Need For Speed The Run Jason DeLong Interview

Need for Speed The Run is the first racing title from EA Black Box in two years: the Vancouver studio handed over the reins of the series to Criterion Games for last year’s smash-hit Hot Pursuit.

In The Run, players step into the shoes of marked man Jack, who must race from San Francisco to New York in order to get his life back. In between, he’ll face off against 200 rival racers, the police forces of America and some deadly natural disasters.

The Run is out on November 18th (and you can read more coverage online) and we sat down with executive producer Jason DeLong to chat about the car selection, the astonishing amount of road, using the Frostbite 2 engine and what having a storyline has done to shape the game.

Just to clarify for those who may not be so in-the-know, there’s been some rumours about the possibly exceptional amount of track. Can you just clear that up for us?
The track distance in The Run clocks in at around 300 kilometres, which…to put it into context for people who don’t know how much is in a normal game, is over three times as much track as we’ve seen in any previous Need for Speed game. That was really important because we wanted to make sure we were really conveying the sense of this journey across the US, this race. The easy way out would have been to do five cities – major iconic cities across the States – and say “that’s the Run” and for us, it was more about…when you do this type of trip it’s actually about the journey in between those cities, which is the most important part. We wanted to make sure we were really conveying the broad scope of the terrain and variety of the terrain you’re going to see in doing a drive like that.

The Need for Speed games always feature a lot of high-powered supercars. What are some of the biggest new additions to the line-up in The Run?
We got a couple of really new ones actually. We have the Lamborghini Aventador which is the brand new Lamborghini which was just announced very recently, it’s the first time it’s been in a game; we can’t even unveil this yet because it hasn’t been unveiled publicly but the 2012 Porsche 911 is going to feature in our game as well. It’s actually going to be unveiled in September, I believe, officially and we can start showing it off in game as well. The great thing about our cars is that we’ve got a really great variety of cars from classic muscle cars to very modern exotic supercars like you said. We wanted to make sure each car had a unique personality so you won’t really see the stock versions of almost any car in The Run…for example, we have the BMW M3, but we have the BMW M3 GTS; or, you know, the Ford Mustang, instead of just having the GT 500 we have the GT 500 Super Snake, so each one has its unique personality to it.

Where did the decision come from to branch out into having a dedicated storyline? In racing games they’re quite a rare thing.
I think if you look back at the Black Box Need for Speeds of the past – Underground and Most Wanted – people sort of forget that those actually did have stories in them. I would argue that they probably weren’t as effective and it was really based on the technology at the time. You couldn’t have a great-looking character ad a great looking car at the same time in our previous engine so…we had to film actors and they talked to the camera and tried to make it feel like you were involved in the story. It just wasn’t effective quite frankly and in the end we wanted to make sure we were able to tell a story in a way people are now accustomed to in terms of gaming today.

By going to Frostbite 2 and having the ability to have great-looking characters and great-looking environments and great looking cars all at the same time, we feel we can finally tell a story in the way we want to tell it. That’s the main motivation.

You touched on environments there. It seems they play an increasingly important role in this game. Can you talk about what we can expect from the environments?
Sure. First of all, the variety of the terrain, as I mentioned before, is what we’re really excited about. You start in San Francisco, so we have you in city centres, but we also have the rolling hills of California and you get into the deserts of Nevada and the forests and the hills of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains and the snow…it really does feel like you’re going on this immense journey.

In addition to the variety you see across the country you’ll also see the weather conditions and how they affect you: so you’re gonna see rain, you’re gonna see lightning, you’re gonna see some blowing snow, you’re gonna see dust storms that obscure your vision, making races more challenging. The fact that we’ve got this great variety of environments allows us to also put in a variety of gameplay that affects them as well.

Also, the way we have races scheduled: some are wide-open highway battles where there’s twelve of you trying to get to the front of the pack and in other places it will be more intimate, just one-on-one battles where the cops are involved.

It’s nice that we can have the gameplay variety, the weather variety and the terrain variety all together just really makes this journey feel as epic as it really is.

