NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup Designer Diary #4

Online Racing

By Mike DeVault
Assistant producer, EA Tiburon

One of the most enjoyable aspects of NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup is the ability to sit down and play a multiplayer game against human opponents. Up until recently, the only way to do this was by using the multiplayer split-screen functionality. This multiplayer method was functional, but it wasn't ideal for gameplay, since the screen would get split up so that each player had his/her own.

Your racing skills will be put to the test when you take NASCAR 2005 online. Click "Stream for Free" for higher resolution.

Last year this all changed when we introduced online play to our NASCAR franchise. We now had the ability to allow players to compete against each other from coast-to-coast in order to have a little fun or settle some bragging rights. In our first year featuring online play, we had many different challenges…mainly just getting the system up and running and working properly. Our initial online implementation allowed for players to compete in head-to-head matches along with a customizable field of artificial intelligence cars. In NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup, one of our goals was to take the online portion of our game to the next level.

Increasing our online support from two players to four was an important goal for us. It was also more challenging than we had initially expected. Most of the games in the EA Sports lineup are head-to-head games, meaning only two total teams compete in a game. In NASCAR, however, this is not the case, and we wanted to allow up to four human players to compete in a single race. So to break this mold meant we were going to have to handle things differently, both in the gameplay and in the user-interface aspects. Now the game can support races with up to four human players.

This year's game also allows you the capability to add up to a full field of AI drivers to make things even more interesting. Another big element of our multiplayer effort this year was to enable gamers to compete in different racing series during online play. NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup allows players to compete against other online opponents in the NASCAR Featherlite Modified series, The NASCAR Craftsman Truck series, The NASCAR Busch series, or the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup series. This was a huge addition for us, since we felt it was important to open up and deliver a more diverse online racing experience. With four online racing series to choose from, there should be a series that appeals to just about everyone out there.

When you unleash a game to the masses in an online capacity, people are going to get creative. Sometimes this is not a good thing. A lot of times players will use their ingenuity to explore ways of cheating online. This is something we take very seriously, and since online play became a part of our games here at EA Tiburon, we've had our own group of QA testers whose job it is to find all of the potential loopholes that could exist before we ship the final version of the game. Stability is also a key to ensuring that the game provides a fun and immersive online gaming experience.

Inevitably, some players will find ways to skirt around some of the game's anticheating measures. The good thing about our online games, however, is that we are able to track much of the information that passes through our servers. This allows us to deal with a lot of cheats that players discover after the game ships and then deal with them. A strong community will also contribute and provide us with the information from their experiences with people that are out there trying to exploit the system. At the very least it allows us to identify the cheaters and deal with them as necessary.

We are very pleased with the results of our online features and improvements this year in NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup. As we continue to explore ways to improve the racing experience online, we will be constantly looking at things that we can do to improve future releases of the game. We listen to the things that our fans of the product ask for and look to implement features that will continue to grow and advance this online racing experience. We hope that all who read this will be able to enjoy those features as well. We'll be out there racing too, and we look forward to your challenge…but you'd better bring your A-game.