CSR2 preview – CSR Racing sequel set to speed onto iOS and Android

The original CSR Racing game was a big hit on mobile. After its release in 2012, it quickly sped to $12m of monthly revenues – a startling amount at the time, although less so now with Candy Crush Saga having made around $3.6m a day in 2014.

Still, CSR Racing motored on to 130m downloads on iOS and Android, and was a big part of the reason why social games publisher Zynga paid $527m to acquire its British developer NaturalMotion in January 2014.

Now under Zynga’s wing, NaturalMotion is working on two tentpole titles that it hopes will spark an upturn in the fortunes of the publisher, which never quite managed to translate its FarmVille-fuelled dominance on Facebook into mobile success on the Candy Crush / Clash of Clans scale.

Dawn of Titans, unveiled earlier this year as an epic war-waging strategy game with mobile-friendly battle times and controls, is one of those. Now the other has been revealed too: CSR2, which is a sequel to CSR Racing.

Which explains why the Guardian is sat with NaturalMotion boss Torsten Reil as he shows off his shiny LaFerrari supercar, playing on his iPhone but projecting the game onto a floor-to-ceiling cinema screen to show off its graphics. It’s fair to say he’s in confident mood.

“This is not just the best-looking racing game on mobile, but the best-looking racing game full stop – including console. In some ways, we’re going beyond the quality of console,” he says.

This may sound like empty boasting – “console-quality visuals” has been an overused phrase in mobile gaming since before the app store era – but NaturalMotion’s history developing animation technology used for console franchises including Grand Theft Auto, Reil has weight behind his comments.

The studio hired the former racing studios boss from console publisher Codemasters to be general manager of the CSR2 team, which includes developers and designers who’ve worked on the likes of Need For Speed, Burnout, Forza and DiRT on console.

“It’s a console pipeline and console technology, but obviously a mobile game in terms of the play patterns,” says Reil, who has previously talked about his “Starbucks-line” rule of mobile development: that you should be able to play a session while waiting in the queue for a coffee.

Like its predecessor, CSR2 won’t be a free-roaming racing game, or even a traditional track-based one. Both focus on drag-style racing instead, with short, sharp races where slick gear changes are the key.

We don’t actually spend much time racing during the preview, partly because NaturalMotion is still working on the race visuals, and partly because Reil wants to show off his cars.

“CSR2 is about building a collection of supercars: it’s not about having just one car in your workshop and racing any more, it’s about having multiple cars in the garage,” he says. “And we’re not making any compromises in terms of detail: we even have one full-time guy who just does car paints: and his background is in real-world car paints.”

Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, Pagani and other manufacturers are on board, with Reil lovingly showing off various vehicles’ exteriors and interiors, and noting that each is based on the manufacturers’ own CAD data for the cars.

The risk is of whizzy visuals and petrolhead-level detail over playability. “We don’t just want this to be a graphics-fest for the sake of it. We’re using the visuals to be believable. We want you to feel that this is real,” says Reil, in response, while casually popping the bonnet open to show off an engine’s finer details.

NaturalMotion is also very proud of its car configurator tool – “the best car configurator in the industry: not just the games industry, but the car industry” is Reil’s view – and the way new cars roll up to your garage rather than simply appearing out of thin air when you buy them.

But what about the actual racing? Many of the details are being kept under wraps – Zynga and NaturalMotion’s media campaign for CSR2 is similar to a big-budget console title, which is another pointer to how they’re presenting it.

From the couple of races the Guardian sees, the graphics are certainly a big step on from CSR Racing (which was hardly shirking on that front, for its time) while the gameplay remains focused on getting a good start then nailing your gear changes.

“There will be new controls and mechanics, but we are not revealing them yet,” says Reil. “It’s still about drag racing, and it’s still an arcade game at the end of the day. The believability and authenticity is the car ownership thing, but the racing is where the fun comes in.”

CSR2’s social features are also under wraps for now: “Social gameplay is really important to us, but it’s not about sending tweets and spamming people on Facebook,” says Reil. “How do you play together in a meaningful way? We have some ideas...”

How will CSR2 make money? In-app purchases in the main, with Reil saying all the right things about NaturalMotion’s determination not to create a cynical cash-grabber – an accusation levelled against many freemium games by critics of the sector.

“We try to make our games playable entirely without paying any money, not least because the majority of people who post reviews on the app stores are playing for free, and you want a really good rating,” he says.

“A rating of 4.5 stars and above is an indication that you’ve got it right, because people complain when the pinch is too high. The way the market has developed, most free-to-play games don’t pinch in a way that’s noticeable very early on.

“They wait for a while before even giving people the option to spend money. It needs to be about giving people the opportunity to spend, rather than trying to force them.”

What happens with the original CSR Racing, and will players be able to bring any of their data (or cars) across to the new version?

This kind of migration went very wrong for Zynga with its Zynga Poker franchise, when a new version angered many players, and eventually forced the company to relaunch the old game as a “Classic” title. Avoiding such a fate with CSR Racing and CSR2 is surely high on the priorities list.

“We expect that CSR 1 will still have a bunch of dedicated gamers playing it, and they will have a selection of cars that they have won and paid for in the multiplayer mode. But there is also a whole bunch of people who are now ready to play the next game,” says Reil.

“That, initially, is going to be the bigger audience, we think. Will CSR 1 players be able to bring anything across? We’re not ready to talk about that either, but it makes sense for there to be some continuity.”

CSR2 will soft-launch in a few countries in the coming weeks, before making its full debut on iOS and Android later in the year.