RACE 07 - The WTCC Game is the latest in a rich line of recent racing sims from Swedish developer SimBin, which includes the excellent GTR 2 as well as last year's first WTCC game.

GameSpot UK recently had a chance to put some questions to Diego Sartori, the man at SimBin looking after the game's creative direction, ahead of the game's international October release.

GameSpot UK: What changes from last year’s RACE – The WTCC game do you think fans of the series will appreciate most?

Diego Sartori: First and foremost we think that the added content is what the users will appreciate the most for a variety of reasons; one of course being that more tracks and more cars are always welcome additions to a racing game, secondly the diversity of the new content makes the game span over many very unique driving experiences and therefore many new challenges.

Added content would not matter much if it was not for the new game modes or improvements to already present game modes, such as World Leader Boards, Online Time Attack and Custom Championship.

RACE 07 puts you right in the centre of the action.

GSUK: How much was the development path for RACE 07 determined by user feedback from last year’s iteration?

DS: We do listen to our communities and we do take their feedback into account when starting a new project, but we are often way ahead of them in terms of what we internally would like to have in the game. We just have a better understanding of the process, we know the limitations of the game engine we are using, so even though we might share a wish for a new feature, for example a new game mode or even some sort of new content, it could be that we simply can not get it in the game due to license or technical reasons, and then this ends up on our internal wish list and that is rather long I can tell you.

However feedback on our games do greatly impact the future of a game series, we listen and try to adapt to the market as best we can, if we didn’t we would be out of business fast I fear.

GSUK: What can you tell us about the game’s community-oriented features?

DS: RACE07’s support for custom skins surely is the most in-your-face feature of the game when it comes to communities, already for the Demo we can see that the communities are embracing this new feature, lots and lots of new fantastic looking skins appear every day on the community forums.

Real SimRacers and real SimRacing teams in the game should also appeal and based on the initial feedback we are getting from this I can reveal that we will do more of this in the future and we are prepared to take it one or two steps further.

The Leader Board support is another community aspect of the game that we hope will grow big and become a community-oriented feature of the game, we would like to see national Leader Boards initiated by local communities and we do hope to one day see as many national Leader Boards as there is countries using our game.

One last comment on the community aspects of the game should be about how we find some of the talent we need for our productions in the very same communities, many high profile positions in the development team are currently occupied by people originally head-hunted from the communities and we are constantly looking for more talent...

Single-seater races are one of this year's most obvious additions.

GSUK: How do you deal with the challenge of making a game that is both compelling online, and satisfying offline for those who prefer to play on their own?

DS: This is a big challenge and one could say that by not focusing on one or the other 100% then neither will be 100% once in game, I do however think that we have managed to find a nice balance between what makes a good offline racing and a good online racing game while still keeping the appeal of the game bigger than just for the hardcore SimRacers.

The best way we think is to combine the two types of game play as much as possible and as fluently as possible, we feel we have achieved this goal with the inclusion of the World Leader Board support and the Online Time Attacks.

The biggest difference between RACE07 online and RACE07 offline/single player is the life span of the game, many of our users will use this game until a new game in the series is released. They will join leagues or enter competitions, or they will race in pick up races online. We added the Custom Championship function and the Car Filter option to game’s single player segment in order to create some of the same level of longevity, the possible combinations of tracks and cars when setting up a new Custom Championship are endless and we do hope that players will find new and cool challenges for them selves through this part of the game.