Thank you for joining us! Could you please start off by telling us about MotoGP 25 and what your goals were for the latest installment in this long-running franchise?
Stefano Talarico, Lead Game Designer: Hello and thank you for this opportunity, I’m glad to be here with you. We have everything set for the launch of MotoGP 25 and we can’t wait to hear from the gamers.
Being a yearly game, we need to be laser-focused on our goals and we have to always be ahead of the curve...just like real riders! Our main goal this year is the same as always, and that is to provide new ways for players to enjoy our game while staying true to the sport and our core game experience, which is what makes MotoGP games so recognizable and loved by our audience.
But of course, the sport is growing worldwide. While we nurture our core audience, we want to welcome new players, so we’re always refining our gameplay features and continuing our focus on accessibility.
MotoGP 25 seems to offer a lot of variety when it comes to the vehicles, tracks, and modes players will experience. Can you please summarize what the game offers?
Talarico: The MotoGP series is always focused on making the gamers feel like real riders, and this year we wanted to add a little taste of what riders do after a race weekend.
Besides our regular offer of Moto3, Moto2 and MotoGP class bikes, this year we also feature minibikes, flat track, and motard bikes, which are available in Quick Mode, online, and Career Mode (MotoE class bikes will be added in a future update).
We know that almost every rider on the roster uses their time off to train, and they do so by racing on different types of bikes. This is why we introduced Race Off events, in which players can ride the new bikes: we created two environments and four circuits to allow them to have a break from MotoGP events and enjoy a different kind of racing, more focused on fun and adrenaline than pure performance. Furthermore, Race Off events in Career Mode are designed to reflect the “training element” that inspired them, as they help the players to ride the bike to the fullest.
How have you designed MotoGP 25 to appeal to those looking for an immersive simulation experience while making the game accessible to those more interested in the adrenaline of arcade racing?
Talarico: Gameplay-wise, MotoGP 25 stays true to its core. This year, we refined our gameplay simulative core to achieve what our players asked in regards to electronic setups and tyre management. The Pro Experience is designed to provide the players with the MotoGP gameplay that they know and love.
But this time around, we also wanted to offer a new game experience: something that could open the door to players more accustomed to racing on four wheels, in addition to MotoGP enthusiasts who are completely new to racing games. The Arcade Experience is designed to be immediate, fun, and makes it easy to pick up and race your bike to the limit from the get-go. It’s the perfect choice if you want to experience bike racing at its fullest, without having to tinker with setups and technicalities, and we’re confident that new players will love it.
Both the Pro and Arcade Experiences will have a subset of fully customizable settings, allowing the players to create their preferred setup and enjoy the game to the fullest.
From the bikes to the tracks, how has Unreal Engine 5 enabled your team to create an experience that looks more realistic than ever before?
Talarico: Of course, upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 gave us the opportunity to build new fascinating scenarios and revisit our main environments. We greatly improved the overall lighting of the game, focusing of course on the tracks: grass and trees have been revamped to appear closer to the real scenarios, and we reviewed curbs to provide a smoother riding experience.
We also expanded on the concept of the TV set that was the main setup of last year’s game: MotoGP 25 takes place in a virtual production stage designed to change dynamically and make the players feel like they’re about to start a race in any moment, but also giving them the feeling of being behind the scenes during the glorious MotoGP new-season presentation.
We are thrilled with the presentation of this year’s game, and we know that we can keep pushing the envelope in the future. We already have some ideas that we can’t wait to tinker with!
A lot of work has been put into the game’s audio. Could you please tell us how you achieved such an authentic soundscape and the role MetaSounds played in the process?
Talarico: MotoGP 25 features all new engine sounds, recorded with new advanced systems, and as you said, this was really a lot of work. Having the opportunity to work with clean recordings made with top notch equipment made our life easier and our product better, but we also made sure that every other aspect of the game sounded better than we ever did.
Our audio department did an outstanding job in every aspect of their work. From how the music flows in the game to the on-track gameplay, everything is rich, vibrant and, as you said, authentic. I think the testament to this work is the fact that real riders played a preview of MotoGP 25 and told us that it sounds exactly like the real thing: we couldn’t be prouder.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 a good fit for this project?
Talarico: MotoGP games are just like the real MotoGP, a technical feat where pushing the envelope is the key to reach the goal, year after year.
We knew that, if we wanted to reach our goals and stay on top of our game, the switch to Unreal Engine 5 was necessary. And, as per the previous answer, we’re so thrilled by the possibilities that Unreal Engine 5 unfolds that we can’t wait to dig deeper and experiment with aspects of the game that this year we only touched upon.
Were there any particular features of Unreal Engine 5 in general that stood out to the team during development?
Talarico: It would be unfair to point out a single feature, considering how thoroughly we use the tools in Unreal Engine to move everything you see in MotoGP 25. So, I’ll keep it simple and race-y: in MotoGP 25, we replicate 80 different prototype bikes, running on 22 real circuits replicated in game. This means working on an insane amount of spline levels, ideal trajectories, trigger-boxes—and all this work must be replicated for different bike categories, different circuits, and work with both AI riders and the players. Our gameplay designers know every inch of our tracks and, more importantly, how to make everything work smoothly with the tools provided by Unreal Engine 5.
With so much content being offered, how has Unreal Engine 5 enabled your team to streamline content development workflows?
Talarico: Milestone has 300 employees and works on different projects simultaneously, so streamlining the workflows and pipelines is essential. Everyone in the company can and often will contribute to the project at any moment, and this is only possible thanks to having Unreal Engine 5 as a shared base on which we build on different game realities.
Speaking of the amount of content, this is also true considering that we often rely on outsourced works: Unreal Engine is a staple tool for game makers, and our partners are used to following our pipelines and schedules to provide us and our players the best content.
Can you tell us a little bit about the character/bike customization options in the game and the UE systems that helped you deliver these?
Talarico: With the introduction of motard and flat track bikes, MotoGP 25 features a whole new set of off-road helmets and goggles as customization items for the player’s character. Those new items, of course, go in addition to the usual set of racing helmets which makes custom characters stand out and make each player unique. Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, every helmet, livery and detail of those items is vibrant, and reflects exactly how those technical materials and advanced paints would react in real life.
For the first time in the series, MotoGP 25 also features a new customization element, which is custom podium emotes: using motion capture technology, we recorded many celebrations that could be used on podiums, and that will add a layer of immersion to our gamers. This transition from reality to the game has been really smooth thanks to our animation team and the tools provided by Unreal Engine 5.
Does your team make use of the Epic Developer Community and if so is there any particular area that you have found helpful?
Talarico: Of course! It is a very useful resource that we use to find answers and to post our insights on development, depending on what happens during our dev cycle. We use it both for project-related issues, but mostly for heavy-duty research and development tasks that may come up during the development of the game(s).
What are the advantages of choosing an engine where all the features and tools are available to you out of the box?
Talarico: Working in Unreal Engine allows us to really focus on what we want to bring to the game. We developed years of knowledge in the engine, and we really use every facet of it to deliver the best game possible.
Using an industry-leading engine like Unreal also allows us to hire new employees that already understand what we need and how to do it, while our veterans can help them by expanding their knowledge and keep experimenting with the possibilities, especially in terms of UI and physics. Even if we tend to tailor-make some solutions for our games, having the chance to start from such an advanced start point like Unreal Engine is absolutely fundamental.