Project Gotham Racing’s Uncertain Future

Perhaps PGR’s future isn’t entirely uncertain – Microsoft owns the right to the IP, and despite developer Bizarre Creations being bought out by Activision we’ll see future PGR titles. But who’s going to be the developer?

“Project Gotham Racing is a signature racing franchise for Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE and we plan to continue the series but we have nothing further to announce,” said Microsoft in a statement.

Whatever the decision may be – and that’s assuming that it hasn’t already been made, as Microsoft was certainly aware of Bizarre’s move ahead of time – Bizarre has discussed many of the changes that they seemingly planned to make with PGR5. Speaking with CVG, lead designer Ged Talbert had this to say:

“Obviously Gotham 4’s about to come out and we’re really happy with it, but behind the scenes we’ve already started ripping our game to pieces. We know where we failed in certain areas; for instance we wanted more trackside damage, more particles and smoke effects, a bigger damage system – and all of these things are being stripped out in a post-mortem. Next time it’s more on the detail. That’s what we think; we think the devil’s in the detail. Anyone can make a good looking game but the top games blow you away by being super-realistic, adding things that you didn’t expect and surprising you.

I personally believe there’s a lot we can do by taking our vehicles we’ve already got and putting them into different, more interesting environments. It doesn’t always mean outside of the city, it just means getting lets say more elevation – somewhere we can finally do big jumps. That’s what we’re looking for in the next game; going to deserts – that kind of stuff. Seeing how they affect the gameplay, see if we can get Kudos working there as well. We could bring cruisers in, we could bring ATV-type bikes in. None of these are definite, but there’s are whole world of things for us to do.”

So, can we expect to see all of this in Bizarre’s new racing title? Or will the new developer of PGR heed these words and include those features in PGR5? We won’t know for at least a couple years, so let’s just sit back and enjoy PGR4 for now.

via 1UP