to get a "flavour" of the cities, rather than street-for-street translations.
Did you have many stylistic influences when making the art for this track?
Scott: In the case of Motor City, hell yes! As standard practice, we collated hundreds, possibly thousands, of reference images from the Internet, looking for street scenes that we could emulate, or interesting-looking buildings that we could add to the tracks.
(Left) The pre-production Motor City track, and (Right) the same area from Burnout 360.
As a rule, we don't like making the same style of games over and over! So we adopted a new art-style, with a view to making the world less colourful and more visually rich. For Motor City, this meant making the track less like a homage to Detroit, and more like the common conception of Detroit, as seen in movies. We watched a lot of films, took a lot of screenshots, and came up with a completely different art-style.
There are some very obvious nods and winks to the various film resources we used. Some of the more astute gamers may recognise Robocop's steel mill, for example, or the car park jump from "Exit Wounds". However, our main point of inspiration was "Gone in 60 Seconds".
Wasn't that set in LA?
Scott: Yes I know, but bear with me!
The most sincere form of flattery!
Those who saw the movie may realise that its third act just screams Burnout. There's a freeway chase, a section through a warehouse district, a bit where they drive a muscle car through some docks, lots of jumps and crashes throughout, and then there's that alleyway chase; that implausibly-long sequence where every time the car went from one alley to the next meant near-certain death by one of the disproportionate number of buses that operated in the cross traffic! This became our focal point in Motor City: "Do the alleyway sequence from 60 Seconds". We put in a kilometre of alleyway into the track, we gave the colours of the world a yellow bias, we exaggerated the size of the cross traffic roads and filled them with buses to extend that critical moment for as long as possible, and suddenly Burnout was cool again!
What makes the gameplay individual on this track??
Scott: It's a little known fact, but Motor City and Eternal City were the first two tracks produced for Burnout Revenge. Pretty much on the first day of pre-production, the designers gave us a document, detailing all the gameplay elements that they wanted in the tracks, and basically left us to it. They gave us a wish-list of ramps, split routes, hard-stops and choke-points, and we didn't even know if any of this was going to work at 200mph! While the other tracks were in development, Motor City and Eternal City were fast-tracked to prove our gameplay ideas. For each track, we had one artist entirely owning the gameplay, without the retrospective knowledge of ever producing Revenge-style gameplay before. As a result, the tracks play in completely different ways, despite being made from the same list of gameplay elements.
Motor City was basically a textbook approach to world design. At any one point in the track, the player is always presented with three routes, one beside the other; the main route where you dodge and check traffic, the ramp route where you leap over things, and the tunnel route where you drive through an underpass or a warehouse.
Ramps on the left, pillars in the middle, loading bays on the right
Areas like the docks in the long course, or the factory in the short course are very obvious examples of this. The Burnout Revenge gameplay is always there, and always visible.
What about the Crash course?
Richard: Motor City was the first Crash course we built, and served as a test bed for the other three which we built. As such it presented us with a lot of challenges during its construction, and taught us a lot of things NOT to do, as well as showing us all the cool things we could do when freed from the confines of the race tracks.
Memorable moments in the Motor City crash course are the car park jump, which sits in the most engine intensive location in the ENTIRE GAME! A dog leg so large that the route is as wide as track is long! (well almost anyway!).
Were there any challenges in creating this track, given the restrictions in hardware?
Scott: Absolutely. No matter what track we're making, we always have the same challenge: "How do we make this look good with our limitations"?
Richard: The tracks and the Crash courses have a lot of common limitations, and also their own ones.
In the Motor City Crash course, the area around the car park was a struggle because of the elevated freeway which went in a huge dog leg, meaning a huge area to fill with detail, and which meant we had to play some very clever tricks to disguise the draw distance as the width of the track meant we couldn't draw as far.
The ship jump (Xbox360 Exclusive) was also a challenge, to stop the player seeing behind any of the scenery, as they are right on the edge of the world, and flying very high. People often forget that a game world is like a movie set, where a lot of the scenery is in fact just a façade!
Are there any cool things that we should look for? Any tips or tricks?
Scott: I can't imagine that I could point out any tricks that everyone hasn't found out already, but I'll give it a go.
My favourite trick in Motor City is with the loading bay ramps in the alleyway. For the most part, they seem pretty pointless, but if you have an opponent beside you, drive up the ramp and pull sideways in mid air, thus landing on your enemy for an instant vertical takedown. It's completely repeatable, and always annoys the n00bs on Xbox Live!
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