Rush the stage
How the DriveClub developers have redefined the arcade racer in record time
DriveClub’s developers redefine the arcade racer with Onrush
We didn’t think this was supposed to happen anymore. It is barely 18 months since Codemasters announced it had given a new home to the team that made DriveClub at Evolution Studios, which had been shut down by parent company Sony. In just a year-and-a-half, this team has devised a new game concept, built a new engine to power it, and announced it on Sony’s stage at Paris Games Week. And not only that. Onrush was up, running and playable internally at Codemasters within just three months.
“It’s about working smartly, more than anything else,” game director Paul Rustchynsky tells us. “We learned a lot from previous projects about how to do things in a much better way – especially when we were working on a service on DriveClub, having to deliver features and content on a monthly basis. Having to adapt to that sort of schedule heavily influenced how we do things now. It’s been a whirlwind: 18 months is a short period of time to do what we’ve done, but we’ve only been able to do that because we’re not building a new team. We’ve got the knowledge, we understand each other, and we already had all these processes in place. We’ve got some of the most skilled racing-game devs in the UK, if not the world.”
The vast majority of the DriveClub team – around 50 staff – moved over wholesale to Codemasters after Evolution closed, and that rolling start has been the key factor in Onrush coming together so quickly. Another factor has been, naturally, Codemasters itself, which has lent tools, support and plenty of advice to its new in-house team – and has greenlit a game which sits notably apart from its traditional sim-focused output.
Simply put, Onrush is nuts – a consequence, perhaps, of it being dreamed up in between leaving Evolution and starting at Codemasters: “We had no offices,” Rustchynsky says. “We designed the game in the pub.” First, it’s an arcade racer, representing not just a sharp left turn for a team that spent years on the meticulous in-game modelling of real-world cars and physics in DriveClub, but for the racing genre in general, which has largely left the ludicrous excesses of drift, boost and takedowns behind in recent years. “People were getting quicker thrills, higher action and more spectacular moments elsewhere,” says assistant game director Jamie Brayshaw. “Arcade racing games used to be where you got your hit of speed, that instant smile on your face. But firstperson shooters, for example, evolved much more quickly, and offered players more of those thrills more quickly. People were getting their fix elsewhere.”
It is instructive that, while naturally namechecking the likes of Burnout and Evolution’s own Motorstorm series, Rustchynsky and Brayshaw also refer to games such as Overwatch and Rocket League when they talk about Onrush. It’s an idea born of the recognition that games are no longer competing with other titles in the same genre, but with every successful game on the market. And with that comes an understanding that games in other genres teach lessons that can be applied far and wide.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is focus on the fun and remove many of the frustrations of typical racing,” Rustchynsky says. “We’re not a traditional racer. There’s no concept of a start or finish line, or of laps. There’s not even a concept of position. You’re racing around a track at high speed, vying for takedowns, but it’s not to try to break away from the pack. It’s not about, if you make a mistake, that’s your race over. It’s all about keeping everyone together in this condensed, chaotic pack at all times.” There are 24 vehicles in said pack; if you fall behind, crash or get taken out, you’ll just be respawned back into the action. “We’re taking the core of what you’d expect from an arcade racer, and then changing the rules.”
The team aren’t
yet talking about what will dictate the win conditions, but there won’t be a chequered flag. The focus on constant action builds to the crescendo of Rush mode, which Brayshaw describes as “like boost for your boost, the next level above, a bit like the [Ultimate] abilities in
Overwatch. That SSX Tricky or NBA Jam moment, where you’ve worked hard, and you get a massive payoff.”
Rustchynsky and Brayshaw can certainly relate to that. While working at speed, they’ve also had to endure quite a mindset shift, away from the painstaking realism of DriveClub to the no-holdsbarred action of a very different kind of racing game. “It’s been something of a release in some ways,” Rustchynsky says. “The constraints, the licensing, all those details hold you back in some ways. Here we don’t have to worry about getting all the stitches in the leather just right. We can do whatever we want. It’s about what makes the game fun.”
Onrush was up, running and playable internally at Codemasters within just three months