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Destruction AllStars arrives on PS5 as part of PS Plus today, but that wasn't always meant to be the case. Lucid Games' vehicular combat game was originally designated as a launch title, although Destruction AllStars was delayed from November 12, 2020 to February 2, 2021.
Back in October, Pete Smith, director of product development at Sony XDev Europe said "Destruction AllStars is a multiplayer game that’s at its best when you’re competing with gamers online from all around the world. We want as many people as possible to experience the mayhem on PS5, and what better way to do that than to provide the game to our PlayStation Plus members?"
It's just a matter of time
"Because of scheduling, the earliest possible time that we were able to launch on Plus was February."
Colin Berry, game director
In our recent conversation with Colin Berry, the game director of Destruction AllStars, we learned that the delay was necessary because of scheduling conflicts within the PS Plus framework. "We are really pleased that we're launching on PlayStation Plus. That was something that the team wanted to do and that was something that XDev wanted for us as well; we pushed for it quite hard. And we managed to finally get agreement that we can launch on Plus, but, because of scheduling, the earliest possible time that we were able to launch on Plus was February."
Of course, despite being ready to launch in November, Lucid Games has been taking full advantage of the additional window of opportunity. "It [the delay] gave us a bit of extra time as well to polish things up over the last couple of months, which is great," says Berry. The studio is grateful for the additional time to work on its chaotic 16-player multiplayer racer because it's only too aware of the audience base that Destruction AllStars will have available to it from day one. "We're gonna have the biggest audience that we could hope to have because of being on PlayStation Plus on the PS5. I think the tie-in rate of this kind of thing must be massive."
Inside Destruction AllStars: How Lucid Games is bringing the next generation of vehicular combat to PS5.
With Destruction AllStars rolling out today, Lucid has done as much preparation as possible to ready its servers – although, given that this is the studio's first live-service game, it's also anticipating some hiccups here and there. "We don't know how many people are going to download it and then not play it for three or four days, or who will play it immediately. So there is a little bit of scariness in that."
"But we've done a lot of testing behind the scenes. A lot of load testing on the servers too, and so we're pretty confident that things will hold up. I think it's difficult with online games – and I don't think people necessarily always realise how difficult it is to launch an online game – because you can never truly test, obviously, everything. You can never really account for, you know... no matter how many testers you hire, and how much load testing you do, you can't account for 200,000 people hitting a login server at the same time," Berry says, laughing. "Games fall down all of the time, don't they? You know, we are nervous, but we are hopefully in a really good position as well."
