LiveRevenge remembers who beat you last time, so you can get them back next time!

How did the idea of Live Revenge come up in the first place?

Alex: Burnout Revenge had just been released onto Xbox and PlayStation 2 and we were looking for new features to enhance the Xbox 360 version. We could have released a port but that wasn't interesting to us and it wouldn't have been interesting to players. We knew that Xbox Live was going to be the killer app for 360 at that point, and people who'd bought the 360 during that time frame would be playing those launch games a lot on Live. So we decided to focus on the online part of the game.

Kiana: We were talking about online features before we finished the PS2 and Xbox versions of Burnout Revenge, as we were play-testing it.

We were talking about Scoreboard Attack for a long time before we dropped it because it didn't really have that Live sort of feel. It was a way for players to compete against each other without actually having to be online together simultaneously—if a friend beat your score you got a message about it saying, "He just beat your record, you should try to win it back." But it was just sending messages. It was like playing chess via email. Not very exciting and it didn't really get players emotional about winning.

Why Live Revenge, though?

Kiana: We were all playing against each other when we were finishing Burnout Revenge on Xbox and PlayStation 2 and we didn't feel like there was enough Revenge in it!

We wanted something that we could turn into a call to arms for players. A lot of people who play online don't know each other in advance, and seeing as the game was about Revenge relationships, we wanted a way to introduce people to each other, and keep them acquainted, get them battling each other, then track their battles and keep them going between races and sessions.

Tracked relationships turns friends into enemies.

So if you started a race against someone who had been scoring takedowns on you, either in that session or in any previous sessions, the game would call it out. It would tell you to go after him to settle the score. Meanwhile, on the other player's screen, it would tell him that you were coming after him. It's a bit evil when you think about it! The game is the devil on your shoulder, starting fights.

Anyway the game could easily track all the data it needed to do this. The thing was we wanted to present it in a human way, not just with numbers like most online games do. Playing online can be a bit hardcore, so we wanted the feature to be understandable and fun for everyone.

So the intention was mainly about the game automatically keeping score?

Matt: The other part was—well, I remember that I often had the experience of saying, "Who is this guy I'm playing against?" I remember Alex was online a lot with a group of guys from the USA, and he was saying, "Look out for this guy or that guy."

Alex: It became another way of evolving people's Friends Lists beyond just their friends. A lot of players' Friends Lists just contain their friends and not the strangers.

With a feature like Live Revenge, you do get into a good session with a particular person. You do get a rivalry going. You've had a good time and you've got something going but one of you has to leave the session and they want to get back to that.

Matt: It's not just throwing some people together. Most games say they support Friends on Xbox Live but they don't try to help people make friends. Live Revenge is about pushing people to make friends with each other. A lot of the Friends requests I get are from people I've got a rivalry going with.

Alex: I was racing a guy in Indonesia once. He went to bed at 1am, and came back to the lobby an hour later because he couldn't sleep until he'd taken me down. Every time I was on the Blue Team I'd never let him cross the finish line and he got really mad!

Pete: Yes, remembering the state of your relationship between different games was the big deal for me. Other games don't do that.

Alex: Are we tracking that forever? If I don't play for a year and I go back, will it still remember the guy in Indonesia for me?

Matt: Yes. The persistence is important. It remembers 250 rivals. If you ever get more than that the older ones have to drop off the bottom of the list.

From concept...

Pete: The camera stuff that showed the rivals at the start of the event was always designed to look as it does now. That's the bit that shows you who you should be going after, and who will be coming after you. The messages and icons and the post-race presentation had a lot of re-working before we were happy with them.

Alex: I remember the lobby icons were originally going to look like targets but they went through quite a few iterations.

Matt: It sounds trivial but we did spend a lot of time looking at the flash of the screen tint when we're introducing players—holding the flash of red for bad relationships, green for good and yellow for neutral—and getting the timing right, so it was dramatic without slowing the pace.

...to implementation, the rival intros didn't change that much.

Alex: I wish we'd put in more messages, more names and call-out phrases that told you how different people were playing against you.

Matt: We originally had a couple more categories that we had to drop in the end. One of my favourites was 'Fresh Meat', which was an introduction to a player who you hadn't played before. But we put in as much as much as we could at the time.

Pete: I liked how you could escalate your relationship with another player, though, when you battle them over and over again. Getting to Nemesis level was very cool.

Kiana: You need to have over 100 settled scores with one person to get to Nemesis status—which turns out to be quite a lot of settled scores, actually!

Matt: That makes me think of our 'Grudge o' War' Xbox Live Achievement, which was originally about doing 1,000 takedowns! We had to scale that back!

Was there anything else that didn't make it in there?

Kiana: One of the original presentation ideas that we spent a lot of time on was recapping the progress of the race, from beginning to end, on a graphical timeline. And it just wouldn't work. You would see the names of the opponents and when they became revenge rivals their icon would explode, and if you got a new guy you got a stamp.

Matt: That was originally going to be the entire story of the race. But it was kind of hard to show because the graph went up and down so much it was hard to get that across clearly.

Didn't Live Revenge get some kind of recognition from Microsoft?

Matt: Yes, Live Revenge was called out at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference as a major innovation and Microsoft is encouraging developers to do more of that relationship tracking online. At the time we were the only people who could do it because the EA game servers allowed us to do server customisation. Maybe that's why no-one else seems to have stolen it yet!

Do you think other developers are missing a trick by not including something like Live Revenge in their online games, then?

Alex: I don't think people really realise the impact of this feature.

You can tell, among our friends in the industry, who has really played the game. I saw one review that said, "Revenge 360 is good but there's no reason to buy it if you've already got it on PS2 or Xbox." So those guys obviously never looked at the game on Live for any length of time. They just didn't understand the significance of the work we'd done.

Some of the other games released on other platforms tend to come to Xbox 360 with only a few minor graphical changes. We think we made a lot of changes. People who play Burnout Revenge 360 online understand that.

How much does Live Revenge define your approach to developing the next generation of online games?

Alex: Online version 1.0 has been 'here's the game, it's the same gameplay with the same levels as offline, but there are just more players and you have to make your own game out of that.'

We're moving towards the second stage of online where it's up to the developers to use that technology to provide that new game experience. Live Revenge is a step towards that. It's about scoring, game framework, options, personalising options, game rules.

In Burnout Revenge, it's all about settling the score.

I'm amazed at the lack of game rules in many games online. It's still tied to PC games from ten years ago. In shooting games it's all Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. Now I think we're going to have more people online, with cameras and voice. That's the exciting part. Burnout had Save and Share and Live Revenge. What's Gran Turismo going to do? What's Metal Gear going to be online? I want to know what my favourite games are going to do online that's different.

If you're just saying, "We've got 100 players online"...Well, we could make a soccer game with 50-a-side. But the game rules need to escalate. Are there four goals now? Is the pitch scaled up? Do you get to play without a referee? It shouldn't just be the same old rules.

We were reading about 'Gun' this morning on PSP, and they have a quick-draw duel on link-up. That's cool. It's what you expect given the concept of the game. It's not just Capture The Flag.

We're going to get to greater numbers of people connecting than ever before, so we've got to work harder to deliver the best new experiences we could be giving them. If it's all just Deathmatch, that's a failure.

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