MotoGP '07 announced

By Robert Purchese Published 27 February, 2007

For PC and Xbox 360 in autumn.

Roaring onto the starting-grid this afternoon is THQ, who's announced a fresh new motorbike adventure for Xbox 360 and PC, due for release this autumn.

MotoGP '07 will expand on last year's efforts by adding 800cc bikes, more tracks, fresh next-gen visuals and more customisation options than ever before. Plus there'll be all the latest information from the 2007 racing season, online tournaments and pink-slip racing, as well as revamped GP and Extreme modes.

"THQ's MotoGP titles have shipped in excess of 1.5 million units and are critically acclaimed for pushing the limits of realism and console technology," said Bob Aniello, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, THQ. "With MotoGP ‘07, THQ raises the bar yet again for both core gamers and racing enthusiasts."

We really enjoyed racing around at hair-raising speeds in last year's MotoGP '06, perhaps a more gentle learning curve and improved load times can make this new title even more essential. You can read our review elsewhere on the site.

Of course, it's not the only bike engine bubbling on the grid ready for the next-gen race, with Koch's SBK 07: Superbike World Championship due for PC and Xbox 360 in October. Perhaps the niche world of two-wheelers finally has some fierce competition.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (30) Latest comment 5 years ago

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  • effinjamie #1 5 years ago

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading that Climax Studios had been sold, if so who will be developing this one?

  • krokomkiller #2 5 years ago

    Great, I´v played my Moto gp 2006 demo more then GoW.

  • #3 5 years ago

    Bertie, can you find out who's developing this?

    I've read that Climax were contractually obliged to THQ for one more game.

    I've also read that the developer of the game is not Climax but is yet to be announced.

    Please, put me out of my misery :D

  • Uncle_Fishboy #4 5 years ago

    And better rain effects, and less framerate judder. And being able to change the decals of your bike once you'd set them to offical decals. Basically remake the original xbox game but with better graphics, instead of the hugely dissapointing 360 version that looks to have been rushed out (which was pretty much admitted by the dev team)

  • sharpfish #5 5 years ago

    agreed - number one priority is elimination of all screen tearing and jerky frame rates.

    After that anything is a bonus.

  • BraveArse #6 5 years ago

    mapster +1

    iirc climax are in the employ of Disney now... :( ... I fear this will not be anywhere close to the same calibre of game

  • ralphwolfenstein #7 5 years ago

    Climax are developing it, albeit for the last time due to the BVG buyout. Hopefully (as a swan song for the series) they'll make this the best yet...

  • crazyhorse174 #8 5 years ago

    No PS3 then?

    Bit strange, is it not?

  • BraveArse #9 5 years ago

    The Playstation moto gp games are an entirely seperate game done by a japanese dev. They're related only by the series they represent.

    Good to hear that it's Climax that are doing it.
    Edited by 1 at 27/02/07 @ 19:55

  • IAmBatman #10 5 years ago

    > iirc climax are in the employ of Disney now

    Only the racing studio.

  • SuperBas #11 5 years ago

    I'll certainly be getting this for the PC. :D

  • GamesConnoisseur #12 5 years ago

    I ll wait for review (on EG where else?!) or trial it via demo as I purchased MotoGP 06 on the strength of previous two stonking great Xbox game but was disilliusioned after all that tearing (much worse on VGA lead).

  • effinjamie #13 5 years ago

    Wait for the EG review, who said of the prevoius game "Meanwhile, on a technical level, GP '06 is phenomenal." and made no mention whatsoever about the attrocious framerate and tearing!

  • Mr_Brown #14 5 years ago

    Will probably get this, would rather they sort out the customisation which has not changed since the first game. Why is their no paint option, instead of those shite symbols. Also much better leathers customisation or be more creative with the designs. Wouldn't mind also, more concentration on the moto gp part rather than the exreme mode, which wasn't that good. Maybe 250cc's moto gp etc?

    Though I already know what we're gonna get. A smoother looking version of Moto GP 06, with hardily any changes a few new tracks, bikes and a new extreme mode. Also I bet you the custom mode isn't even touched. bollox.

  • #15 5 years ago

    The last EG review hit the spot, but they did miss out a trick on the tearing and frame rate problems. In a racing game like GP it's important not to have either, it's really offputting.

    I've not a single shred of doubt that the new version will be smooth as silk, as they can build on the gorgeous graphics of 06 while tweaking the performance.

  • FooAtari #16 5 years ago

    I loved the MotoGP games on the Xbox, but was very disappointed with the 06 on the 360. I'm kind of sad to see this has turned into another yearly franchise.

    I hope this one is much better than 06 though, the framerate and tearing was awful.

