Normally, it is gamers who want to play demo versions of their favourite games before they can buy it. However, Racing Studio boss Guy Wilday too wants to put up a demo of SEGA Rally on the Xbox Live as well as on the PlayStation Network.
Guy Wilday told Eurogamer, “We’ll look to do potentially 360 and PS3 downloadable demos before release. We’re looking at exactly how the demo’s going to work and what we’re going to do. The balancing act with demos is always obviously not to give too much away. We want people to get the experience of the game without giving the game away. So that’s our challenge, we’ll get some more bits of the game finished and then we’ll make the final decision as to exactly what we’re going to do.”
They also sent information about the Deformable surfaces that will feature in SEGA Rally. Here it is:
- As with the original SEGA Rally arcade cabinet, in single player mode the new SEGA Rally is about racing successive laps of the track against a number of opponents. Although, this time as well as AI players, players can race each other online or head to head. As players race each successive lap in the game, they and their competitors churn and wear the track leaving a scrubbed or rutted track surface behind. Unlike other games which have tricked players into believing they are cutting up the track with visual trickery, SEGA Rally really is deforming the surface and this will influence the gameplay in a number of ways.
As well as learning the race tracks to gain split-second advantages, players will start to see, hear and feel nuances in taking one racing line or another. For example, players might see a curve made by another car through some gravel, which if they follow will help them gain speed, whereas if they take a fresh route through the gravel it could potentially slow them down. It’s these gameplay elements that give extra depth, is what players expect from a next-gen console and is something no game has done before.
SEGA Rally has been developed by SEGA Racing Studio and will release for the PS3, Xbox 360 and the PC in Autumn 2007.