Sony unveils MotorStorm 2
16-player online, first rendered trailer.
Sony has officially unveiled MotorStorm 2 with a brief trailer and some information echoing the stuff leaked earlier this week, and says it's out on Blu-ray this autumn.
The trailer, which you can see on the SCEA blog, is comprised of rendered footage - something Sony has confirmed to Eurogamer - and is designed to give us an idea of where we'll be going in this one.
The answer to that question being, as the press release puts it, a "solitary tropical paradise in the Pacific Ocean", rather than the previous game's MotorStorm Festival in Monument Valley. This new location throws up very different tracks with "thick swamps, dense jungle, towering peaks and steaming volcanoes" to traverse.
Developer Evolution has carved 16 tracks out of the "thick mud, tangled undergrowth, swift flowing rivers, choking volcanic clouds and searing lava pools" to test you, and you will be able to race through them using all the original vehicle classes along with a new one, monster trucks.
The presence of water should be interesting, given that the scale of the vehicles differs greatly and it's easy to imagine that - just as bikes are more suited to tight squeezes and shortcut paths suspended in the air - so some will struggle to progress through water more than others.
MotorStorm will continue to work online, too, with 16-player online racing support for game number two, as well as four-player split-screen racing offline. Sony is known to be pushing integrated web-based services like SingStarGame.com a lot harder this year, too, so while there's no specific mention of a web service we wouldn't put that past anyone there either, particularly given MotorStorm's history of long-term online gaming support.
The final thing to say is that Sony refers to the game as MotorStorm 2, but adds that the final name is still to-be-confirmed. So it could end up being called BarryStorm, or something. Look out for more details on BarryStorm soon.