Update Speculation thread

Lol.

 

So what's the ETA on the update again, based on the spreadsheet? Mid-March? I've forgotten.

 

I'm not sure what the spreadsheet said, but mid March sounds reasonable on the early side, mid April on the late side.

 

Here's the spreadsheet:

 

This update should bring some interesting surprises that havent been mentioned in the devblog. Updates with new cars, in this case the Vivace usually also come with a bunch more stuff. So far we just know of the car and the improved AWD system, which makes me wonder,
What else is coming on this update that we have not seen or mentioned before?

 

Honestly I'd like to see some form of "usable spares"
Like a button you press if you have a flat tire, and your spare tire will be used, same for the driveshafts of the hopper crawler

 

Updated maps?

 

I disagree with this concept. Every map should have equal police difficulty, although having faster or heavier units with advanced tactics at higher heat levels would be a nice touch.

I've actually been kind of stuck on the front of suggesting improvements to the police system. As of now it suffers from a vast number of fundamental issues that there is no point in suggesting minor things as fixing the system in general should be the highest priority.

In other news though, I would not be surprised if we see a lot of police oriented changes. Besides the rumored police AI improvements and new police lighting, apparently Nadeox1 is moving into content creation. He has made a lot of the police related content for the game, so he might be able to fill in a ton of the gaps the game currently has, however he really needs to make sure he does his research and not accidentally produce inaccurate or anachronistic content.

 

I wonder if the ambulance will get the new lighting changes.. The ambulance box lights are very dim and I don't even notice they're on sometimes.

 

probably with phase 2 of the gavril revamp

 

I'm curious as to what's going on with the map remasters. Small Island, USA is basically confirmed at this point, but I highly doubt that will be the only map getting an upgrade, as it's relatively small. Port and Industrial Site would be nice to see, and a JRI remake would be both unexpected and amazing at the same time. However, Small Island, Port, Industrial Site, and JRI to a degree are all "abandoned industrial" maps, and I hope that each map gets its own distinct personality and thus a reason to play on these maps, alongside filling in all the empty space on these maps.

 

I would love to see JRI remastered with a town, with houses and such.

 

JRI needs a setting change. It's definitely not Hawaii, it's fairly obvious that it doesn't resemble Hawaii whatsoever. A Japanese conversion inspired by the southern islands is what I would go with if I was in charge, as we have a ton of Japanese vehicles, even JDM vehicles, the latter of which make no sense on a European or American map.

 

I really hope JRI keeps the semi-abandoned industrial/military theme tbh. I love abandoned infastructure in general and I really hope to see that theme expanded in JRI. Overgrown abandoned runways and a pillbox, maybe an abandoned plane, low capacity infastructure, etc...

Of course the setting needs some work, since it's clearly not Hawaii. And some town or something since it's really weird having an active harbor and observatory without any real residences.

 

Some abandoned stuff should remain, I love it too, but at the same time, how many completely abandoned maps do we need?

As of now, the following maps are completely abandoned:

• Small Island, USA
• Port
• Industrial Site
• Derby Arenas
• Jungle Rock Island

 

Small Island could use a complete change of theme, there's a lot of places that the remaster could go and abandoned industry on such a small island is a weird idea.

I'm not sure what to do with Industrial Site and Port. I can't imagine any decent remaster of either map keeping the roadways. They could be combined into one giant active harbor/industry map, which would just be a big version of the harbor on Italy with a different climate.

Derby Arena doesn't really count, it's just some tracks/arenas with that theme opposed to a full map.

And JRI has the tropical + military aspect rather than a generic abandoned theme, so it's not like keeping it with that theme would have too much overlap with another abandoned industry map.

TLDR: JRI is at least differentiated from the others. Small Island could work with any theme, Port and Industrial are in a weird situation, and Derby Arena is just some tracks with that backdrop rather than a normal map.

 

I'm thinking that small island, industrial, and port will be combined into one map. In some of the media released recently, we've seen video from some map that does not currently exist in game. It's too big and the roads we saw don't line up with the current small island, so I believe those three maps are getting put together into one map that will take inspiration from the Texas coast, like Galveston. Those three maps are the only remnants from launch back in 2013, and the devs can't be happy with their quality any more, so the only logical thing to do would be to make an entirely new map combining those old maps.

 

• Derby Arenas is obviously not really going to count. It's just a thing for scenarios.

• It's not really possible to merge Port and Industrial Site, as that would break scenarios and quickraces. Port has a ton of unused land, and Industrial Site also has a decent bit too. With all that empty land, there's a lot of potential for new areas. Also, they are both extremely similar, so setting changes might be in the plans to differentiate the maps.

• Small Island is horribly empty, and I hope they add a lot more locations to the map, as of now it's just a relatively flat empty map. I still have my fingers crossed for it to take a Outer Banks inspired direction, but I'm not so sure given the new footage.

• JRI is a massive map, the same size as ECA, WCA, and Utah, and making the entire map abandoned would kind of be a waste, and it would be extremely hard to fit into the plot of the (hopefully) upcoming career mode. A good compromise would be having populated areas on the main roads, and the abandoned areas being more hidden off of back roads or gated off with alternative paths to access them, similar to real life. This would allow the abandoned locations to still be present, but not dominate the entire map. Nonetheless, as of now it's still a giant empty generic jungle island, and a re-theme would be nice, hence why I'm still pushing for a Japan inspired rework for the reasons I mentioned previously.

I highly doubt they're merging maps, again because of the fact that merging maps would break a lot of existing content, and they specifically said that they want the remakes to have reverse compatibility.

On another front though, I hope that Port, Industrial Site, and Small Island have a bit more variety in their settings. Basing them all on Texas would get a little repetitive. For all we know they could have a French theme for one of these maps to coincide with the upcoming Cherrier Vivace.

 

they were already getting revamped, if you look at the dev blogs from the end of 2018. We just never got them in the past year

 

Time out.

From current job listings:
"In order to support our on-going and future development plans in the entertainment, industrial and research fields we wish to hire a developer with experience of porting Windows applications onto Linux and game console environments."