s part of our continuing coverage of Xbox Summit 2005, we went to Microsoft Game Studios in Japan and interviewed Nick Davies, design manager on Project Gotham Racing 3 for Xbox 360. We got the full scoop about what it’s like to develop for the 360, the latest info on the all-new Gotham TV on Xbox Live, and how the development team was finally able to get racing crowds to come alive. We also have a slew of screenshots and a new trailer. To see Microsoft’s presentation at Xbox Summit 2005 of Project Gotham Racing 3, click here.

Game Informer: So how long has PGR3 been in development?

Nick Davies: Just over 18 months now.

GI: How are you guys liking the new hardware?

ND: Well, we’ve had a lot of support from Microsoft. Being in at the start we’ve obviously got an advantage. There’s obviously a learning curve with the new console, but you’ve seen the video. We’re getting our heads around it quite quickly.

GI: What’s you favorite thing about the new hardware?

ND: I think it’s the way it all fits together with Xbox Live. Obviously the power’s there. You can see we can create amazing graphics and amazing sound, but I think having Xbox Live and the features of that we really can build a Gotham 3 community so that everyone can come together and race together. Everyone can watch each other. It’s not like a game. It’s like a TV channel that you can join in with and Gotham is becoming like a real sport rather than just a video game.

Nick Davies 

GI: Could you give me the history of the franchise since it began with Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast?

ND: Well, it really starts with PGR, which is the first in this franchise. That was when it launched for Xbox back in 2001. It’s a continuous process. We’ve been researching cities and cars and refining the gameplay since then. So each iteration we kind of push each piece of hardware to the maximum. And now we’ve got our hands on 360 so we’re going to push it as hard as we can.

GI: How far do you think you guys are pushing it right now?

ND: It’s hard to say. It looks really good. We’re pushing it as hard as we can push it at the moment. Obviously, we learn new skill and new tools and new ways top work it every day. So we can some more out of it I’m sure.

GI: So you think, just ballparking it percentage-wise how much…

ND: I’d hate to say because the programmers would kill me if I go back and tell you it’s 50% or it’s 75%. All I know is it’s looking pretty lifelike and pretty realistic. So I think we’re pushing it pretty hard.

GI: How did Microsoft find you guys back in the day?

ND: I don’t know how they found us, but we did the Formula 1 games back in ’97 so we had a sort of history and pedigree with racing games after doing games on other consoles before. So I think we’re proven in that area and they were looking for a racing games so it came together quite nicely.

GI: Can you go into a little bit more detail on the Gotham TV?

ND: Yeah, it’s really exciting for us. We’ve got Xbox Live. Obviously, that’s a great feature on Xbox 360, and we want a way of basically bringing together the online and the offline components into one kind of package. So it was our way of taking a game and making it look not like a game, but like a TV station that everyone’s used to. So we’re going to have channels where you can view the best players in the world on them. You can view the races live or you can view highlights and replays of their races. We’ll have channels where you can catch up on what your friends are doing. Channels where you can watch replays of your own races.

Overriding that we’ll have a live news ticker that you’d see on a 24 hour sports channel basically updating you on relevant information about what’s going on in the game. So if one of the great players comes online while you’re offline and he sets a new lap record we’ll tell you across the bottom of the screen. You press a button and it takes you straight to that lap and you can dive straight in and watch him. Or if he’s racing someone or there’s a big race a grudge match between the first and second place leaders on the leader board we’ll tell you that’s going on. You press a button and we can take you straight there.

GI: Say I want to see how you’re racing. Do you have to send me…

ND: No, it’s all dealt with behind the scenes. We’ll give you the relevant information that you would want to see. So we’ll give you all the information about the top players or your friends.  Then we’ll just feed that information to you. If you don’t want to watch it you just carry on with what you were doing. If it interests you, press a button it takes you straight in there.

GI: So it would just pick your highlight for you? It wouldn’t even ask you or anything like that?

