XBA: Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions for Xbox Addict. First off, whom am I speaking with and what is your primary job with 2XL Games? Can you give us a little bit of your background history? What projects are you currently working on that can be mentioned?

Robb: Hello, my name is Robb Rinard. I’m a game designer currently working on BAJA for Xbox 360 and PS3. Myself and other members of the 2XL Games team have worked on a number of different series including Motocross Madness, ATV Offroad Fury, Matt Hoffman Pro BMX 2 and MX Unleashed.

Up to 10 racers online trading dust clouds.

Robb: ‘The Baja of California’ is a beautiful piece of land just south of San Diego that runs over 800 miles down to the southern tip where you’ll find the resort city of Cabo San Lucas. It’s not only a fantastic coastline, but its remote and somewhat treacherous terrain make a great setting for the sport of ‘Desert Racing’. If you’re totally unfamiliar with the Baja, go rent the movie ‘Dust to Glory’. It’s a really enjoyable film that captures the essence of what our game is all about. After watching it, I think you’ll want to play BAJA.

The sport itself is comprised of 3 major organizations and a number of smaller ones. The most prevalent are: C.O.R.R. (Championship Off-Road Racing), S.C.O.R.E. who sponsors the annual Baja 1000, and ‘Best in the Desert’, which hosts a variety of off-road races in a number of southwestern states.

C.O.R.R. races are commonly held on what are known as ‘short-course’ tracks, which are good for spectators as they provide many of the same thrills as watching a Nascar race, only with 800 horsepower off-road trucks. These courses tend to have shorter lap times in the 1-2 minute range. A bunch of famous motocross stars like Jeremy McGrath and Travis Pastrana are competing in the C.O.R.R series these days.

Both S.C.O.R.E. and Best in the Desert races are long distance, point to point races through the wide open desert. They race in places like Pahrump, Prim and Laughlin, Nevada and most races span hundreds of miles, taking all day to complete. The most famous desert race of all, the S.C.O.R.E. Baja 1000 takes over 24 hours for even the fastest vehicles to complete.

So how does all this translate to our game?

There are 95 different events, including over 40 short-course tracks, 27 rally races, 9 Open Class Challenges, 7 Hill Climb Races, and 9 massive Baja stages.

Our short-course tracks look and feel a lot like outdoor nationals tracks in motocross, only there are no rhythms sections to master. BAJA is ‘the off-road driving simulator’, where the object of the game is to keep all four tires on the ground, sliding around turns, always looking for ways to carry more momentum through turns. That’s not to say that you won’t catch any air, but it’s not the object of the game like it is in an MX game. This is a serious racing experience that is intended to deliver on the promise of the Gran Tourismo of off-road racing.

Watch out for jack rabbits!

Robb: I’m a long time fan of the Rallisport Challenge series as well. I actually considered it one of the games to beat in terms of driving fun as I worked on BAJA.

At the core of what makes BAJA a fresh new driving experience is the relationship between the physics and the terrain/course design. At the start of the project, I regularly told the guys, “at one end of the stick are the course designs and shape of the terrain. At the other end are the driving physics. Our goal is to work towards unifying the two systems and meet somewhere in the middle”. To that end we worked on creating a great tire and suspension physics model capable of handling the ridiculously rough terrain we imagined racing on. Over time we refined the shape of the terrain, and honed in on a brand new physics model that allowed us to drive on the edge of out of control, without actually losing control.

The biggest difference you’ll notice when watching someone play BAJA, versus any of the racing games on the market today, is how busy you are with the controller. Real ‘Desert Racing’ is about reading the terrain on the fly and quickly reacting to all the challenges the ever-changing course presents you. This forces you to spend as much time reacting to the course as you do actually steering the vehicle.

I can tell you about tons of cool features like destructible fiberglass body panels and helicopters that you can call for repair, but the bottom line is: BAJA is a blast to drive. Once you fire up one of our Trophy Trucks or Class 1 Unlimited buggies, you’ll never look back. I can honestly say it’s the most fun I’ve had playing a four-wheeled driving game.

