This is an IGN opinion piece from Phil Iwaniuk, decorated winner of many Gran Turismo Sunday Cups who learned to feel, not think in 1999's Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer. It's a philosophy that may impair his opinions, but yields many a purple sector.
How many times have you bought a cheap banger, entered it in a series of races called something like the ‘Rookies Cup’, and used the proceeds to unlock new events? Since Gran Turismo arrived in 1997 and pioneered that vehicular rags-to-riches structure, it feels like we’ve repeated that identical racing game campaign mode grind countless times.
In fact, when you pause and look back at the great and good of racing games, it seems like all of them, from Need For Speed to Dirt Rally, were about putting you at the bottom of a big pile of events and having you gradually climb your way up to the faster races in the best cars. The genre’s been laser-focussed on innovating when it comes to visuals, physics models, tire simulation and the like, but it’s been stuck on the same solo gameplay structure for way too long.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer flies its speeders against the grain in many ways. More than just a game that gets both the cinematic IP and the feeling of racing right, it’s an experience that seems to be visiting from a parallel universe. One where the familiar hand-holding game design philosophy didn’t take root, and the Gran Turismo career mode didn’t become ubiquitous.
“Why hasn’t someone thought about that before?” Fuse Games co-founder and CEO, Matt Webster, reflected on the game’s unique run-based career mode when IGN spoke to him back in May. It’s so obvious that it would make for a fantastic racer when you see it implemented like this: instead of working through a to-do list of championships, you pick from a selection of different sequences of events, each with their own risks and rewards, and if you lose too many times along the way you’re booted out of the whole championship. It’s back to the start for you, and no excuses. Even before you get familiar with the nuances of the mode, there’s something about knowing losing actually matters that feels refreshing.
“Gaming is risk-reward”, says Webster, “but the risk has to have a consequence.” In Webster’s previous racing hits like Burnout, that consequence looked like a spectacular wreck, your car resetting on the track, and you having some catching up to do.
“But we've lost consequence because, in many racing games, we don't really spend the time on crashing,” he adds. “It’s been eroded away. So [we] looked at different genres that you could steal from, because genres have done that in contemporary gaming. We see lots of hybrid mechanics going in, and actually racing is a bit of an outlier that hasn't done that.”
Instead, racing has gone in one of two directions recently. The post-covid sim racing boom seemed to convince developers of the more hardcore titles that the PvP-focused iRacing model is king. Why spend such a lot of effort on a career mode built around PvE racing when your player base is queuing up in lobbies, waiting to provide more intelligent and unpredictable competition than even the smartest AI drivers? The success of Assetto Corsa Competizione and Le Mans Ultimate has only strengthened that argument.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-star-wars-galactic-racer-solves-driving-games-biggest-problem