ND: You’ll have your friends list or your buddy list online so that’s the way we can access and give you information on that. And also it will track the top players. It will track when someone beats a lap record on a particular course or someone challenges a top player. It’s really keeping it relevant to you. We don’t want to flood you with information that someone just posted the 85th best time on the lap that is no interest to most gamers. But is someone is beating the lap record we’ll give you that information. You don’t have to go and search for it. We’ll give the information to you.

You can alsmost smell the burning rubber

GI: Say someone is not really good at the game and doesn’t want to share their information  with other people?

ND: Well, you can share it with your friends. Everyone can laugh along with their friends. I don’t think we’ve got a way of blocking that so far. I don’t think watching someone play particularly badly is going to be one of the highlights we’ll be showing.

GI: My friends are mean. They want to make fun of me so they’ll record it.

ND: Well, you can take them off your friends list. (laughs)

GI: Is it running in 720p, 1080i?

ND: 720p yeah. I’ve seen it running at the moment. I’ll have to double check with the technical guys on that.

[Update from Microsoft: 720p is confirmed.]

GI: The video you demonstrated yesterday of Project Gotham TV had different channels, things like that. Is that how it’s going to look?

ND: That’s not the final design. We’re still working on the kind of presentation of it. That’s how it will work. We’ll have different camera angles that you can pick from heli-cam, or a camera in the crowd, or a particularly exiting corner. And you can choose where you want to watch the races from. But the final design presentation we’re still working on that.

GI: Now you said yesterday that you can view your own replays from absolutely anywhere on the course?

ND: Pretty much anywhere. We’re still working on all the camera angles, but we’ll have the most important corners on the course, and in the most important grandstands, and obviously tracking via heli-cam, and in-car cams. But actually being able to show it from every angle we’ll have to wait and see.

GI: How many total tracks are you guys going to have?

ND: A lot of tracks. We’re not releasing the final amount yet because we haven’t released all of the names of the cities that we have in. So we’ve told you Tokyo and we’ve told you New York. But with the route creator we’ve put in there there’s literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of tracks. You can design your own. So if you don’t like the ones we’ve created… You should like the ones we’ve created. Then you can just go out there and build your own tracks.

GI: Could you explain a little more about how the tournament structure will work?

ND: Yeah, we’re going to have organized tournaments as well as obviously the PGR2 people organize their own tournaments online within their own communities. But we’re going to have organized Gotham tournaments that everyone can join in and we’ll whittle that down to knockout tournaments and then we’ll have some overall winners. And we’ll still have races in Europe, races in Japan, races in America because of the time differences. We don’t want people staying up till 4:30 AM to take on someone across the other side of the world. If they want to they can do that.

GI: How often do you guys keep updating your website with news and leaks of artwork?

ND: There’s no regular pattern for it, but it seems to be kind of a weekly basis when we’ve got something good to tell. Which, at the moment we’ve got such amazing things to show you that it’ll be very frequent updates. People really like it.

GI: I was one of the doubters about the city screenshot.

ND: Oh shame on you.

GI: I was like, “That’s crazy.” And then sure enough you guys posted the wire frame and I was like, “Holy crap!”

The proof is in the wireframe

ND: Ben, our website guy - I think his inbox just went “boom” in about three seconds. That’s the kind of thing we want to show. We’re proud of what we’re doing. We want to show everyone even though we’re not that advanced yet, we’re not actually showing the final piece of software, but we keep you updated and keep your mouths watering. People seem to like it.

GI: How many total racers online are you going to be able to support?

ND: We haven’t confirmed on a figure yet. There’ll be at least as many as Gotham 2 and hopefully more. In terms of watching online races the sky’s the limit. Everyone in the Gotham community can watch you race as they see fit.

[Update from Microsoft: Although we haven’t announced the total amount of players that can race together online, we know that Bizarre Creations is shooting for more than eight.]

GI: Are you going to have any MC or VJ guy that’s going to be…

ND: We’ll have some trackside commentary for each race situated kind of within the crowd. Not in-car commentary that you might be used to from some Formula 1 game, but we’ll have people commentating and we’ll have the crowd obviously cheering, you know? And jumping out of the way when you try and crash into them. But there’ll be no specific DJ on there.

