Black Rock’s Ian Hudson Talks PURE Excitement

Black Rock Studio’s Ian Hudson took time out for a Q&A with Gaming Nexus on the upcoming off-road racing title, PURE. As the Lead Environment Designer on the PURE team, Hudson poured a lot of energy into creating tracks with hightfield technology without sacrificing visuals.

Hudson fields questions on PURE’s powerful ATV customization engine which can be as simple or complex as you can handle. He also covers gameplay issues like ranking and racing online, paying special attention to PURE’s custom tricks.

After working on the ATV Fury franchise we really wanted to add more depth to our trick system. We felt that the trick system that we had inherited with Fury didn’t challenge the player enough or reward them for learning all the tricks on offer. We wanted a system that was very simple to use (as tricks are integral to the game) but would offer immediate reward to more skilled players. What we come up with was a multi-tiered system where all players can easily perform the basic tricks that the characters can do. As they build up their “thrill bar” they can start pulling bigger tricks until they can start pulling the top level tricks. When the player fills their thrill bar they get to see their characters special tricks. It’s these special tricks that are unique to PURE. The other 80% of the tricks in the game are all current tricks that are being done on ATV’s and MX bikes.

You can catch the complete interview with Ian Hudson on Gaming Nexus.