  • Beano #17 5 years ago

    "agreed - number one priority is elimination of all screen tearing and jerky frame rates."

    I'll second that also... since the first MotoGP on Xbox, every sequel has gotten worse and worse framerate - the Xbox 360 version was incredible jerky and glitchy.
    Why can't Climax seem to understand that a smooth 60fps framerate is critical for the sense of speed in a game like Moto GP?

  • JackyB #18 5 years ago

    hi, can anyone tell me the best way to connect my 360 to my shiny new HD TV? I am pretty sure it aint the component cable you get with the premium console pack.

  • DiscoMike #19 5 years ago

    "hi, can anyone tell me the best way to connect my 360 to my shiny new HD TV? I am pretty sure it aint the component cable you get with the premium console pack."

    That is the best way. The next best way would eb to use a VGA cable if your telly supports it.

  • JackyB #20 5 years ago

    cheers disco mike. So component is better than VGA? i thought it would be the other way round. Also, is there no way of making use of my HDMI sockets? i thought that was the point of HD?

  • Darren #21 5 years ago

    MotoGP '06 was a massive disappointment for me, far too similar (but inferior) to MotoGP 3 on the Xbox except with added "next-gen-ness" in the form of slowdown, bugs and nasty v-sync tearing, most noticeable when cornering. It was clear to me that the game had been rushed out and was not finished.

    I have high hopes that this new game will be a vast improvement on last year's game, it had better be if it wants my money this time round. A new development team and a brand-new engine (?) must surely be exactly what this series needs?

  • Darren #22 5 years ago

    'Wait for the EG review, who said of the prevoius game "Meanwhile, on a technical level, GP '06 is phenomenal." and made no mention whatsoever about the attrocious framerate and tearing!"'

    LOL

    I remember reading that and thinking the reviewer must surely have played a different version of the game to me, perhaps the finished product, or possibly they had a completely different definition of "technical competence". Maybe they played the game on a 14" black and white portable from 20 feet away?

    Whatever, MotoGP '06 looked extremely pretty at times, I'll give it that, but on a technical level is was far from phenomenal in my view and was clearly rushed. This was supported by the comments from Climax after its release when they admitted that they'd had problems optimising the engine and THQ pressured them into releasing the game too soon before it was complete.

  • BadBoyBonner #23 5 years ago

    Postmortem of moto gp 06 on Gamasutra
    [link url=http://gamasutra.com/features/20060808/motogp_01.shtml
    ]http://ga masutra.com/features/20060808/m...[/link]

    What Went Wrong?

    1. Framerate

    All the MotoGP games by Climax have to run at 60fps. It’s a completely non-negotiable part of the project. And so when, in January 2005, we sat down and hammered out the feature set for MotoGP’06 with THQ, the requirement of 60fps was writ large.

    Getting launch or near launch titles to run at 60fps is always going to be challenging. You start development on hardware (or sometimes an emulator) that bares scant resemblance to the final product – and final hardware usually only shows up very late in the cycle and even then you’re lucky if you get more than a handful of kits.

    In the beginning we planned fastidiously to hit the magical 60 mark, but at that stage we had little idea of the final hardware so our only option was to make all our assets scaleable. We’re lucky that all our tools are built around modelling higher order surfaces and so at a touch of a button we change a bike from 1,000,000 polygons to 1,000 polygons. The same goes for the environment. And our exporters will scale the textures or vegetation to whatever limits we desire. Basically, we thought we had all angles covered.



    Now, I’m a console programmer as are most of my colleagues. It’s been 10 years since I released a PC game. This lack of PC experience led us to overlook something that would have been obvious to a PC coder. The single biggest performance drain on MotoGP’06 wasn’t the number of vertices or textures but the number of draw calls.

    In November 2005 our game was running at 12fps, with the render loop taking nearly 2 frames.

    That month news came through from Microsoft that the changes to the Xbox360 SDK that would allow us to circumvent these draw commands wouldn’t be ready in time for our launch. We were in very serious trouble indeed.

    Neil, one of our engineers, set about moving the render loop onto its own processor core. This was a major engineering challenge that took 6 weeks to complete, but even then the renderer was running over a frame.

    Another engineer, Matt, eventually solved the problem by writing an offline automatic occlusion system. It would travel round the track and take snapshots of the scene every few yards – and query the GPU to see which draw calls resulted in pixels being written to the screen. At run time it would not execute draw calls that didn’t contribute to the scene, and this cut our draw call count in half. The system has to revert back to frustum culling if you stray too far from the track.
    Edited by 1 at 28/02/07 @ 10:15

  • BadBoyBonner #24 5 years ago

    2. Loading Times

    The new generation of consoles have up to 8 times the memory of the previous generation and yet the DVD read speeds have increased by only about 3 times. Even assuming a perfect data read rate it would take about 32 seconds to fill 512Mb of memory. In practise you need to factor in seek times as the game loads different files, and so MotoGP’06 takes about 40 seconds to load a level. And 40 seconds is a long time.