GI: You guys are going to utilize the same kind of custom soundtracks that you guys have done before?  And what about the regular soundtrack.

ND: The actual soundtrack hasn’t been fully decided yet with licensing I imagine. Off the top of my head I’m sure it’s absolute that we’re using custom soundtracks, but I think 360’s supporting custom soundtracks almost across the board. That’ll be the standard.

[Update from Microsoft: It’s something we’d like to support, and will do our best to do so. However we can’t guarantee it as time is really tight to get all of our features in now!]

GI: That was one of my favorite things about 2 is that I could listen to the same music in PGR that I could listen to in my car.

ND: Yeah. Well we think that the actual licensed music for PGR 3 will be so good you won’t need to have custom soundtracks.  We took a lot of time looking at the tracks this time around. It’s hard choosing stuff that appeals across the globe rather than one particular area. It’s obviously quite difficult. We’ve got a good selection of things that we think people will like.

GI: Anything that you took out of PGR 2 that won’t be in PGR 3?

ND: We’ve just surpassed everything that’s in 2. We’ve just added. In 2 we had a great game but it was a little bit clinical. It was very good looking, but the streets were very clinical looking. So we’ve added spectators and race furniture to make each race feel like an absolute racing event rather than just racing around some empty streets. So we’ve really given some atmosphere. The spectators look great. They’re all fully motion captured and animated and they’re all unique as well. Not just cardboard cutouts that you see in other games.

Down in front!

GI: How many polygons are you guys using on the actual spectators?

ND: I don’t have a figure on that.

[Update from Microsoft: Bizarre Creations is working toward creating a gaming experience unlike any seen before.  In that order, Bizarre purchased their own motion capture studio to create lifelike crowd responses and action.  In PGR 3 the crowds move and react to the action they are seeing unfold in front of them like never before, which creates a much more realistic experience for the gamer.]

GI: Just because you were throwing out numbers yesterday.

ND: Yeah, we’ve got numbers on the cars. The cars are way up in polys on the outside and the inside and the cities. Obviously you’ve seen the wire frames. On the individual crowd animations? Not as many as the car, but they still move realistically, and they jump out of the way and do this and point and cheer and shout so it looks realistic. But you’re zooming past so fast you don’t have time to count the polys.

GI: This is true. You can’t hit the spectators though?

ND: No, but if your barrier’s here and some guy’s standing here if you jump and hit the barrier he’ll jump back in fear. So they do react to what you do. If you overtake someone in a particularly cool move they’ll cheer and whoop you on and throw their hands in the air. But they’ll all do it differently. It’s not just like everyone jump up and does a wave. They’ve all got individual movements.

GI: Now how about the game’s structure? Playing through the game, any additions that you guys have done?

ND: It’s not additions. It’s more we’ve opened it up. Whereas in Gotham 2 you have car classes and you moved up one by one and we held your hand all the way through the game. This time it’s completely open. You can, if you particularly like street races you can just finish the street racing championships first or if you like a particular car you can play with one car all the way through if you want or you can choose one of the 80 odd different cars you want to race with. It’s totally up to how you play it. It’s really, it’s like there were so many games where you buy it and you get halfway through and you’re stuck and you can’t finish it and you think well, we’ve put a lot of effort into making these cities and all of these tracks look good. We want everyone to be able to see them. So really if you bought the game you can play anywhere that you want to.

GI: Those are my favorites though. So can you go into more details on how you’ve tweaked the kudos thing? Can people still… there was a guy at work who used to kind of cheat a little bit.

ND: We’ve refined the whole kudos system so where we had power slides before we have variations of power slides. We’re really focusing it so that we can pick out the really great players from the good players. We really can get an idea of who is the best on there. So it’s a constant refinement of that system. More detail. We’re actually taking more measurements of what people are doing so we can actually say that’s a really great power slide as opposed to just a good power slide or an average power slide or, in my case, a really really poor power slide (laughs). 

