GRTV: Craig Sullivan on Need for Speed: Rivals

We recently paid a visit to Gothenburg-based Ghost Games, who are handling the next edition of the Need for Speed franchise. We had the chance to ask creative director Craig Sullivan, who also served as creative director on Criterion's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Need for Speed: Most Wanted, about the upcoming game.

"The handling and physics set up in this is very, very realistic, but what we do is we layer on top of that, the ability to drift the car very quickly around the corner and just having a lot of fun within two minutes of picking up the controller. Yes, we always start off with very realistic, very beliveable physics so that these cars can pretty much do anything and it looks right. The we layer on the Criterion special sauce of getting camera right, getting the drifting right, getting the feeling of the braking or the e-braking, jumping or even just the collisions are very, very finely tuned. We know we're not making a simulation. We could make a simulation if we wanted to, but we know in this type of game for these guys who are racing chasing as a cop and a racer, they want it to be something that's very... Easy to get into, but quite hard to master."

"Some game has tried this before, and that's not just driving games. There is the idea of you have to be very much in control of chaos. Cause you have a load of humans together and a load of AI together. So unless you understand exactly what their motivations are and what they're doing, then it can be quite broken to be honest. So we've spent a long time playing AllDrive. We play every day in the office and have playtests where a lot of players are playing together as cops or racers or a mixture of both and really, embracing some of the stuff we learnt from Hot Pursuit also from Most Wanted. Most Wanted was a very open game, it was very broad in its structure. Hot Pursuit, our previous game was a little more linear and a little more controlled. And I think we're taking elements from both games and wrapping them up."

For more on Need for Speed: Rivals - read our preview.