NASCAR Racing 2002 Season Q&A

By Staff, GameSpotPosted Jan 18, 2002 6:20 pm PT

Producer Tom Faiano answers our questions about this sequel to NASCAR Racing 4.

Without a doubt, the best driving game released in 2001 was Sierra and Papyrus' NASCAR Racing 4, the latest installment in a series that has been pleasing racing fans for nearly a decade. The game walked away with our driving game of the year award and was named one of our top 10 games of 2001, and even though it was released very early in the year, it is still being enjoyed by armchair drivers everywhere. But with a sequel already in the works, Papyrus isn't wasting any time in following up on its exemplary racing sim. Logically dubbed NASCAR Racing 2002 Season, this game will improve upon NASCAR Racing 4 by using enhanced graphics, incorporating the latest roster of teams, and including a number of changes. To get more insight into all these new improvements and additions, we sat down with Papyrus producer Tom Faiano.

The new driving lessons mode will introduce novice players to the basics of racing.

GameSpot: Traditionally, there has always been a two- to three-year gap between releases of successive NASCAR Racing games. Are you aiming at EA Sports and its model of releasing annual versions of sports games with NASCAR Racing 2002 Season?

Tom Faiano: Well, NASCAR is a seasonal sport, and any game that models it as closely as ours certainly lends itself to an annual "face-lift," if you will (add the current season's teams, drivers, paint jobs, venues, and so on). But to just do that isn't really enough. NASCAR Winston Cup racing hasn't changed too fundamentally since our series started in 1994, so the challenge becomes finding ways to keep things fresh for the hard-core players while still increasing the game's overall accessibility.

GS: What are some of the major changes that fans of the series can expect to find in 2002 Season?

TF: Let's see. We've included all-new drivers, teams, and paint schemes for the 2002 season; added the two newest NASCAR tracks (Kansas Speedway and Chicagoland Speedway) and one original track (a three-mile oval with no restrictor plate); and we've improved the sound and graphics. We've also added a new mode called driving lessons to teach novices the fundamentals of driving and racing, and a set of track tours (narrated by NASCAR champ Darrell Waltrip) that go into greater detail about the finer points of driving each circuit in the game. There's also a new replay editor that lets you add your own graphics, sound, and other effects to your saved replays. The driving lessons and track tours that ship with the game were created with the game's replay editor. There are two new driving aids (digital steering assistance and the ideal racing line), as well as improved features for multiplayer server administrators (grief players can now be more effectively dealt with--NASCAR Racing 4 had some issues in this area).

GS: NASCAR Racing 4's engine produced some amazing graphics, and yet you just said that you've improved upon those visuals in NASCAR Racing 2002 Season. Can you talk about some of these visual enhancements?

The resolution of all the car skins has been doubled.

TF: We've doubled the resolution of the car skins and many of the track surface textures. Since we're using DirectX texture compression (at about 4:1), we end up using only a little more than half as much texture memory as NASCAR Racing 4. Folks running the game in Direct3D should notice crisper textures. We've also increased the detail of the car models. OpenGL is included as well, but it does not benefit from texture compression.

GS: Have you made any changes to the physics model from NASCAR 4?

TF: We made some major adjustments to our damage model. It is now easier to get damaged, and there is increased aero drag when driving a damaged car. Engines can be damaged a lot more easily in collisions, and tires wear more quickly when using high amounts of camber and/or very high tire pressures.

We've changed our restrictor plate model to match the changes NASCAR made for 2002, and we made a few other small tweaks as well--improved the camber thrust calculation, engines can now backfire, and we now display roll couple information (a very useful tidbit for the savvy setup guru).

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