‘We’ve contacted a bunch of artists from around the world who do not work in video games, [people who work in] comic book, graphic novels, and so on. And we gave them a very simple description of the game and how we thought these characters would be in terms of personality, ” Sony XDEV, senior producer John MacLaughlin, told IGN. ‘We have contacted so many people from all over the world; South America, Africa, Japan, the Middle East, Russia, Eastern Europe, and we got this wild, eclectic bunch of art through these characters. ”
And these concepts have found their way into the game thanks to the many diverse artists – key aspects of character designs such as Genesis, which have blades instead of legs, come from the imagination of the artists rather than as mandates of the development team.
And while players will spend a lot of time behind the wheel as these characters, one of AllStars’ unique brackets is to make players jump out of their cars and run around on foot. Able to accomplish unique hero moves, some impressive parkour and more, as these characters are an integral part of the experience, and have almost always been during development. Although it certainly took a bit of tuning to get the game right on foot.‘We had a good idea for some time in the project of what the play would look like in a vehicle. “We want the vehicles to be super agile, even the heavy vehicles are agile than you would see in a racing game,” Berry explained. “Now we have characters [and] we can not just have them vulnerable, because then it will not be nice. But we can not have them too powerful. We’re not going to launch them rockets because it’s a very different game. So we need it to be these hyper-real athletic characters. ”
And when the team discovered how to weave the character and vehicle games together so that they go hand in hand, it also helped the team understand how to build arenas that would suit both types of games without ever having to far from the others in the multiplayer-focused experience.
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“We did not want to separate the characters too much from the vehicle. We did not want skyscrapers, although it can be nice to climb on top and dive into the arena, because while climbing on a skyscraper, climbing is quite lonely, ”Berry explained. “If you have 16 characters, and four of them get out of the vehicles and climb a skyscraper, they are not really involved in a multiplayer game at that point.”
Berry explained how Lucid, although the early test versions of the levels could be quite large and quite high, did work to scale up the arenas into more focused combat zones to keep players, inside and outside vehicles, as at all times connected as possible.
Players can now see for themselves as Destruction AllStars is available on PS5 and has been included in this month’s PS Plus series. For more information on the new PS5 exclusive, learn more about why Destruction AllStars’ delay helps make a PS Plus launch, and stay tuned to IGN for more information on the new game.
Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond! And PlayStation head. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.