Slightly Mad Studios’ World Of Speed Details

World of Speed developers, Slightly Mad Studios, recently conducted an interview with Redbull.com. I’ve scanned through the interview and have picked out the interesting details for your reading pleasure.

World of Speed is an upcoming free-to-play game for the PC. Regarding it’s free-to-play nature, Pete Morrish at Slightly Mad Studios said: “A lot of the times when you say free-to-play, you’re usually met with a sharp intake of breath. “There’s a good reason for that: A lot of free-to-play games are set up rather cynically in order to take advantage of flaws in the human psyche that we’ve all got, and these are all essentially skinner boxes with pretty graphics that optimise the transport of money from your bank account to someone else’s. That’s fine, if all you want is a slash and burn through a short-term community and sell out.”

“What we want to do is do it the proper way, and build a community. We’re in it for the long term. We’ve got a roadmap of several years. We think the way to do that, and the way that’s been proven, is to treat your customers with respect and offer them things that you think offer value to them.”

Morrish comes across honest and passionately about the focus of their racing game and is saying all the right things. You can of course play through World of Speed without spending a single dime or penny. It’s still unclear what exactly you will (if you so choose to) be spending your hard earned on within the game however.

World of Speed will feature around sixty different cars, each one lovingly recreated with an incredible level of detail, Morrish told Redbull.com: “The cars are accurately modelled from manufacturer CAD data, some of them are laser scanned in while others have full photo builds and things like that too, so they’re all done very accurately. All the way from an old Russian larder puttering around on a two–stroke engine or whatever’s in them, to a kind of Bugatti Veyron and everything in between.”

Regarding the number of environments and tracks, Morrish commented: “We’ve got a number of real-life tracks such as Brands Hatch. We’ve got functional point to point races, so there are some nice courses inspired by the west coast of California, for example, that coastal road sort. One is based in Monaco, the Azure Coast, and what we’re most proud of is our city tracks. So far we’ve revealed three different locations; London, Moscow and San Francisco.”

Slightly Mad Studios are currently attempting to integrate MMO elements to their upcoming racer with class based mechanics albeit applied not to a character but to the cars themselves. Morrish told Redbull.com: “We took inspiration from a genre of game that does community and team play properly, and that’s MMORPGs. You look at the way they’re constructed, and you get people who form a clan and as a team, they do raids and dungeons and missions and that sort of thing. Each person has their own specialised character that they’ve built up and have their own abilities, clothing and tools and stuff like that. You might have one guy who’s a barbarian and has an axe made up of the skulls of his enemies, and his job in a raid is to go out and slice the legs off anything that comes close to him. If you’re not quite that angry, you could choose to be a healer or a mage, and be more of a background character, healing and making sure the barbarian dude in the front is protected.”

“And we thought that was quite an interesting way to approach team-based racing. A lot of team-based racers out there are still about getting across the line first, and we took a slightly different approach with this whole thing. We’re not just about getting across the line first, we took this kind of thing, the MMORPG stuff, that clan mentality, and we’re introducing it to the racing game.”

World of Speed is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online action racing (MMOAR) game for PC, developed by Slightly Mad Studios (The guys that will also bring us Project CARS) and published by My.com. World of Speed is set for a PC closed beta sometime before the end of the year. You can sign up for the beta right now through the World Of Speed website.

For more racing videogames news keep checking back here at CarGamingBlog. For more information on World of Speed check out the official site. For the full interview between Pete Morrish and Redbull.com click here.