So this is one of the latest Four-letter word racing games. According to Joystiq, Fuel is going to be in the Guinness book of world records as the biggest console game ever in terms of the playable environment you can traverse.
I am, by default, interested in all racing games until I hear negative comments about them, so this one is definitely on my radar now. Having the largest terrain (in a console game ---- does that mean there is a PC game with even larger terrain?) is a good way to grab people’s attention. Better than just having a four-letter name.
From what I’ve seen of this, it looks pretty spectacular. Racing games aren’t usually my bag, but the free-roaming nature of this means some potentially superb Wacky Races-esque cliff barging might be happening, which I am completely in favour of. I also like that you get your own helicopter to provide you with stuff. I am keeping an eye on it.
The scale comparison thing is weird. I have an image of Hong Kong, St Lucia, Singapore and the Isle of Man tesselating. I could not tell you how big that area would be; my guess would be bloody huge? Isn’t the standard “surface area measurement that’s too big to comprehend” Texas? That asteroid is the size of Texas! That free-roaming racing game covers 22% of the area of Texas!*
I suppose a PC game with larger terrain might be one of the flight simulators - don’t they model entire countries, albeit at a far smaller level of detail?
Absolutely stupid world record. Any competent coder could beat that record, tonight, if they wanted to. Sure, it wouldn’t be as pretty, but it’d be to-scale navigable terrain larger than 5,560 mi^2. And I could even deploy it on the 360 via XNA so no-one pulls the console qualifier. =)
That said, looking forward to the game. LOVED DiRT.
I wonder how the physics will feel for this. I really enjoiyed DiRT, despite the simplification of the car dynamics (magic braking, etc), but any more than that and it just becomes silliness. I really can’t get into the Burnouts or PURE or anything that lets me bounce off trees at 60 mph and not penalize me for it. My brain just won’t let me enjoy them. But I loved the roving rally-type country missions of GTA:San Andreas, and this seems to be in that vein.
OT-- speaking of Dirt, Dirt2 seems to be taking the franchise away from actual rally-ing and more into the wierd extreme sport US glitz, girls and blaring speakerphone area which I don’t understand or particularily care to explore (NSFS … prostreet, was it? went there, and it was damned annoying. Just let me race my car already without all the hype culture 'n tatoos 'n shit…) /end rant
Most of the Codemasters racers I’m familiar with lack the “caRPG” element I gravitate toward. Am I finally going to be able to amass a huge collection of cars to drive around as I please?
I’m trying to remember the sizes of some of the maps we played in my old IL-2 squad online - they were large enough it took close to an hour one way and back. Some of the naval maps were, of course, huge, but i think the Leningrad map was at least 200 x 400 km or so.