After being delayed everywhere else, can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. PlayStation 3 disaster racer Motorstorm Apocalypse‘s post-quake release has been officially delayed in the US. No ETA yet, but it definitely won’t make its originally planned April 12 release.
The apocalyptic fourth entry in Evolution Studios’ off-road racing series is only three months away, as Sony tags Motorstorm Apocalypse with an April 12 release date for North America.
Sony have two in-house racing developers. Evolution Studios, who do MotorStorm, and SCEE Liverpool, who do WipeOut. Seems a bit silly having two teams doing the one genre, doesn’t it? Does to Sony.
Evolution Studios lead designer Nigel Kershaw and creative director Paul Hollywood, responsible for the recent MotorStorm: Pacific Rift for the PlayStation 3, tell 1UP that the “infamous” E3 2005 trailer for the first MotorStorm “kind of pissed us off a lot.” Why? Well, for one thing, it wasn’t created by them and set the team up for “expectations about the rendering prowess that we were going to expose.”
Last year’s MotorStorm gave PlayStation 3 owners a novel concept, a game that added context and surroundings much more compelling than you usually get in pick-up-and-play racers. Half the fun was the exquisitely hallucinated reason for it all, that there could actually be a beyond-extreme rally “festival” held in Utah’s Monument Valley, sort of like Sturgis meets Burning Man with loads more violent collisions and fatal wrecks. And, one assumes, crazy monkey sex in everyone’s tents at night.
Owners of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift will have good reason to fire up their copies of the PlayStation 3 racer well after launch date, as Evolution Studios says it’s planning on releasing “something new to play with every week” much of it expected to be absolutely free. Since the title doesn’t ship to Evolution’s home turf until November, don’t expect anything this Thursday, though.
