tux_peng {l Wrote}:Think about the game STK took inspiration for the story mode from. Diddykong.racing didn't have a very deep story either.
Don't forget
Crash Team Racing, the main inspiration for STK, from my point of view. However, Diddykong is from 1997 and CTR is from 1999. Both looked like STK 0.6 (actually, the contrary). We are in 2016 playing STK 0.9.2, that has a nice engine which allows track makers to reach a upper level in graphics. I really like arcade games with simple graphics, but STK reached another level when Antartica became the engine and dynamic light, shadows, fog as well textures in 1024 became the standard. Makes no sense to recede graphically and I think this is not being questioned. The question is: how graphically complex the tracks must be: full of objects or simple and focused on racing above all?.
Let me clarify: It's obvious that every track must have a story and,
for story, I mean a theme,
with defined - as clear as possible - visual style which may group objects, colors, sounds and songs capable to tell a story for themselves while the gamer drives around. I told you the real history behind the story present on my
1750 just as cultural complement, but this information is not required to understand the theme of my new project and like it. I don't expect a foreigner or even a Brazilian will look at my track and may say,
"Well, this is an obvious track placed in some Brazilian baroque town by 1700s when a gold rush happened. It's clear this small village was founded by a French admiral and pirates came later to take the gold bars from there". The track has it's own story - a small village with baroque architecture somewhere where Portuguese is spoken. There's a port and some pirates too. Nice. The gamers will understand the theme and run fast. They will care less about the story, but they will enjoy a lot the graphics with a cultural coherence. The theme is clear: small town with a port located in paradise-like landscape centuries ago. There are pirates too; maybe, some treasure.
It's all. Nobody asks the developers to include scrolling texts telling the the cultural details of the historical background in every track. We are not making games with screenplays like movies neither RPG.
No one must be obligated to tell a story based on the world real history, but nobody should forbid the authors to tell a story through architecture, objects, costumes and songs. Actually, this already exists in STK.
Candela City does this,
Paradiso Island also and
Cocoa Temple, too. You can realize you are racing in Paris, in Princess Juliana Island and Mexico or somewhere in Central America where Aztecs invented the chocolate.
XR 591 is perfectly understandable as a track somewhere out of the Earth while
Bovine Banyard is a clear rural area. So, why not to explore all the potential of antartica, hi-resolution textures and strong graphic cards to show a track with stunning graphics including many objects and eventual characters? So, I'm in favor of the freedom for authors of tracks, but with common sense. Some few additional characters and textures in the game will not make it worthless to download. Not all authors will include their own characters and textures. Anyway, there's always the freedom to hide complex tracks with stunning graphics on the addons site while you include empty tracks on the main game
. That's why I'm for thematic packages instead a list of obligatory tracks (except for the history mode, for while).
tux_peng {l Wrote}:I agree that some of the tracks do feel kinda empty. There are some old tracks like mystic island that would work great in the new engine & others like.canyon and Rudy's icetrack had potential; but I don't know if the original authors are still around or if the *.blend file is available.
Except for Icetrack, the rest are still available in Blender files. I have them too.