TW: We saw in the gameplay footage yesterday the avalanche at the end. Is that quite a regular thing, epic moments like that?
I wouldn’t say it’s a regular thing, but we definitely want to have these memorable moments throughout the game, signature pieces. Where the environment plays into it…I would say less than 10% where we have epic action like that. We have several planned for the game but it’s not the norm. It’s about those memorable moments…

JB: You mentioned Frostbite 2, which everyone connects to Battlefield 3. How did Frostbite end up being considered and used for The Run and what are the advantages?
Frostbite is an incredible engine…when we set out, first of all, Black Box was given time to create The Run. In the past we had to create a Need for Speed every year so we weren’t able to really invest in our technology and to advance it to the level we wanted to. When we knew we had the time to focus on The Run technology was one of the things looked at: do we create an engine ourselves, do we borrow Criterion’s engine, do we use DICE’s engine…there was a fairly big search of technology for what we wanted to do and in the end Frostbite was the clear favourite in terms of the story e wanted to tell, the game we wanted to make.

We partnered with the people at DICE to get our road tool, our racing physics and our racing engine into Frostbite 2 to create this uber engine which provides us with things like, obviously, great world destruction – avalanche levels, which we’ve never been able to do effectively before – and it allows us to get the character out of the car once in a while for storytelling.

On a less consumer-facing side it’s also a great artist’s content tool. We were able to create 300km of track because we could see it so quickly. We could change something and see it an hour later and see what to improve and make better as opposed to days of old where it would take a day or a couple of days.

Frostbite is an amazing engine which allowed us to really iterate very quickly.

Coming onto competitive multiplayer, Autolog is the big thing that came in last year. Are there enhancements to it this year?
Yeah. Autolog plays a big part in our game. We’ve got some traditional challenges, event-by-event Autolog like in Hot Pursuit and Shift, but we also put Autolog into the career. It’s not just about getting across the country and finishing the story; it’s also about getting ahead of your friends. The idea is that with every stage you’re passing we know second to second how you compare to your closest friend on that race and it’s displayed for you on the HUD so you know if you’re ahead or behind in the race across the country. Maybe you got to Chicago first in the story but maybe you’re 3 minutes behind your friend so maybe you wanna try it again.

It’s really cool because we’re seeing from playing it back in Vancouver that it makes the journey and the race much more personal: we’ve got 200 AI opponents that we’ve put in the game but really at the end of the day you’re actually facing your five to ten friends on your friends list, trying to race them across the country, so it makes the single player journey less lonely and that’s pretty cool.

Can you talk about how the game plays out for a novice person coming to the franchise but also for the Need for Speed veterans?
We’ve got a couple of things really. One thing is our handling model, our physics model: we wanted to make sure we were delivering a really believable physics system. We want the cars to behave the way you believe they would behave, so it’s definitely not an arcade racer – you can’t execute a perfect drift around every corner – but it’s not a simulation, something like the Shift franchise. We’re somewhere in the middle where the novice player can pick it up and play and finish and do well but there’s definitely mastery required to get the perfect times you want to get so the Need for Speed hardcore I think they’ll be really happy with where we landed on our physics model.

On the other side in the career mode we actually have difficulty levels this year. You can play on Easy up to Impossible: Easy difficulty is really about the AI being more forgiving. We have a rewind mechanic in the game this year when you pass checkpoints: if you miss a corner or don’t quite make it you can choose to rewind or if you wreck you rewind, and time cuts back to where you were at that checkpoint. The number of rewinds that are available for use varies based on the difficulty as well.

How does that integrate with the social factors of comparing times, difficulty levels and things like that?
We have all that in the Speedwall so we know how many rewinds were used and things like that.

What can we expect from the multiplayer?
We’re not really talking about the multiplayer right now, but in another month or so…people will be happy though, we’re pretty excited.

How did it work handing over the reins to Criterion and then taking them back?
It was great! We were grateful to have the time to spend over two years focusing on the product and we’re a really tight family within the driving group at EA: it’s a brother-sister relationship so there’s a bit of healthy competition but at the same time we’re very collaborative and we work together. We had our team help out on Hot Pursuit and likewise we’ve got Criterion helping us out so it’s a collaborative family environment.

The ability to offset year over year, as we tend to do now, is great for the consumer in the end because we have the time to create a quality product.

In terms of sound design, what have we got in terms of both music and sound effects? Have you been playing around with this at all?
We’ve got an incredible audio team at Black Box and the audio in previous games like Most Wanted has been second-to-none and people can expect more of that in terms of sound effects. Having the power of Frostbite makes it that much better so we’re very pleased with what we’re doing with sound effects.

With music we’re actually doing something really…the idea with The Run we’re trying to tell a cinematic story so just like in a movie you have moments where you have scored music and you have moments where you have licensed music to give you a mood, if you will, that’s what we’re going with. You’ll see when you play the demo here at Gamescom: those are “composed levels”.

