As you may have seen by now, GeneRally 2 launched into Early Access yesterday. We're really happy that people are enjoying playing, and we're actively going through all the feedback (both positive and negative) to see what we need to improve and see areas of friction people are having.
The purpose of this post is to update on a few of the recurring things that came up over the past day or so, and to outline what we'll be working on in the coming days and weeks in response to that!
Collected Feedback
These are some of the things players have told us over the first 24 hours since the game's release - the big ones have their own section below, but we've read every piece of feedback and every comment, and have added them to our player-feedback tracker!
The AI
This is our number one priority at the moment. The AI launched in a state that was less-than-ideal, and a lot of bugs became apparent - particularly in the championship mode - right away.
GeneRally 2's AI is aiming to be smarter and more fun to race against than the average arcade racing game AI (most of which stick solidly to one line, and act like the player doesn't even exist) - however, in our current implementation, the AI are too nervous and too prone to making curious avoidance manoeuvres.
We have today been testing some initial improvements to the AI, aimed to improve their confidence, and their ability to follow the racing line in difficult situations. They should still display the slightly more natural behaviour many of you liked - they'll continue to make mistakes, take different lines in search of speed, etc. but they will do this in a more controlled and sensible fashion.
The update we put out in the next day or two will be an initial step, and we'll continue to improve from there.
The Driving Physics
A big part of GeneRally is the satisfying driving feel - and this is something we want to ensure is present in GeneRally 2. At the moment, particularly for the Formula and General cars, that feeling is sadly lacking. Many users reported those two cars feeling "floaty" and difficult to drive.
Thanks to the detailed feedback from several community members on the GeneRally 2 Discord we have been able to identify some specific issues in the handling of certain cars that caused unintuitive or unpredictable behaviour. Markku is hard at work tweaking the setups, and you can expect improvements coming into existence over the next days.
In addition to this, several people highlighted the engagement of the reverse gear being a significant issue for them in some cars - and this will also be fixed in the near future.
The In-Game UI
The in-game UI is definitely not the final version of the UI. Many areas of the UI are in need of an actual "design pass" to bring them up to a higher quality, and make them more convenient and friendly to use.
Over the coming weeks, we'll be making lots of improvements to the UI - including moving the in-game car status areas to a more friendly location, adding timings and a live-updating set of racing standings.
Other Feedback
There are plenty of other things users gave us feedback about. This is not a complete list of them, but here are some of the more common requests:
- Saved driver presets;
- More colour options for cars;
- Change ghost car to be more translucent, and able to be disabled;
- Track player statistics;
- Add keyboard rebinding;
- Allow the menus to be navigated with keyboard and controllers;
- Increase damage scaling to go past 100%;
- Implement a zoom override;
- Improve camera controls in the Track Editor;
- and more...
Many of these items of feedback will see progress over the coming days and weeks.
What's Next?
Whilst we can't give exact timelines for all of these things, we do want to give you a bit of an idea of where our priorities lie right now.
This Week
We'll be working on more improvements to the AI and physics problems described above. You'll also most likely see some fixes for bugs and the addition of some small quality-of-life improvements for the game and the game UI.
Next Week or Two
We'll bring more improvements to the AI and physics, and start to work on some of the larger high-priority features (like keyboard rebinding and controller-enabled UI). These features might not arrive next week, but we will begin working on them.
We'll also start looking at improving the design and implementation of some of the UI in the game - starting with the in-game UI and the track-selection screen.
After that...
We'll continue on with our plan for Early Access - improving in response to this kind of player feedback, and working on things like Online Multiplayer and GR1 track importing.
You can expect blog-posts from us on the state of development and what we're focussing on - and we'll be adjusting our course and schedule based heavily on player feedback.
Thanks
All-in-all, we'd like to thank everyone who has given feedback about GeneRally 2 so far, and we are eager to make sure that we deliver improvements to the game in all areas! Please continue to give feedback to us via whichever means is most convenient for you (Discord, Steam forums, email, etc.)
Discussion
If you'd like to engage with other users - and with us - about GeneRally 2, the best place to do that is on our Discord server!
Workshop
In closing, here are a few of our favourite examples of things people have uploaded to the Steam Workshop since launch... why don't you check them out?
From top left, clockwise:
- Ehmni by KubixekTV
- Arizona Cardinals by En4cer
- Country Bridge Bash by DANi
- Kago Pass by PandaTruenoo
If you want to support us and the game's ongoing development, and purchase GeneRally 2 in Early Access, you can find our Steam Store page here.
If you've already purchased and would like to help us out, please consider leaving a review for GeneRally 2 on Steam!