Today we officially announced Ignite’s new racing project, Simraceway. More than just a game, Simraceway is a constantly-updated online racing world featuring highly-realistic cars, precisely recreated tracks and completely authentic vehicle physics. We haven’t yet announced all the details—you can expect more on content, licenses, and features soon—but we have highlighted the title’s core focus: to do online racing really, really well.
As we see it, there are still a couple of key challenges for anyone looking to create a truly great online racing experience—challenges that no game has yet overcome. The first of those is something that doesn’t get spoken about much but it’s possibly the biggest barrier to enjoyment of a multiplayer racing game. We’re talking about effective player skill matching—the ability of a game to accurately read and then match players based on their skill levels.
You see, we believe that every single one of Simraceway’s great features—its appealing, licensed cars, its challenging, laser-scanned tracks, its comprehensive race marshaling and anti-cheat measures, and its great prizes—will be lost if our players are dumped into a race with someone much better (or worse!) than them. It’s simply not fun to cross the finish line miles apart from your rivals!
So with this in mind, we’ve got to work on solving this problem—and doing so in a way that doesn’t require our players to spend precious time unlocking levels or earning licenses that are often woefully below their true abilities. Instead we’re looking to introduce a system that measures skills in real-time—one that can dynamically and accurately match players to create truly competitive, live, multiplayer racing without the hassle.
We know it’s a complex problem to solve and realize it will take us a while to dial it in perfectly but we feel, thanks to years of research and some cool new technology we’ve got coming down the product pipeline, that we’re close to cracking the oldest problem in the history of multiplayer racing.
We’ll keep you updated!