    There are many different ways of speeding up load time from having fully stream-able worlds to keeping as much as possible data resident in memory. The old MotoGPs employed none of these techniques. They’d never needed to. They could fill the Xbox1’s memory in 12 seconds and better than that they could dump all that data to its internal hard-drive so that next time round it loaded 10x faster.

    On the 360 we were aware of our shortcomings but the engineering effort required to rectify them was so huge, and the launch window so close, that they never got addressed.

    On our next game this will be a high priority.

  • malteaserhead #25 5 years ago

    @BadBoy

    I don't think they mention the tearing in that article...
    Do you think they know about it? ;)

    /remembers whinefest


  • malteaserhead #26 5 years ago

    @yellowtruck

    I know nought about these things but remember reading this (can't say if it is correct, or relevant, though)

    The 360’s DVD drive pulls information off of a 12X DVD disc twice as fast as the PS3’s 2X Blu-Ray does off of a Blu-Ray disc. The 360’s 12 DVD drive has a speed of 16.5 megabytes per second compared to the PS3’s 2X Blu-ray drive which has a speed of 8.7 megabytes per second.
    Edited by 1 at 28/02/07 @ 10:44

  • BadBoyBonner #27 5 years ago

    Yellowtruck - Malteaserhead is right - hence a "feature" of PS3 being to pull a set of core data onto the PS3's Hardisk to speed access up (as access times are slower as well - but see post below).

    Malteaserhead - while am sure we both know that they know about it (lol) would have been nice to bury a Vsync - on off in the game an see the impact it had (worries over live aside).

    If memory serves me right, think I remember Bizzare R&D revealing that they could have completely re-written the PGR3 rendering engine about 3 weeks before shipping - at which point the Producer nearly had a cardiac arrest, seems PGR4 will not be running at 1024x600 then (well, fingers crossed).
    Edited by 1 at 28/02/07 @ 11:37

  • BadBoyBonner #28 5 years ago

    N.B. obviously Blu-Ray drives will be speeding up in future revisions of the PS3 hardware. A side benefit at the moment though is this allows the PS3 to operate very quietly.

    Playing Crackdown on the 360, late at night with the sound down, makes me wince at the painful sounds emanating from my 360 - with the disc on extraction emitting enough heat to act as a hot plate. Might have to take the lid off and give it the Dyson treatment.

  • BadBoyBonner #29 5 years ago

    How fast can you read/write data on a Blu-ray disc?

    According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc. The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware. If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.

    Blu ray
    Data transfer rate (data) 36.0Mbps (1x)
    Data transfer rate (video/audio) 54.0Mbps (1.5x)

    DVD
    Data transfer rate (data) 11.08Mbps (1x)
    Data transfer rate (data) 10.08Mbps (1x)
    Edited by 3 at 28/02/07 @ 11:45

  • BadBoyBonner #30 5 years ago

    PS 3 = 2 x 36 = 72mbps
    360 = 12 x 11.08 = 132.96mbps

    If your wondering what on earth the difference where the data is on a disc can make to the speed it is read, this is a simple explanation [link url=http://t elcontar.net/Misc/maths/CAVvsCLV.php
    ]http://te lcontar.net/Misc/maths/CAVvsCLV...[/link]
    Edited by 1 at 28/02/07 @ 11:51

  • BadBoyBonner #31 5 years ago

    Yellowtruck - I am sure your aware that DVD speed's already exceed x12 (cd-rom went from x 2 to x52). Fact is by the time x12 blu ray drives are widespread the new Xbox-Live (seems a better name than Xbox720) console will (probably)be out, and will again be released at a transitional time as the 360 was (i.e. uncertain times of format) - it may not even have a drive at all (unlikley - but depends on broadband infrastructure) however - I think it will be a cold day in hell before the Xbox features a Blu Ray drive.

  • ChromeMud #32 5 years ago

    @yellowtruck

    Well I can see you're a Blu-Ray/Sony fan.
    You assume too much when it comes to the PS3 winning the HD movie format
    war.I don't see this Trojan-Horse plan securing anything.
    Consumers ultimately choose what they want and if I was after a movie player
    I wouldn't be considering a games console but a dedicated HD movie player
    and seeing as HD-DVD players seems to be cheaper I would go with them.

    I hope the next MotoGP will be the best one.MotoGP 2 was my favourite by a
    long stretch.
    Edited by 1 at 28/02/07 @ 15:41