Road Redemption Developer Outlines Plans for a "Living, Breathing World"

Road Redemption, when it was successfully funded on Kickstarter, attracted plenty of attention due to comparisons with the iconic Road Rash series. The prospect of an action racer in that mould, along with concept footage that showed solid intentions, helped the campaign to funding success. The project has had mixed times since, with one trailer that struggled to impress that was subsequently removed from YouTube, being followed up with much improved footage relatively recently.

Ian Fisch, who's behind the project, has spoken to Eurogamer about his ambitions and goals for the game. While acknowledging the shrinking market for arcade racers that drove him to Kickstarter as opposed to conventional publishing, Fisch believes it's a genre that, with the right approach, can provide unique gameplay.

One of the greatest things about Road Rash is that it's an action game, but your environment is constantly changing. You play a game like Arkham Asylum, or God of War, you're essentially just playing in a cube, a wrestling ring. It's a flat surface, the enemies are spaced out, you're not really using the environment. In Road Rash, you're having a fight and all of a sudden a car will come out between you and your combatant, and you have to react to that. Or maybe you pass a telephone pole, and all of a sudden you've got an opportunity to win the fight by kicking them into a pole. You have all these amazing emergent situations, where every battle is different, just because your environment was constantly changing.

...Having real physics and rigid bodies, that's something you could never do in the Road Rash series, even on the N64. It just creates all kinds of emergent situations, where you're causing wrecks, cars are spinning over the road. We're planning a way to have either harpooned enemies, or maybe lassoing them and flipping them into stuff. With physics there's an infinite possibility of amazing and funny and awesome situations.

In terms of the structure, meanwhile, Fisch explains more about the approach of an adventure rather than a set of races and tournaments, with suggestions of relationships with NPCs and gangs as you travel across the US.

Road Redemption is going to be a journey from one end of the United States to another. It's going to be an epic kind of roguelike experience where it's this constant streaming seamless world, and there are a bunch of different people populating this highway you're driving on, and they'll have memories. So let's say you accept the mission where one gang will pay you some money to take out another gang - the next time you encounter the gang, they'll remember that and come after you. It's going to be a living, breathing world.

Are you encouraged by the developer's goals for Road Redemption, and do you like these ideas? Let us know in the comments below.