FUEL Demo
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Saturday 1 August 2009 11:45

It's tricky. It's non-claustrofobic Motorstorm. But
I don't think they can pull it off. The point of
race tracks is that they are tuned to be balanced.
There are always certain points that have been
changed to make the track easier or harder at that
point. Rocks or other obstacles you have to avoid
to get a good lap time and the placement of those
points is crucial. Then the game is about finding
out those points and getting the skills to handle
them. But FUEL doesn't seem to have tracks with
that mechanism. It's big and while the graphic
detail is all there, the physical detail isn't.
There are no small rocks to avoid, just larger
structures. So it feels more like any open world
than something fit for a race game. It's spread out
large, but thin, so bigger isn't better.

As an open world it's great. The first thing that
came up in my mind was "Why am I not in an
Interceptor?". It captures the vastness. But just
like Liberty City, it's not what it looks like. I
haven't figured out what the trick is, but there is
a discrepancy between how big it looks and feels
and how big it is. You can drive up to the top of a
hill and look towards the horizon. But when you
drive to some point in the distance you'll be there
pretty fast, even if you're not moving very fast.
Reality is much bigger. In GTA IV that's not an
issue because it's not a race game, and they have
avoided mentioning distances and velocities, but
for a race game it probably doesn't add up. The
other issue is that there have to be recognizable
items in the map so you know where you are, and
that doesn't work if every tree, truck and farm
looks the same.

But what I miss the most in a world like that is a
character and a story, which could be as flimsy as
DJ Atomica type storytelling. Just like in
Motorstorm it's some surreal world where for some
reason insanely big race stuff is going on. These
games may hint at Burning Man, Mad Max and events
like Bonneville Speedweek, but fail to really
connect. Their worlds are empty and meaningless.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/play/2009/08/01/fuel-demo/