As excitement for Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled ramps up, we’ve been fortunate enough to keep getting information about it from developer Beenox. This is a game that pulls on your nostalgia strings. After all, it does what the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy did by offering a better look at a blast from the past. Games Radar+ conducted an interview with Beenox Creative Director Thomas Wilson that had Wilson discuss how the team effectively balanced modernization with nostalgia-factor, which is an important thing to get right.
One of the main goals during development was to keep Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled as close to the original as possible, at least in terms of how it feels. Wilson said:
I fell in love with this game because of the awesome mechanics and the awesome track design and the personality that comes out of the characters, so our responsibility was first and foremost making sure that we were recreating that as close as possible–to really have the muscle memory kicking in as you play Nitro-Fueled.
The idea of jumping back into the remaster to find that it feels exactly as it did 20 years ago is exciting and will likely satisfy long-time fans. Wilson then added that even though the gameplay and feel of the game would remain the same as the original, Beenox injected personality within the animations, which are a major difference between the two games. He noted:
We talked about online and leaderboards but we can also talk about the personality that can be injected into each of the characters, right? Because now these characters are fully rigged, fully animated, and that’s something we can take advantage of when we’re animating the characters when they’re racing – the reactions when they get hit, when they jump, when they win after a race. So there was a tremendous opportunity to actually inject more personality into it by keeping the same original gameplay that everybody fell in love with.
Trying to balance this within a remaster seems like a daunting task, but since Crash Team Racing already had such solid gameplay, there likely wasn’t as much that needed to be expanded upon, which may have happened in other game remasters. Where things get different are in its visuals, and quality of life improvements, like with the aforementioned animations and implementation of leaderboards. There was also confirmation that the original soundtrack would be included, as well as an entirely new one, with the option to switch between the two.
What’s great about this is that you can also tell that Beenox is a team full of fans of the original, which definitely helps when developing a remaster.
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled will release for PS4 and elsewhere on June 21, 2019.
[Source: GamesRadar+]
