Recently, Motorstorm developers Evolution Studios have discussed their plans for downloadable content.  For their upcoming title, Motorstorm: Apocalypse, these developers are taking an approach to their community unlike most developers: they’re giving plenty of DLC away for free.

Lead designer Paul Rustchynsky elaborated that in order to avoid segregation amongst the Motorstorm community, “all of the content critical to core gameplay is going to be available to everyone for free”. Though tracks will be available for free, Evolution Studios still intends on releasing non-critical downloadable content such as new vehicles, liveries, etc. for a price.

While referring back to previous titles, Rustchynsky said “we had some fantastic tracks – but it segregated the community. You’ve got half of them playing the new tracks and half playing the old, and that just splits them up”. Therefore, Rustchynsky concluded, all new tracks will be given to the community absolutely free.

“We’re trying to take influences from all areas of games and make sure that the community stays engaged for a long time. And if they’re around to play the game they’ll want to buy more of the smaller items; more liveries, more vehicles and that sort of thing.”

Rustchynsky then went into detail about the priorities of Evolution Studios, saying that new content will only be provided after they have “addressed all the primary concerns from the community”.

Referring back to previous titles again, the lead designer said “In previous MotorStorm games we always focussed on content and then the fixes and improvements later on. We admit that it was a mistake to take that route, so we wanted to change that and make sure the community feels like they’re being heard.”

Evolution Studios is also going to begin rewarding players who invest considerable amount of time into their game:

“We have a community manager who will be monitoring and tracking all the different players, and if particular people are wowing us with their times or consistently winning challenges, we have content that we can provide to them by sending them a code, entitling them to new vehicles or liveries which will be exclusive to them or a very small subset of players.”

Though there was plenty of hype for the previous two Motorstorm titles, Apocalypse is proving to be that of which Evolution is putting their most effort into. Hopefully this turns out to be less than the average developer happy talk, and we see them actually implementing all of these things come the game’s release on March 16 (EU), and April 12 (NA).

Source.