Announcing Blur!

Meet our brand new racer!

Finally, we can talk about Blur! It seems like ages since we started on this one, and it's a great relief to finally tell you guys what we're working on! If you're a long time Bizarre community member you're probably used to these periods of relative silence from the studio - we're running dark whilst everybody in the building is fully heads down on the next big thing. We've been working hard on this new racer pretty much as soon as we finished up on PGR4, joining forces with Activision on the way. It's been a long year or so!

So what is Blur? Well, it's a completely different racing experience to the games we've done before. Don't be expecting a continuation of the simulation franchise- we wanted our next game to push the racing genre into bold new territory. We wanted to do something exciting, original and different.

That being said, Bizarre does have a set of core strengths - things like licensed cars, realistic environments, detailed physics and driving model, great graphics, exciting handling , awesome sound, etc. etc. We wanted to stick to these strengths with Blur.

Overall, we felt that the future of the racing genre was less about serious and technical precision, and more about the fun and excitement of racing, especially as a social experience with friends. Blur is all about really intense wheel-to-wheel racing, where every second of every race is an adrenaline-filled experience. For proof of this, look no further than the number of cars we have on track. Twenty cars, all racing together simultaneously!

It's not just mindless speed though - Bizarre is introducing a certain element of strategy on-track. We want the best players to be more than those who have learned the routes and memorised every apex. Blur introduces something surprising to the mix in this regard - power-ups.

Yes, the rumours are true. Blur has pickups on-track giving you the opportunity to blast opponents out of the way in the corners, or boost past them on the straights. There's a fundamental difference to how we're handling this though - contrary to rumours, there's no machine guns strapped to cars! Our power-ups have a big element of skill to them - if you know what you're doing then you'll get much more out of them. They augment your racing abilities, rather than being one-hit wonders like you might see in other games. Of course we'll elaborate on this over the next few weeks.

Another huge new feature we've introduced into Blur is a storyline. Yeah, I know what you're thinking... but wait. We don't have semi-naked women or z-list celebrities in our game. We wanted all the good bits of a storyline (strong characterisation, accessibility, player progression, opponent personalities, etc.) without any of the cheese. What we're talking about is a racing-focused premise rather than some elaborate tale - a reason to race.

The way we hope to achieve all of this in Blur is to deliver the storyline in a unique way. Whilst we do have minimal "establishing" cutscenes in the game, the bulk of our storyline is delivered through an integrated social network interface. All of the AI characters are members of this network, and they challenge you to races by sending messages. The social network is absolutely integral to Blur, and extends way beyond the game itself - it's fundamentally how everything fits together - but again we'll go into more detail in the next few weeks.

Multiplayer is big in Blur, as you'd expect from us. We'll support 20 players simultaneously over Xbox Live and PSN. There's also 4-player local split-screen support. The social network interface is also mirrored in multiplayer, so you can play against and communicate with AI or your friends using the same UI.

There's so much more to talk about in Blur. And so much more to show - the stuff you're seeing now is really early pre-Alpha stuff, and each day something new goes in! We want to tell you about the new car set, the new (very varied!) environments, the team racing game modes, Custom Groups, etc. etc. Everything will be explained in time!

Blur is planned to launch in fall '09 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. In the meantime, now that the gag has been removed we'll be posting more Studio Updates soon! :) Watch this space!