As part of The Crew Motorfest Season 9, RC car racing has been added in a unique yet entertaining form. Instead of just giving the players small little RC racers to drive around Hawai’i, the team at Ivory Tower made them a little smaller than normal vehicles.
Add on some jumping, and the normal zippiness of RC cars, and a whole new car type is added to one of gaming’s biggest car festival games. We got to chat via email with Julien Hummer, Creative Director of Ivory Tower about developing this new type of car gameplay for their ever-expanding car festival.
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Firstly, why RC cars? They said the whole idea came from an idea of why Ivory Tower hasn’t done RC cars yet. “This idea came from a test: What if we reduce the size of the vehicles in our game? And it works!”
The Crew Motorfest Season 9 wants players to immediately feel that difference with the RC Cars.
Hummer continued, “The Crew Motorfest is built around the idea of celebrating car culture in all its forms, and RC car culture is absolutely a part of that. It’s nostalgic, it’s universal, almost everyone has a memory tied
to an RC car. It wasn’t a ‘why not,’ it was more of a ‘why haven’t we done this yet?’ With the open world
of our game, the TrackForge, it felt like the perfect stage for this kind of experience!”
Driving an RC car in-game isn’t exactly one-to-one with driving an RC car in real life. Julien talked about the decision to make it more of an RC fantasy than developing a true RC car experience. “RC cars have that twitchy, hyper-responsive handling, they react instantly, they slide in a very particular way. We wanted players to immediately feel that difference the moment they switched to it. It had to feel like a toy, but a fun toy.”
Speaking of a toy, Julien went into more detail as to why the vehicles developed weren’t just tiny RC cars on small tracks. Specifically, it was a design choice to help readability in the open world. “If we had scaled them to true RC size, they’d be nearly invisible in an open world as large as ours. You’d lose the car in the environment, the sense
of speed, and maybe the fun.” He added, “By scaling them up just enough, you keep the RC feeling while maintaining playability and visual presence. We always prioritize what feels right over strict realism.”
RC cars are synonymous with jumps and stunts, so there’s pleny of them in Sesaon 9.
Adding on to what feels right, the RC-specific driving mechanics include jumping. Not just off ramps, but at-will to get over obstacles quickly in tight corridors. We talked about the choice to add jumping as a mechanic. To Julien, jumping is synonymous with RC cars, and the team’d be remiss to not add it.
“RC cars are synonymous with jumps and stunts in the collective imagination. Anyone who’s ever had one as a kid knows the first thing you do is look for a ramp. They add a vertical dimension to racing that our other vehicle classes simply don’t explore in the same way, opening creative choices on tracks that would otherwise feel flat and predictable.”
Finally, we chatted about what went into developing RC cars for The Crew Motorfest. In fact, if you’ve watched the live-action trailer for this season, you’d see the team playing with RC cars to get the feel right. Development also involved French RC Champion, Adrien Viallet. According to Hummer, Viallet’s input helped get the feel to a point where it’s as fun as it is.
The team at Ivory Tower nailed the feel of RC driving.
“We partnered with Adrien Viallet, French RC Champion, who came directly to the studio so our developers could experience what a real RC car looks and feels like. He also got hands-on time with the RC Frenzy playlist and the RC content in general, sharing his feedback directly with our teams. Having that kind of real-world expertise in the room was invaluable.”
He even said that developing RC cars led to internal playtesting, having a little too much fun with their world. “There’s something about RC cars that brings out the kid in everyone. A lot of internal playtesting turned into people just hunting for the best jumps in the open world rather than testing what they were supposed to! That emergent behavior told us we were onto something really fun.”
After already playing through the new RC Frenzy playlist and driving around the open world with an RC vehicle, the team at Ivory Tower nailed the feel of RC driving. In fact, its iteration may be even more fun for a layman driver than actually driving one around in the driveway. With the freedom to explore Hawai’i and what is now possible with the track editor, The Crew Motorfest‘s creativity has no bounds. Especially when a racing festival of all forms (i.e. flying, boating, driving, Motorbikes) adds a great, albeit unexpected, sister-racing type.
The Crew Motorfest and the RC Frenzy update is available now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.
