Why the desert is the perfect backdrop for PS4 arcade racer Flatout 4: Total Insanity, out next week

Hello PS Blog! I’m Alexandre Assier, Producer of FlatOut 4: Total Insanity at Kylotonn Games in France. I’m proud to be able to give you an exclusive behind the scenes look at the creation of this new version of Flatout that we’re creating, which captures the heart of the original and rebuilds it into a terrifying, thrilling PS4 arcade racer.

Today I’d like to focus in on one of my favourite locales in the game, and one that I believe embodies the ‘go anywhere, wreck everything’ spirit of Flatout 4: the desert.

At the beginning of the project, we had brainstorming sessions as a team to work out where our new Flatout game would take place. We began by considering the core pillars of Flatout – destruction, humour, insane race tracks.

The first, most obvious place that came to mind? The U.S desert. There’s something particularly iconic about the place, and the idea of overlaying the Flatout particulars made it a match that just fit. Just picture smashing through desert shacks in a classic muscle car while firing off a magnetic bomb at your unwitting opponents (and you can do just that in the all new Assault mode!).

With a first, key backdrop decided, we pushed ahead and started to design the different areas the player might encounter in such an environment. Because anyone that’s watched several decades of action movies set in such a place knows the desert’s not a barren landscape. There’s a multitude of landmarks that’d make for thrilling set pieces during our races.

Environment 1: The Canyon

The very first environment area in the desert that we started on was the Canyon, brought so vividly to life in our early concept art:

Designing a track isn’t a case of sketching a line from point A to point B and sticking in some stunning scenery. You’ve got to consider alternating the pace of the race, switching gears repeatedly via track shape and environmental hazards to keep your racers wary.

The Canyon is a great example of this, taking place on an abandoned road, the intention of which is to make the race fraught with spectacle and tension. High cliffs and tight turns means there’s a constant sense of claustrophobia in some stretches of the race course; it takes cockiness – but more importantly, it takes skill – to overtake an opponent here!

But as I said: shift gears. Between these sections we insert open areas, allowing you to let rip with your Nitro and blast past the competition before you dart into the next narrow passageway.

Environment 2: Ghost Town

This abandoned locale is a labyrinth of roadways and side passages just waiting to be explored. And as this is Flatout, everything is ready to be rammed through and destroyed!

We iterated repeatedly on the Desert’s layout, ensuring the different areas were intricately designed to create diversity of path and varied gameplay. As you can see from our development designs below, there’s a lot of possibilities on offer. You should treat the main road as suggestion rather than direction; go off tarmac and find shortcuts aplenty (and fill your nitro gauge via destructible objects!)

We fell so in love with how the desert environment started to come together as we play tested it, we decided to highlight it as our Main Menu environment — the first visual that the player sees when they launch the game.
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We’d also like you to know that for the PS4 Pro version, we have pushed the visual quality of the game to be even more impressive!

We hope you will check out Flatout 4: Total Insanity and love it as much as we loved creating it!