We're talking over 1 million dollars for this puppy! Dont wreck.

XBA: What can we expect from the career mode in the game? How many classes, cars, sponsors, tracks, etc.?

Robb: The career is structured to provide players with the full gamut of Desert Racing experiences. Everyone starts out racing the Volkswagen Baja Bug and has to work their way up through 8 classes until they end up racing the high performance Trophy Truck class.

At the start of your career, you have zero corporate sponsors and have to rely solely on purse winnings to advance yourself. As you gain experience and notoriety, corporate sponsors will approach you and offer to pay you through advertising on your truck. By the end of your career, the amount of money you can earn through contingency sponsorship far outweighs what you can earn by placing in the top 3. But there’s a catch; it’s called contingency sponsorship for a good reason. Your sponsors will only pay for a race if the body panel that bears their logo is still on your truck when you cross the finish line. Hence, getting paid is contingent upon keeping your truck together to the end of the race. Not an easy thing to do consistently.

We support the following classes (sorted by performance):
Volkswagen Bug (Class 5/Class 11/Class 1600 1/2)
Unlimited Volkswagen (Class 5U)
4x4 Class (Class 3/Jeep Speed)
Open Wheel Buggies (Class 10)
Mini Trucks (Class 7)
Fullsize Trucks (Class 8)
Unlimited Open Wheel (Class 1)
Trophy Truck
Bonus Class – Trophy Karts (Go Karts with Trophy Truck bodies)

The events themselves are made up of race leagues built from the 40+ short course tracks, rally race events and optional invitational events held by various sponsors.

Each vehicle is initially purchased bone stock. There are over 400 parts in our upgrade system, with millions of combinations and endless tuning opportunities in the garage. Everything is adjustable from the springs and shocks, to brake bias, gear ratios and steering. You can drive the transmission as automatic, tiptronic, or fully manual. With the right steering wheel you drive the manual transmission as a four-on-the floor and do all the shifting yourself. It’s a lot of fun!

All sorts of off road vehicles to use and fall in love with.

Robb: Our vision for off-road racing couldn’t tolerate any walls or boundaries. From day one, we worked from a philosophy of being able to ‘drive to the horizon’. While our worlds are finite, you have to drive for a very long time in any one direction to reach the ‘end of the world’. In comparison to last-gen games, BAJA’s worlds are as much as 25 times larger than anything we’ve authored in the past.

These huge worlds opened up doors to create some truly revolutionary gameplay. Our simulation of the Baja 1000 is about a 300 mile drive that takes several hours to complete and never once touches the same piece of terrain twice. It’s unlike anything you’ve played in a rally game to date. Also, unlike most other rally games, you actually get to race against a wide range of vehicles on the course at once, but you’re only directly competing against the other vehicles in your class. It’s definitely cool to overtake slower vehicles with your Trophy Truck in the middle of the rally.

If you can see it, you can drive to it.

Robb: We were able to get all the single-player game modes working in multiplayer. This includes: short-course racing, rally mode, Baja mode, the Open Class Challenge and Hill Climb Races.

We support 3 long distance races, the Baja 250, Baja 500 and Baja 1000. These races can last from 30 minutes to 3 or 4 hours. We have cool features that let you hand off your truck to an AI co-driving in case you need to go to the bathroom or make a sandwich. When you come back, just take back over from the AI. They don’t race as fast as a skilled human player, but this allows you to take part in long distance races and still keep up with real life.

Also, we’re not going to pull a ‘DIRT’ and promise 100 online racers that you never actually see in the race. We support up to 10 players on both 360 and PS3.

We also support up to 4-player split-screen, something we haven’t been able to pull off since ATV Offroad Fury 1.

XBA: The Baja 1000 is an interesting online feature. Can you explain to us exactly what this race mode is?

Robb: Sure. The Baja 1000 is basically a 9-stage rally race. Each stage of the race takes about 30 minutes of continuous driving. We load a new level at the end of each stage, which actually works out nicely as it’s convenient to take a quick break between stages. I can’t say what the final drive time would be as we’ve been continuing to tune the course, but it’s more than 3 hours of driving. It’s definitely our most ambitious technical gameplay achievement, and something the entire 2XL team can be proud of.

