Are They Ditched, or Are They Pending DLC? See Lycett’s Response
You may or may not have known this, depending on how close you listened to a wide array of audio samples from Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing that has circulated for a couple weeks now.
For those who didn’t have the ears for it before, it’s time to listen up. There’s a particular set of audio commentary tracks that were a part of that extraction in which the announcer is clearly referring to reverse courses that, for now at least, don’t exist in the game’s final product. Courtesy of Sonic Retro forumer nineko, you can find a ZIP of that audio here.
The tracks reference 8 courses–Rampart Road, Sewer Scrapes, Rocky Coaster, Shibuya Downtown, Turbine Loop, Roulette Road, Ocean Ruin, and Monkey Target–as having a reverse mode.
The question is, were these planned for ASR’s final release and cut, or is this the foundation of a future DLC release…or both? If the latter, assuming the courses in question have mostly been built with that in mind with minimal changes needed for a proper execution, we may have another DLC key on our hands. Though a better deal than what was recently put up for purchase, it may not sit well with fans who would prefer more time spent on original content, especially if this is essentially another unlock code for content already built into the game, and if it’s offered at a similar price.
UPDATE: Pretty quickly after we published the bulletin and the story, Steve Lycett commented on the SSMB about the unused lines:
As with all games, we recorded the commentary quite early on, so we recorded more than we planned to use, with some alternatives in case we made any late changes. Some things didn’t make it into the game, or made it in but in a different form.
The rivals one is quite interesting, what we *used* to do is have each character having a defined rival, so of course as Sonic, your rival would be Eggman. If you beat them in a GP, you’d get something extra. In the end we took this out as it wasn’t massively intuitive or clear, though… It still will give you a few extra miles even now for beating Eggman as Sonic in a race (or indeed any of the rivals we picked!)
If you’re expecting the un-used commentary to be used for DLC though, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
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Reverse tracks were something we originally planned to do, but as you’ve probably guessed, most of the tracks wouldn’t work the other way around due to some the jumps. We decided to focus on making them all fun the right way around! So if you do grab those VO clips that TSSZ has rather cheekily posted, now you know wh
So, it looks more like this particular component had been planned and cut, and less like we’ll see something in the future. Given what has been released, thought anything is possible as chatter continues to build for a pending DLC release.
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Yay, thanks for mentioning me :]
I was never a fan of reverse course (always irritated me in online matches of WipEout HD), but meh. Better than nothing. Probably wouldn’t pay more than $2 for it though.
To Barry and the troll faking a disease: Your IPs have been banned, and will continue to be until you can prove you won’t be trolling this site here or elsewhere for the foreseeable future.
(Also, you’re welcome, Svend.)
-T
I don’t see how the reverse stages wouldn’t be DLC at all. In fact, some stages don’t even need to be tweaked, like Shibuya Downtown which can be be lapped in reverse already, albeit, without the large jump. It’s all a matter of fixing it so your car doesn’t spin into the “correct” direction when you hit a wall or something.
@Setnaro The download might only be a tweak of a few kilobytes that literally just contains code that mirrors the original track(s) and reconfigures starting orientation, finish line crossing events, and which way is the “wrong way.” But there WOULD have to be some set of instructions telling the game how to process the track.
@n00neimp0rtant: Of course. That goes without saying. Still, it’s not like it’s a freakishly large data that needs to be inserted in, and perhaps there might already be data of that there. Like I said, I don’t think this is something that will be completely kicked out. I strongly believe it will be DLC later on.
Reverse Course huh? Hmm…not a bad idea but when does this come? I’ve unlocked everything by playing through the game including the modes of the Grand Prix, and earn every acheivements.