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Time trials was a new tech that you developed that unlocked all of these location teams to start adding races here and there. How did that come about?

TL;DRTime trials were designed to unlock location teams to place races anywhere, offering trusted in-game tracked times and rally-style solo play, replacing earlier scramble racing, with some future goals mentioned but not detailed.

James TylerSystems Designer, Mission Feature Team

Well, as you mentioned, unlocking those areas for those teams was one of the major goals there. And we thought, when it comes to racing, how can we make an implementation that can be used in so many different ways? Because obviously the PU is like a sandbox; you want to be able to just plunk this down wherever you want. You want to make interesting locations. So when it came to racing in general, we looked at what came before. We had scramble racing in the past and we wanted something new. And we looked at what people enjoy doing, and we looked at the community in general as well. There's so many amazing racing communities out there. And what they'd done is they had these leaderboards on a website that people raced around. Now, you had to trust the person had done it in that time, or there was no way of them actually having their times tracked officially. So we ended up coming together, me, Ed, Luke, working on this design together and thinking of the best ways of basically giving them those capabilities of being able to do that in the game. Time trials, akin to rallying, was kind of the first thing that came to my head. I'm a big fan of rallying, like Colin McRae and whatnot. And it also benefited in a way that you didn't need a million different people in that one location to do the race. If no one else came to that location, you could still have a fun time on your own. That led us to the current implementation, really. We do have some future goals, and I think Ed will speak more on that. But it was super fun to make.

Star Citizen Live›Mission Features·
Published on this date.3 Feb 2023