This even plays out in the pace notes: “We think about the pace notes at the beginning,” Stéphane said. It’s a dramatic transformation that can often take a tight, twisty and enclosed stage to one that’s more open, sweeping and higher speed.
originally there was a forest, but let’s cut all the trees and make a new mountain to add something more memorable for the player.” “We take that chance to dive into this country, say this is pretty good, this part is not, let’s skip that part totally and let’s add this. Let’s focus on just one track and say what have we learned from all the previous countries?’,” Stéphane added. “We said, ‘OK, Corsica is pretty good, but it’s pretty old. Take the Tour de Corse, returning from WRC 8. Every stage that is carried forward from a previous release is reexamined by the devs sometimes they only have minor tweaks, but track overhauls can also be quite extensive. Just as important is that this deconstruction can be reapplied to levels from previous games that have been carried forward or are being reintroduced – WRC Generations is ballooning to feature 22 locations. So we take the interesting parts, deconstruct what is good about it, what makes this rally different and we recreate a country with this.” 60km is way too much! And of this 60km, there’s maybe 5km or 10km that is appealing to the player. “ some rallies are very long and we don’t want the player to play too long a session. Sometimes it’s the colours, sometimes it’s the type of vegetation and the topology of the terrain - Kenya is very flat, and Monte-Carlo is much more mountainous. “When we start building a level, we deconstruct a country and what makes the atmosphere of this rally. “Before we were more reproducing and taking inspiration, not really creating and doing things narratively,” Stéphane explained.
ISLAND RACER FAILED TO START GAME MAC FULL
Those longer stages are important for the hardcore players, and while KT Racing has always created abstractions of rallies with occasional landmarks, as opposed to full 1:1 replicas of stages, their approach has evolved over time. We don’t want to throw them in directly with a big stage that, in Monte Carlo for example, can last for 25 minutes for the first time.” Already with that, sometimes the player is very, very tired because there’s a lot of concentration. There’s a good reason for that, as Lead Level Designer Stéphane de Bank told us: “When you first play a WRC game, the first track is almost 4–6 minutes of play. WRC 7 added longer Epic Stages to meet fan requests, but what do they actually play the most? Shakedowns exist in real life - they’re on Thursdays, and they’re a way to test the car, the set up and stuff like that - and is quite immersive and realistic, but also fun for the players.
“Epic stages are important to the experience, but we see that people love and prefer to play the short stages. “I think that bringing a realistic rally experience goes with those longer stages,” Alain admitted. They’ve done this while also tempering demands with the reality of what people actually play through their game’s telemetry.
They were perhaps a little late to truly accommodate the trend toward more simulation in racing, but quickly answered requests for longer stages in WRC 7, to bring in real world elements and build out the game’s core features like in the career mode. Thankfully, WRC 5 was successful enough to lead to WRC 6 and beyond, in a yearly franchise that allowed KT Racing to continually evolve the game. WRC 5 was a solid, start for KT Racing’s franchise, but with plenty of room for improvement.
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