Pure Preview

May 2, 2008

Imagine this scenario: you're tearing through the back woods of Wyoming on an ATV, sprinting under the conveyor belts of some logging operation and past competitors that try to edge you out of position. You give your quad some gas, get around that pack and pre-load your shocks for the upcoming jump ahead of you – a jump that launches you high into the air with at least 100 feet separating you and the ground. But you don't panic. Instead, you start thinking of tricks, and bust out a Can Can into a Superman and finally a Christ Air before you land. The spectators go wild, and you race off into first place. That's just a quick taste of the fast paced action that Black Rock Studio is planning on putting into Pure, their upcoming racer that will be hitting the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC this September.

Pure is somewhat of a departure from what Black Rock has been known for. Formerly Climax Racing before its purchase by Disney Interactive Studios, the developer's previous titles such as Moto GP and ATV Offroad Fury were more simulation based and held back by license deals. Finally free of these restrictions, the development team decided to make an arcade style title that combines elements of action sports and racing games. The majority of the game takes place within the Pure World Tour, a "career" mode that allows players to take a character around the world to seven real locations. Each location will have at least three to six tracks, which will allow players to take part in fifty racing events overall.

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These races will be broken up into three separate kinds of events, in offline and online play: races, sprints and freestyle. Races are the traditional setup that players expect -- you and fifteen other competitors fight for position over the course of a series of laps to see who comes in first. Sprints, by comparison, take place on a much smaller, more confined track and will involve a lot of tight pack racing. Finally, Freestyle is completely different than the other races, and while we weren't able to observe one of those races, it's probable that it will be based around performing tricks and chaining them together to receive a score, which will determine whether a player wins or comes in dead last.

Tricks are a key element to Pure's gameplay, because they tie into the title's boost system. To get boost, you need to perform tricks, which are broken up along a tiered system. Initially, you start out with basic tricks and the more you chain them together, the more you fill your boost meter, which grants you access to level one tricks. Of course, if you then use this boost, you'll never gain access to better moves. Therein lies the balance between speed and acrobatic maneuvers. As you successfully land more and more tricks and lay off the turbo, the amount of boost you have will unlock level two and level three tricks, and when maxed out, will allow your racer to perform special tricks. These special tricks also have an added bonus in that they allow players to "bank" their boost meter, letting them immediately refill this meter once it's been exhausted. With more than seventy different tricks, as well as up to nine signature special moves for each racer, there's plenty of maneuvers to perform during your jumps.

Speaking of jumps, Black Rock didn't just want to have basic ramps scattered across the environments. It wanted to impart a "vertigo rush" to gamers by sending them over the edge of a cliff for a jump, making the height and the speed at which they fly through the air impart a visceral sense of movement. For example, on the Italian stage, you launch off of a mountainside and quickly freefall for about ten seconds at one point, giving you a chance to string together a large number of tricks before you land.

To give you extra air, you can pre-load your ATV by pulling back on the left analog stick to prepare the machine for the jump. You can modify this as much as you want, from ten percent to ninety percent of maximum load on your shocks to gain additional distance. As you land, you can also adjust the position of where you land on your quad, including the front or rear wheels to maintain your momentum. This can be particularly important when you consider that there are multiple pathways that a racer can take around a stage, giving you possible shortcuts that can shave additional seconds off your time. However, these frequently come with a large number of obstacles such as switchbacks, chasms or other problems that you'll need to navigate across.

Of course, while having experience with these stages is important, having an ATV that can deliver the performance you need is extremely crucial as well. Fortunately, if you don't like one of the vehicles that you can acquire in the game, you can make your own from the frame up. Players can modify the speed, acceleration, handling, boost and trick stats of each machine with licensed components, including engines, shocks and wheels, as well as tweaking the look of the machine. Apparently, there's enough variety within the game to make more than 60,000 different ATVs, so there should be plenty for racers to choose from.

While the speed of the game was impressive, the visuals of the build we saw were truly incredible. The draw distance of the game portrayed the incredible height and scope of the level you were on, so you could see for miles around as you launched off a hillside and saw the details of the landscape below. Black Rock has stocked a large number of visual enhancements in the title, including a visual rendering system that provides a large volume of grass, foliage, rocks and other environmental objects in the immediate foreground. Using a process taken direct from the movie Monsters, Inc., Black Rock has been able to continuously create up to 200,000 instances of these items as racers ride through a track. As a result, the lines that racers take will always change as tire tracks deepen and spin out varying levels of gravel and twigs.

Black Rock has also spent a lot of time on their game engine, which was uniquely built for Pure, to add in a brand new physics and advanced ragdoll system. As a result, every crash landing that you see will look different than the next one, and you'll see plenty of crashes in the game. To highlight the different angles and painful bruises that your riders will acquire over the course of a race, the developers included a free-floating camera, which can actually get banged into by ATVs or the bodies of riders as racers wipeout. Additionally supporting the gameplay will be a large soundtrack of thirty to forty songs covering rock, drum and bass and hip hop. Want to experience Pure? Check out the videos below.