Blur Multiplayer features on the fly DLC

Blur’s lead designer, Gareth Wilson spoke with the Telegraph about the recently released racer. Among the topics were DLC, and what to expect. The tech that Bizarre created for Blur is one that allows the developer to make changes to game balance, playlists, and other server configurations on the fly.  Just another reason to pick up this extremely great racing title.  Blur was released by Activision on May 25th read our review here.

Speaking of downloadable content, what DLC for Blur is on the horizon?

Well, we’ve got a really cool piece of tech we’ve developed. When you go into multiplayer and you see it downloading player information, you’ll probably notice it. All the information about the game balancing tech is stored on a server. So all the playlists that you can see – like MotorMash and Team MotorMash – are things we can make changes to at a moment’s notice.

For example, one thing we noticed was that one race in the Skirmish racing was seven minutes long – which was way too long. The reason it turned out that way is because the race is three laps on the New York circuit and it really should just be two. So we can change that.

So we can make all of these changes on the fly. So if we find out that people love One-Hit, One-Kill on Motor Mash, where you get hit with one Bolt and you’re wrecked, we can add that playlist without doing any sort of fancy downloadable content update. We can do that without players spending points. That’s definitely going to be happening – we’re going to be making changes to the playlists regularly.

Beyond that, nothing’s been confirmed yet, but if the game does well we’ve definitely got the scope for more stuff.

With all that in mind, it sounds like building and listening to Blur’s community feature quite heavily in your plans.

Absolutely! We’ve already been through this process to an extent with the Beta that was released. We had well over a million people download the Beta and then leave messages about what they thought. We encouraged people to come to the Blur website leave feedback; over 26,000 people filled in our survey – which was quite long actually – and they told us what they thought of all game’s aspects from the power-ups to the car-handling and so on. We’ve also got our Blur forums set up and ready to go. – Telegraph