Team Sonic Racing: how to adapt kart racing to the team aspect (Time Attack, rankings, difficulty...)

[Ajavalo]

The purpose of this topic to discuss the matter of adaptation of any well-known elements present in kart racing games to the team mechanics introduced in Team Sonic Racing. I think this is going to be way more interesting than I had initially thought; racing as a team vs. racing solo brings up a lot of potential in areas such as:

• Time Attack: we know this game will feature a Time Attack mode, but do you think it will allow team time attacks? In that case, how will your time be decided at the end? Maybe a sum of all three team members' times? Maybe only the best team member's time?
• Online rankings: in Online mode, not only will you be racing as a team of three, but your teammates might not be controlled by the AI, but by another random person! The rankings could be limited to Time Attack mode, as things would get very complicated otherwise... (I don't know much about racing game rankings, so I can't say much about this).
• Difficulty settings: will AI teammates' competence be dependent on a general difficulty setting, or will there be different difficulty options for teammates and opponents? Maybe the performance of AI teammates will be entirely dependent on how you set their vehicles' stats (which I suppose will be possible).

What do you think? Are there close enough precedents in other racing games that we could go by?

[jgcatindig]

On 6/30/2018 at 8:05 PM, Ajavalo said:

Time Attack: we know this game will feature a Time Attack mode, but do you think it will allow team time attacks? In that case, how will your time be decided at the end? Maybe a sum of all three team members' times? Maybe only the best team member's time?

I would bet there will be a solo mode and a team mode. The team mode averages or totals all of the player's characters. 1 team per player,  will go like a relay mode.  First character selected goes first. Each character has his/her own lap. All start on standing start. 

On 6/30/2018 at 8:05 PM, Ajavalo said:

Online rankings: in Online mode, not only will you be racing as a team of three, but your teammates might not be controlled by the AI, but by another random person! The rankings could be limited to Time Attack mode, as things would get very complicated otherwise... (I don't know much about racing game rankings, so I can't say much about this).

I'm kinda worried about this mode. There certainly will be arguing about who gets which character. And if those can't get satisfied, they may resort to throwing the game,  making it unfun.