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Destruction AllStars crashed into public consciousness last June during Sony’s PlayStation 5 event. At the time of its explosive reveal, the Car Fighting title was slated for a retail release around the then upcoming console launch. In October, Sony pumped the brakes, announcing that the title was postponed until February 2. To alleviate the sting, the company said the game will be available at no additional cost to PlayStation Plus subscribers. Hours after its global launch, we spoke with the producer and senior director of Destruction AllStars to learn more about his old-school roots, action on foot, and how he treats cars like guns.
When we spoke, the game was slowly coming to life on the other side of the globe. New Zealand gamers were the first to experience the game, which was an interesting experience for Colin Berry, director of Lucid Games. “It’s my first time launching a game and now there’s someone playing it live on Twitch,” he says. “Which is cool and exciting, but I described it as a little bit annoying.”
Berry has been developing games for decades, working on the Wipeout series, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, and more. He says Geometry Wars 3 was the last game he worked on and most people have heard of, adding, “It was only maybe five or six years ago, but the world was a different place. at the time. He says that the launch of the PlayStation Portable Wipeout Pure game went well, for example, but it essentially took place in a vacuum. “I’ve never seen anyone play outside of E3. Because once it’s out, you don’t see anyone playing your game anymore. Only now you do, and it’s new to me. You are more connected to the people who play your game. ”
Switching to PlayStation Plus
If things go as planned, there will be a lot of people playing Destruction AllStars. Its competitive nature prompted the move from a full-price retail game to a PlayStation Plus version. “The reason is quite simply that online multiplayer games need an audience,” says John McLaughlin, senior producer at Sony. “And to give the game the best possible audience, it was to put it on PlayStation Plus. Decisions about PlayStation Plus are made well in advance, so the earliest possible was to release in February. It’s a move that has helped give titles like Rocket League and Fall Guys a boost, and Sony is hoping for a similar effect with Destruction AllStars.
The delay gave developers time to make sure their online tech was up to par. “There’s a difference between launching when there’s no console out there and having a very small audience and then coming a few months later when you have potentially millions of players,” McLaughlin says. “We spent a lot of time on the back end, working hard and making sure everything went as smoothly as possible.”
Car fight return
Back in the days of PlayStation 1, car fighting games were pretty common. In fact, the console’s original demo disc contained playable demos for Destruction Derby and Twisted Metal. “There were a lot of these games like this, and then they just seemed to dry up,” Berry says. “It’s similar not only with arena car fighting games, but even with action-arcade racing games like the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3 era of Burnout and Split / Second and Blur and those -the.”
Arcade racers still pop out every now and then, but players who just want to smash cars together until they explode have fewer options. And as Berry points out, these games just keep on being fun just because they don’t get much done anymore.
“I remember from the start of our project – I’m not going to check the guy’s name because he wouldn’t be happy – but we have a concept artist who joined us fresh out of school, a really good guy.” , a really talented guy, ”says Berry. “He must be 21, 22 now, so he was 18 when we started the project. One of the references for one of the things we were looking at, I mentioned Burnout, and he said, ‘I’ve played Burnout before. I was like, ‘What? He came out blah blah blah this year ”, and he said,“ Yeah, I was four ”. Right. That explains it. Berry says this exchange made him realize that his team would bring a genre to players who might not have had the chance to experience the satisfaction of crashing virtual cars together.
The twist with AllStars Destruction is that you don’t lose when your car gets destroyed. Instead, your character can continue on foot – which is about as dangerous as it sounds. “In this game, even though it’s a car fight and it’s about smashing into each other and the cars are a very heavy target, the way we think of it, for our mentality is that you are the character and the cars are your weapons. Berry said. “They are disposable. You are supposed to destroy them and cause damage. You are meant to be destroyed. In years past, it’s always been this, “Oh, if I’m destroyed, I lost. Or it’s game over. But it’s not. You shipwreck and get out of the car in an explosion of metal, wheels, and car pieces, and your character comes out and lands on the ground and bang. They go and they go.
Normal wear
Destruction is, obviously, a big part of the game. As cars degrade and take damage, they start to perform less well. In the end, finding the balance for this aspect of driving was a bit tricky. “It’s mostly cosmetic, and it’s something that we deliberately addressed because we could have gone both ways,” Berry says. “Because you can get out of the car at any time, it became a question from the start: ‘If we mess up your handling as soon as you get hit, you’re just going to get out of that car and go get another one. “. And that means we end up with an arena littered with abandoned cars that are of no use to anyone, and that means we would probably have less spectacular wrecks because you take a bit of damage, lose a wheel, then get out. because the car feels really, really wrapped up.
“On the other hand, if we never reflect the damage to the handling and performance of the car, that’s also not going to be quite right, because it’s going to feel a bit out of touch. We tailor it so that since the car has taken pretty extreme damage and is on its last legs, say its last 25 percent health, you can start to feel it pull to one side if it gets damaged. on one side or loses a wheel. . And you start to feel the bite of the throttle on the adaptive triggers and also on the brake, they start to click and you can feel that your car has been damaged. It goes a little slower, but not much slower. It was a conscious choice to want to reflect the damage in the performance of the vehicle, but we don’t want to do it at a level where it becomes too much and players just leave the car behind.
Destruction AllStars is available February 2 for PlayStation 5 through PlayStation Plus.
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