Project CARS Interview With Pete Morrish

At Gamescom we spoke to a lot of different developers, but none quite as mad (in a good way) as Slightly Mad Studios‘ Pete Morrish. Obviously he’d been working a lot and was clearly in need of a break, but he was also extremely funny and passionate about his game. Before being forced to go outside and see the sun again, I stopped him for a few questions about his upcoming game, Project CARS.

 

It’s a game featuring all classes of racing, which the community of 80,000 of helped build from the very beginning. Here’s what Morrish had to say about it.

• So you’ve got eighty to ninety cars, are they divided evenly across the different discipline or is there a focus?

We strive for parity across all of them. We’ve got a number of different motorsports in there and we strove to have parity of content across them. The one exception is karts, because in real life karts are basically karts. There’s basically one of them, a kart for normal karts and a super kart. There’s not like fourteen different kinds of kart, like a Lamborghini kart or anything.

 

• Are you planning on releasing more cars post launch?

Oh, hell yeah. We kind of have a two year road map for the stuff we want to roll out and it’s not just tracks and cars it’s also you kinds of play modes and new ways of continuing to make this the biggest and ‘bestest’ ‘authenticerest’ expression of motorsport so far seen on console and PC.

 

• Will the new cars be paid DLC or free?

It’ll be a mixture. So of course they’ll be some paid for DLC but they’ll be some as well that isn’t.

 

• And what exactly did you mean by other game modes?

We’re working hard to secure licences for different race types and race series around the world. We’ve already announced Indianapolis 500. That won’t be available at launch but will be available via DLC further on down the line. So that sort of thing. Nothing we are ready to talk about yet but it is absolutely along those lines.

 

• But it’ll all be real world events, you won’t be making up a tournament to add into the game?

It’s not a regular kind of ‘here’s four content packs and a season pass’ and that’s it. We’ve thinking bigger better more for as long as we can, and steering it into the market the community is telling us to do.

 

• So this game was once going to be released across the console divide but that has changed, hasn’t it?

It was but when we asked the question to the community where is our time and energy and money best focused and spent they fortunately agreed with us that taking rid of the 360 and PS3 versions and focusing on the PS4 and Xbox One was the way forwards.

 

• Project CARS works with the Oculus Rift, but does it run smoothly on the VR headset?

The problem is I’m so short sighted that I haven’t been able to have a go on the Oculus Rift myself yet. But yes I think it is running smoothly and kind of lag free. On earlier iterations of the dev kit it was running with a bit of noticeable lag but that’s smoothening out at the moment. It’s not just hardware issues but software issues as well, but it’ll get ironed out. From what I can tell with my incredibly short sight it looks good, there is a lot of stuff there.

 

• So you can have it set so the weather on the real track will be the same in the game, in real time. How does that work?

It’s not like we’ve got spy satellites watching what the weather is, but there are certain open internet services that you can poll data on the weather forecast and weather reports. So you can’t monitor the weather on every square foot of the track but you can get a general view. So we plugged into those systems, so as far as technology will allow we can have a realistic representation of what the weather was like. And with our partnership with racers that have used these tracks they can tell us exactly what the track would be like in the weather systems.

 

• So you’ve included the Le Mans 24 Hours, but how many people do you think will actually complete the race?

Probably not that many, but it is an awesome thing. Though I say that and people have. I haven’t but we were approached by some guys running a podcast in the UK that wanted to do a race for charity of some sort. They reached out to me on Twitter and I said I’d help them out. This was on the run up to Le Mans and we hadn’t publicly announced it yet and we knew Oli [Webb] was racing in Le Mans and so did this thing all tying together. We couldn’t actually announce the Le Mans licence over the Le Mans weekend unfortunately, because of lawyers, but only just after.

So we had a special build created for these guys which was Oli’s car, Oli’s helmet. Basically Oli running the Le Mans 24. There were two teams of three I think and they played it for 24 hours, they streamed the whole thing on Twitch. Oli got involved as well, tweeted about it. It was the week after Le Mans 24, and they played the game for 24 hours solid.

 

A few weeks later they came into the office and met Oli and used our Sim-Rig and put in some best times. So at least six people will complete the Le Mans 24 on our game.

 

• Will the vehicles be balanced at all to stop on car being super overpowered compared to the others?

We haven’t really ‘balanced’ them, it doesn’t really work like that. That’s more of a problem in the car collection games that have thousands of the damn things. But within a particular motorsport the cars are balanced, there is a parity of performance over the cars but that’s because of the cars we’ve chosen over any compromise. We’ve kept them real to life.

 

• How many people do you actually have working on this massive and ambitious game?

Well it depends on how you think about it. In the studio we actually have about eight people, that’s our head office in London Bridge. But as a company we have about 110 people spread out across the planet. Our lead vehicle design for instance lives very close to Cologne. We have a vehicle physics dude in Florida. We’ve got vehicle artist in the Reunion Islands, people in the Czech Republic, Australia, Canada; all over the place.

As a development force on the project we have about 80,000 because of the size of the community.

 

• How much have the community gone into effecting the game?

The whole way through, they’re baked into the DNA of the damn thing. The track selection was put to the community and they kind of chose which ones we should do. And the car selection was kind of put to the community. I mean we can’t do everything but one hundred per cent voting but the keenest and biggest decisions were done with those guys. Without the community we couldn’t have got to where we are with the game, it’s a joint effort.

 

Project CARS is scheduled for released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One this November, with a WiiU release slated for some time in 2015.