Marcus Nilsson points to the men occupying the room:
"These were some of the first people I hired to the studio, the entire physics team is from Simbin."
Now if you don't know of Simbin you're probably not into hardcore racing simulators on PC, but the Swedish studio successfully developed some of the most realistic racing simulators on the market. There is a deep and very detailed physics engine at work behind the scenes in Need for Speed: Rivals - and while this is toned to allow for excessive drifting and the more accessible brand racing Need for Speed is known for, the foundation is there for a simulation.
"The handling and physics set up in this is very, very realistic, but what we do is we layer on top of that, the ability to drift the car very quickly around the corner and just having a lot of fun within two minutes of picking up the controller," explains creative director Craig Sullivan. "Yes, we always start off with very realistic, very beliveable physics so that these cars can pretty much do anything and it looks right. The we layer on the Criterion special sauce of getting camera right, getting the drifting right, getting the feeling of the braking or the e-braking, jumping or even just the collisions are very, very finely tuned. We know we're not making a simulation. We could make a simulation if we wanted to, but we know in this type of game for these guys who are racing chasing as a cop and a racer, they want it to be something that's very... Easy to get into, but quite hard to master."
Our next stop on the studio tour is the AI department. Tasked with building an AI that should act and behave the same way a human player would, the objective is to reach a point where players cannot tell the difference between the AI or human counterparts. The idea is to not allow the AI to cheat, they race by the same rules as human players - they won't exceed top speed in order to catch up, they won't slow down if they get in front. They will, however, make mistakes. We were shown how AI drivers would take certain corners - how using the same inputs as players they would be more or less successful in doing so.
