The release of Destruction All-Stars this week doesn’t just mark the next big PlayStation 5 exclusive – it’s the biggest project yet from Liverpool’s Lucid Games, and the continuation of a legacy that takes in the likes of WipEout, MotorStorm, Destruction Derby, Project Gotham Racing and so much more besides, with the studio being formed from veterans of theUK racing scene. On the eve of its release, we spoke to game director Colin Berry – who previously worked on WipEout, Sonic AllStars Racing Transformed and much more besides – and Sony xDev’s John McLaughlin about their new venture.
A lot of people get excited by the DNA of – your CV is hugely impressive, as is the rest of the teams’. How does that British racing scene DNA manifest itself in there?
Colin Berry: I mean, it’s obviously there. It’s interesting, you know, this is not just myself – there’s probably about a dozen people at Lucid who I’ve worked with it three or four different times before – there’s a good half of the staff who were either at Bizarre or Sony Liverpool or Evolution, or a mix of all three. So like you say we’ve worked on F1, WipEout, MotorStorm, Project Gotham, and I think that that helps. It certainly helped when xDev were looking for a developer to go, hey, what we’re thinking of doing something maybe with the Destruction Derby franchise in that area – which was kind of what the initial genesis of Destruction All-Stars was.
So those conversations are happening between xDev and Lucid: you know, what do you want to do with Destruction Derby? It’s like, well, we don’t want to just do another Destruction Derby game. Or, you know, we can do something now with the tech that we couldn’t do 25 years ago, in terms of damage and in terms of deformation. It’s no longer just texture swaps, we can now do some really cool stuff. xDev were keen to work with Lucid because we have a heritage. We know vehicles, we know how to do arcade racing, we know how to do racing. And even though we’re disrupting our ideas of racing games, it’s still vehicles moving around arenas. We don’t want to make vehicles that are for racing and driving these vehicles, they have to be fun to drive, but they’re in an arena, you’ve got 360 combat, that’s different to F1, that’s different to MotorStorm. But we know how to do the other stuff, so we kind of knew what wouldn’t work straight away! Like we really need cars with hyper arcade-type turning circles.
Destruction AllStars – Gameplay Trailer l PS5 Watch on YouTube
There are games like Rocket League that do that, but we wanted them to still feel like cars, so we started to lean into the handbrake – and those kinds of things are really exaggerated. Having really good physics programmers and really good damage programmers helps – we’re able now to do things that we haven’t been able to do in the past. We wanted to put damage into Wipeout years ago. But we just couldn’t do it with what we had. We couldn’t do what we wanted to do. Now we kind of have more oomph behind us to realise some of the earlier visions for Destruction Derby in terms of damage. And we’re in a modern game setting where it’s like it’s in arenas, it’s multiplayer, it’s online, and it’s smashing into things. And then when you get wrecked, you’re out of the car and you’re on foot and that that area is kind of new to us, but we’ve got people who worked on Assassin’s Creed and games like that. That enables us to then tap into those areas of gameplay and bring all that together.