The Firing Line: 5 questions for Gameloft on Asphalt 8: Airborne
Does it come in red?
Asphalt 8: Airborne might have been out for a little while now, but Gameloft's Gold Award-winning racer remains a brilliantly balanced arcade blast of nitrous and squealing tyres.
At review, we said that Asphalt 8: Airborne "is a racer that concentrates on fun above anything else, and it hits its mark almost every time."
We figured it was high time to sit down with Gameloft studio creative director Diego Barragan, then, and have a chat about what it is that makes the game tick, and what players picking up an Asphalt game for the first time can expect from this gravity-ignoring iteration.
Pocket Gamer: First up, could you tell us a little about what newbies to the Asphalt franchise can expect from Asphalt 8: Airborne?Diego Barragan: It's a perfect blend of two elements.
The first is the tech behind it. It's a true console-quality game. I believe this term has been overused for many games on mobile and tablet. In this case, however, it's bang on the money.
Many genres require adaptation when it comes to controls for touchscreen devices, but racing games fit perfectly on these gadgets. So, the intensity of the experience and the degree of control you have over your car on a touchscreen is identical to the experience and control you could expect from a gamepad.
On the technology side, Asphalt 8: Airborne has no counterpart on the App Store or Google Play. The game features over-the-top visuals, and the whole game logic runs on true physics, which is a first in its market.
When you combine these elements, the gameplay possibilities and level design are endless.
The second key element is the nature of the gameplay itself. We have perfectly tailored this game for the mobile experience. We have carefully designed the length of the races so that you can play them in quick bite-sized sessions.
The social integration, which I believe is one of the fields where mobile really outperforms consoles, is incredibly streamlined and engaging. You can get real-time updates of your friends' performances; compete with them on the leaderboard; or download their very own races and beat them in asynchronous mode.
While Firemonkeys has drifted further towards authenticity with Real Racing 3, you have moved in the opposite direction with Asphalt 8 by adding stunts and jumps to the mix. Was that a conscious reaction to more stilted racing experiences?Real Racing is a realistic driving experience, and this is what its creator strives to deliver. Brake too late, you hit a wall. Lose some speed, take time to recover.
Patience and careful driving are the key, because the mistakes you make when driving in real life can also happen in the game.
The Asphalt series has always been the opposite. It's about cool cars at huge speeds. If you crash into another car, it goes flying away and you drive even faster. You can change the car's direction mid-air. It doesn't make any logical sense, because we're not using realistic logic.
We deliberately trade realism for fun, and in Asphalt 8 we have taken that trade-off further than ever.
You've added weather effects to the game this time around. How do these change the way players will have to negotiate circuits?The only effects that affect the actual car stats, beyond the obvious skill-hindering stuff like fog (which is a different thing), are snow and ice.
In one of the game's locations, Island, it's all about mastering shortcuts and driving on these tricky surfaces.
Some people thought that Asphalt 7: Heat wasn't that much of a step-up from Asphalt 6: Adrenaline. Have you done anything to counter those claims this time around?Asphalt 8: Airborne doesn't have a single line of code from previous Asphalt titles. We've redesigned everything and developed it from scratch.
We have brought one circuit back from Asphalt 7: Heat, though. We thought it would be cool for Asphalt 7: Heat players to start playing and go, 'hey, I know the tricks on this one'.
Even so, though, we've thoroughly revamped the circuit and tweaked the physics, so the driving experience is totally different.
What's the best advice you could give to a player who's set to clamber into one of Asphalt's supercars for the first time?The game changes a lot depending on whether you're behind the wheel of an entry-class car or a top one. Playing 'early' cars is all about getting and using as much nitro as possible. Later cars are designed to be true speed machines.
These speed machines are hard to handle at top speed, and triggering nitro becomes a strategic move. Using them requires far more skill and timing than the less powerful vehicles, but they're the ultimate class to master for multiplayer races.
