“The genre as a whole is becoming quite stagnated,” says community lead Ben Ward. “There hasn’t been a really big game for a long time. But you look at other genres and there are these really big games that hit the mainstream, that bring down barriers.”

Ward blames that stagnation of the driving genre partly on “racer frustration”: the inaccessibility of simulation-type games in which a single crash or taking a corner less than optimally puts you at the back of the pack for the rest of the race.

To avoid that pitfall, Bizarre Creations determined to do “something completely different” with Blur. “Don’t be expecting PGR5,” says Ward.

As a result, Blur will be “our look back at the racing genre, at what we were doing before, what other people were doing, finding the stuff that did and didn’t work and trying something really new, fresh and ambitious.”

This racing genre shake-up comes in the shape of a focus on fun and accessibility. This amounts, in part, to flashy power-ups picked up on the track, including a nitro boost, mines, homing weapons, barge and shunt. 

The trick to Blur’s power-ups, says Ward, is that they require skill and strategy. “There are certain other racing games you may have played where there’s a blue shell that flies over and nukes the whole first five cars,” he jokes. “You just press the A button to make that happen. They basically decide the result of the race. Our power-ups are not like that at all.”

In the course of a race, power-ups can be collected and saved in multiple slots, allowing for use of strategic combos at crucial moments.

Blur’s unique selling point, however, is not its power-ups. The game’s storyline, says Ward, “is delivered through something new: a social network.”

A virtual social network, displayed as a Facebook-style group populated by your rivals, appears between races to flesh out the plot behind the driving, the persistent AI characters chatting about the action so far.

“It’s not War and Peace, but people don’t want that from racing. It’s just a premise,” says Ward.

That there’s online multiplayer goes without saying, but there will also be four-player splitscreen. There are 20 cars on the track in a Blur race, whether driven by AI or real players. “You are always jostling for position and trading paints,” says Ward.

Race environments are mixed; we were shown tracks set in Hackney and an off-road, desert setting. The action seemed as fun and aggressive as promised, though it remains to be seen whether the reaction quips and comments from AI drivers get repetitive or grating over time.

The vehicles are all licensed, too; we were shown a Nissan Nismo 350Z (“our accessible car”), as well as a Dodge Challenger (“balanced for an expert player”) and a Bowler Nemesis, best suited for the game’s off-road action.

Blur is planned for release in autumn of 2009.