For those seeking a shorter Baja event, we include the 250 and 500 which are shorter versions of the 1000.

Stay on the beaten path, or make your own.

XBA: Where is the line drawn between realism for the off road enthusiast and arcade for the casual pick up and play racer? Does the game cater to both enough to satisfy any appetite?

Robb: My goal as a designer is always to create something that I’m personally interested in playing, and the older I get, the more difficult it is to keep my interest for any length of time. I personally tend towards enjoying the simulation aspects of a game. As a result, BAJA has a very robust simulation of a variety of systems that challenge real off-road racers. You can rip the radiators off your truck and then face cooling problems. Bottom out the truck repeatedly and risk damaging your oil pan and losing oil pressure. You can wear out your tires, shocks, brakes and clutch. As each system degrades you’ll need to seek out repair, either from a mobile hot-pit found around the short-courses or via the support helicopter during a rally race.

Even in free ride mode, I enjoy tooling around our giant worlds looking for new games to play with the truck. Our goals were to carefully simulate what it means to control a 6000 lb, 800 horsepower off-road machine and hear what a ripping race engine sounds like tearing up the desert. BAJA has some of the most realistic engine sounds, something overlooked in all too many racing games. When you play it for yourself, I encourage you to turn off the music and turn up the engine sounds.

But we also understand that most people want a game they can pick up and play for 10 or 15 minutes. They just want to switch off from all the pressure and responsibility of modern society and thoroughly enjoy themselves for a little while. So we allow players to switch off as much of the damage simulation as they like, and just have fun playing the game as an off-road racer. It’s still based on the same great driving physics and course design that make the game fun in the first place.

XBA: At the THQ Gamers Day event we saw BAJA being played on 3 screens simultaneously with a panoramic view? Is this feature built into the Xbox360 and what will someone need in order to take advantage of this feature?

Robb: We call this Panorama mode. It requires 3 consoles and 3 TVs. The ultimate setup would include a 5.1 home receiver and a set of surround speakers to play in Dolby Digital 5.1. If you’re fortune enough to have a seat and wheel, it makes for a great deal of fun. I regularly drive the Cocono stage of the Baja 1000 over and over. It’s my favorite rally stage in the entire game and I’ve probably driven it in our simulator close to 50 times.
XBA: Graphically the game looks simply amazing and game play is extremely smooth in the build that we saw. What are some of your more proud graphical achievements in the game? Is there anything that folks should keep an eye out for?

Robb: Most gamers don’t appreciate the challenges in building large scale, free roaming worlds like those found in BAJA. A typical tunnel racer has the benefit of not having to load the entire level into memory at once. I think PGR 4 is the finest looking racing game I’ve seen to date, but it has the advantage of being able to stream geometry and textures into memory as you race the course. The downside to those types of games is the player is extremely limited in their ability to explore the world, let alone go off the track. Both tunnel racers and open world racers have their advantages and limitations. As makers of off-road racing experiences, we’ve always felt that free roaming worlds are the best choice for our style of gaming.

BAJA is an impressive graphics achievement when you consider the size of our worlds and the fact that we can’t hide some parts of the world and then stream it into memory just in time. The 2XL team had to engineer solutions that allowed us to fit everything in memory at once, and still look as amazing as it does.

Go Robb, Go!!!!

Robb: Like I alluded to earlier, I can spend pages listing all the great back-of-box features that allow us to stand with our competition. But it’s not those features that make the game great. It all comes down to the moment-to-moment experience how the vehicle drives, the level of fun in terms of how it looks, how it sounds, and how it handles the terrain. This game is simply a blast to drive, and it delivers a unique style of driving experience I’ve not found in any racing game to date.

A lot of people haven’t heard the term ‘Baja’ before. My hope is that over the next year it will become synonymous with ‘one of the best driving games to date’.

We'd love to thank Robb Rinard for taking the time to answer our questions. We are looking forward to this game, and hope that others will have this on their most wanted list.

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