Article Intro
White Mountain
What was the White Mountain track based on?
Damien: The grandeur of the Swiss landscape was our main inspiration for White Mountain.
We were mainly looking to create an out-of-city track with incredible vistas, narrow cliff-edge roads and tight drifting switchbacks. Switzerland lent itself to this perfectly.
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.
White Mountain at a glance
What makes the gameplay individual on this particular track?
Damien: White Mountain was the first Burnout track where the player could knock or be knocked off the track by going "over the edge" in a race. It's a fun feature that again adds that extra element of danger when battling rivals high on the mountain roads.
White Mountain also contains some of the maddest jumps in the whole of Revenge, allowing the player to jump over sheer drops, drive over roof tops and leap through narrow Swiss streets.
What were the challenges in creating this track (given restrictions of hardware, game engine, etc.) and how you got around them.
Damien: When creating White Mountain the main focus from a visual standpoint was the vistas - we wanted them to be as impressive and jaw-dropping as possible. We did not want to just create a track but a mini-environment that felt open and had the illusion of freedom where the player could see locations from different areas of the track and then go drive there.
Creating a constant 360 degree view of the mountains, bridges, tunnels, town, etc. was tough. Juggling the technical constraints of the hardware and balancing polygons and textures was and ongoing battle through the development of this track. It got to the point where even if we added a few trees we would have to re-balance our performance and re-address our budgets; that's how hard we pushed the hardware and our game engine in Revenge.
Do you have any cool "what to look for" tips / tricks?
Damien: Hooking up the perfect drift around the switchbacks driving into the town of White Mountain is something to master if you want to make up time and earn a ridiculous amount of boost. It is best to practice this in Burning Lap mode to perfect the timing before trying it in races where you then have to mater it with more traffic and rivals... its tough, but trust me, it's worth the effort when it all plays out perfectly.
Be proficient in the art of drifting around switchbacks like these and you'll master the track
Also, always try to take the shortcut through the town plaza underneath the clock tower in the forwards variant - there is plenty of chaos to cause by busting through the café tables, and the jump at the end can lead on to bigger and better things as well as earn you enough boost to get you past the marina straight and into the tunnel hill climb.
The entrance to the town plaza shortcut is under the clock tower
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