Because you can play any way you like people are going to get massive kudos points by not really cheating but they can still do that if they want to. But we’ve really refined it so we’ve got the balance between speed and style as perfect as we can get it. So you won’t just drive around fast and you won’t just drive around stylishly. We’re just really measuring more detail and how far, how fast, what position you were in when you were taking this moves on. Were you in risky situations? We really can show who the great players are. We don’t want people to speed around around around and around. Just racing to the finish line. That’s not what Kudos is about. It’s about speed and style.

GI: Would freaking out the crowd a little bit, like slide in and get really close…

ND: Yeah, if you get really close they’ll step back. If you hit it they’ll be jumping back for their lives.

GI: Would that give you more Kudos?

ND: Not specifically right to the crowd but, you know, if you get right up to the barrier then it’s stylish thing to do. So yeah.

GI: What are you guys thinking about as far as Marketplace items?

ND: We’re really concentrating on just getting this finished and shipped out. Obviously the potential’s there for downloadable content. We used it in Gotham 2. It was very popular. But we haven’t got any plans we can really share on what we’re going to do with the downloadable marketplace. But it’s there to be used so we’ll announce something in due course. But it’s really focused on getting this ready, getting this shipped and get this pushed out.

GI: What about customizing your vehicle?

ND: We’re not having customized vehicles. You can change the coolers like you would do with factory standards in a showroom, but the customization in this isn’t all about making your car look different. It’s about making the game play differently, about having different race types, it’s about creating your own route. We think players will get a lot more from creating their own tracks than they will from just adding a slightly shinier paint job or a spoiler or some rims here and there. Plus these cars that we’ve got are really beautiful looking. We don’t want to destroy them.

GI: What do you think the vibe is about the game here in Japan?

ND: It’s been really good so far. It went down really well yesterday. The video really grabbed people so we’re really pleased about that. Seeing it on the big screen was fantastic even though it was slightly bright and scary to me. But yeah it’s gone down really well. Not that it’s surprising. It looks great. But people seem to be really taken with it. So I think it’s showing off it’s... it really does look next gen. It’s one of those titles that does look like a next-gen title and that is impressing people.

GI: Do play other racing games?

ND: We play all of them. I’m a big fan of Burnout. Obviously we play every game we can get our hands on. It’s all good research. It’s nice to see different directions people are taking. Obviously there’s a lot of racing games out there. You’ve got Gran Turismo for the simulation. You’ve got Burnout for your pure arcade and your crash. And you’ve got some more in between the two. I think we’re often..

GI: Do you guys share technology with the Forza team or Rally Sport? Do you guys talk?

ND: We talk to everyone through Microsoft. We all talk and we all have experience of working with friends on different teams. In terms of sharing we’ve got our own tricks and secrets we’d like to keep to ourselves. We don’t have conferences where we all swap design notes. But we all talk.

GI: How far along is the game in development right now?

ND: Different cities are at different stages, but I think we’re sort of looking around sort of 65%-70%. What you see in Tokyo is pretty much there and pretty much lifelike and people recognize the streets. But yeah so I figure 65% to 70%. When you’ve got so many different cities and cars it’s difficult to say where you are with the progress.

GI: How many people are on the team?

ND: Artist-wise, there’s 35-plus artists. We did some outsourcing as well for some work. We just hit a hundred people in-house. I think last week we got out hundredth person. We’ve got more than one team working on it at the moment so it’s around the fifty mark at least.

GI: What’s your favorite thing about the game?

ND: I think so far it’s the route creator. That’s the thing that’s kind of exciting. We can try and take on the Bizarre designers and see if we can beat their tracks. But it really does mean it’s got unlimited lifespan. You can create a track. If you like it, you can show it with your friends online. Everyone can race on it. It really does open it up. It really makes Gotham play how you want it to be.

GI: So speaking of playing it, when’s it going to be playable?

ND: We’ll let you know soon. As soon as we’ve got a build to show you then we’ll show it.

GI: Will it be playable at X05 or will we see more at the Tokyo Game Show?

ND: We’re not sure. Couldn’t say. Not that we don’t think it will be playable – I just don’t have the schedule of where we are. We’re working night and day to get the game finished and ready for release.  Yeah, I think we’ll have some more to show at Tokyo. You have to wait and see.