Midnight Club Los Angeles, developed by Rockstar San Diego and published by Rockstar Games
UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: Rockstar Games has just forwarded us a copy of the email blast they sent out earlier today about the patch being issued simultaneously for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Here's what the email said:
A title update is currently available for both the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 versions of Midnight Club: Los Angeles. The Xbox 360 update adds support for additional leaderboards for tournaments on the Rockstar Games Social Club, broader multiplayer match searching, and upgraded streaming and performance. The update also brings improved AI balance to adjust dynamically to user skill level.
Separately, the folks at Rockstar wanted to clarify that players were never required to play red-level races in the pre-patched version of the game. We regret the confusion.
***
Despite our use of the word "patch," in the headline,
let it be known that the fine gentlemen and ladies at Rockstar Games
prefer to say "update." We learned this yesterday when we stopped by
Rockstar's Manhattan offices to chat with Rockstar vice president of
development Jeronimo Barrera about the company's recently released
racing title Midnight Club Los Angeles. Apparently, inexperienced
gamers were struggling to progress through the game, and just as Rockstar is doing for PC gamers
who've complained of problems with Grand Theft Auto IV, console owners
of Midnight Club Los Angeles will have their troubles wiped away with a
patch, er update that goes up today for Xbox 360 owners and at an as
yet unspecified time for PS3 users.
"Obviously, we
like to listen to our fans," says Barrera. "We've done a bit of tuning on the
dynamic race structure so that early on, it will be easier for novice
players to get to the later races." Asked how they achieved this,
Barrera says they wanted to keep it feeling natural, so they focused on
how and how often the computer-controlled cars screw up on turns and
intersections rather than on the rubber-band approach to A.I. that typifies many racing games. The tweaks, we're told, cover roughly the first third of the game.
We
remarked to Barrera that every game teaches the player how it should be
played from nearly beginning to end. So how would this instructional
process be affected by the update? By giving players an easier time up
front, would this leave them unprepared for the challenges they would
face in the last two-thirds of the game? "There's so much content in
the game, it's actually allowing you to see more of that content
quicker: a new car, or a certain set of races," says Barrera. "But the
way the structure is set up, you can do just the easy races and still
progress. Having truly open-world races--if you can't enjoy the red
races, you'll definitely enjoy the yellow or the green races--it's
almost like we're able to target a specific group with our fixes,
without affecting the hardcore. You still have to play red races [please see the clarification at the top of this post], but
you won't have to beat them in order to progress."
We wound
things down by asking Barrera about whether these changes were driven
primarily by actual telemetry data collected from online-connected
gamers, or simply from the carping on message boards; he said it was
the latter. "Maybe that will play a role in future updates, but for us,
it's early days," he says. "Midnight Club is a franchise that has a
long shelf life. The PS2 version still sells. There's definitely a
community there, and we listen to them. We were absorbing this feedback
from many different areas." And while he refused to tell us anything
about future, more content-oriented updates, he said there was more
than just fixing the progression for novices in today's update: cleaner
graphics in places ("Not that it doesn't look amazing, but this allows
us to do it, so why not do it?") and some more robust features for
online tournaments. Happy racing.