We’ve got a composer named Bryan Tyler working with us and he’s done music for Battle: Los Angeles and for Fast Five, so he’s a Hollywood composer and he’s done some amazing work for us. You’re going to hear that intense action cinematic music and we’ve got licensed music which we’ll be talking about later.

We’re being very deliberate with our licensed music this year as well. A lot of games please everybody and try and do lots different but we’re picking something we feel fits the tone of our game and that’s what people are going to hear.

There are moments that have gathered attention, which involve moments outside of the car. Were these rooted in decision to create a cinematic experience?
That’s really what it was. Just to be upfront, the out-of-car stuff is less than 10% of the game overall. We are a racing game, first and foremost.

The out-of-the-car moments were, for us, in aid of telling a story, because that’s we wanted to do: we wanted to make sure we had a character that people wanted to play, they wanted to believe in his emotional predicament and that means sometimes you have to get out the car; you can’t tell the entire story behind the wheel. We do a pretty good job of it but once in a while you have to get out of the car!

The reasoning behind it was a couple of things. One was to tell the story, to keep the action and the intensity up: to not have people play this amazing, adrenaline-filled race and then put the controller down and watch the story – we wanted them to feel like, once in a while they have to get out the car but to keep that adrenalin there.

We tried lots of different things, testing it over the past year and a half. We gave people full control to walk around but at the end of the day it’s like we want people to stay in the movie, if you will, and keep the action moving forwards. We wanted to take away some user control because you didn’t want Jack to get t-boned in Chicago, then get out the car and walk down the street and look for a donut shop – he’s trying to get across the country!

Another reason is that it just forces some standard gameplay mechanics that we wanted to do like car selection, for example. We don’t want people being in the same car for the entire race, you want to upgrade to new cars, so that’s an easy and convenient way to force the player to have his car wrecked in some way and to have to choose a new vehicle.

Are the AI drivers fleshed out in the cinematic experience?
Some of them are. Obviously, no everyone! There are key rivals you have throughout the course of the game and there’s a primary bad guy you see many times across the game so we do flesh some of them out.

The journey is a trans-American run: how does that stitch together over the 300km?
We use the [US] map in the materials we’ve put out so far. It’s the key metaphor for us: you always know where you’re gonna be next and how it’s tracked. We break The Run down into stages so each stage is a certain section. Once in a while we have to jump ahead because, no offense to my friends in North America, but the middle part of the US is pretty boring so we make sure we have interesting places to drive in.

Did you get the opportunity to sample these areas?
That was a huge part. We had one of our guys go through each city with a camera: we had high-def video reference of the entire cross-America journey so that was cool. It’s a romantic ideal too in America, to do the great American road trip and go across the country, so emulating that in the game…I think people are going to be really excited about it.

Maybe for people in the US they’ll get to drive through or near their hometown, which is kind of cool. It’s the first time we’ve done real locations – Need for Speed has always been set in fictional towns and cities and it’s the first time we’ve said “we’re going to go through Yosemite National Park” so the fact we get to recreate these for the first time is really exciting.

How accurate is the modelling?
We want to ensure we’re providing the most fun so it’s definitely “inspired by” rather than faithfully corner-by-corner recreating but we were at E3 with the Chicago level and I demoed the game to people from Chicago and I could see them pointing at the screen saying “I used to live that way!” so I think we did a pretty good job. People from those areas won’t feel we didn’t do it justice.

Does it bother you investing so much time in these areas and people shoot through them at 100mph?
[Laughs] At the end of the day it’s about the experience they go through and it’s every little piece that kind of comes together and we wanted to make sure we were providing people with an experience, not just “we did a straight shot across the country and that was it?” which might feel a little bit hollow. We have multiple ways of visiting the tracks.

How many modes?
The primary mode in The Run is the Sprint mode where you have to pass a certain number of racers within a certain amount of time which is what you’re seeing at Gamescom today. We also have Survival mode with things like avalanches where you have to stay alive, we have Cop Battles, and we have Rival Battles which are smaller one-on-one races.

Are we going to see a NFS The Run trans-Canadian sequel?
[Laughs] As a patriotic Canadian I’d like to see that happen.

We’ll put that in as a Maybe.
We’ll see where we get to in New York and once Jack gets to New York, who knows what adventures are waiting.