Exciting Content and Features Revealed for Wreckfest in 2018

Paul Jeffrey

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Wreckfest Roadmap 3.jpg

Lots and lots of exciting details revealed around the future of Bugbear Entertainment's excellent Wreckfest destruction derby style racing game...


Hot off the back of the recent major December build and subsequent hotfix updates, Bugbear Entertainment have confirmed plenty of development work is still underway back at the studio as the team continue to push for a final version one release later this year.

With updates and development having felt frustratingly laboured since the game released on Steam Early Access back in 2014, these past few months have seen an incredible upturn in fortunes as new content, features and refinements keep coming to the title at an impressive pace. With the big December patch now confined to the history books, the development team are back hard at work as they look to add the final polish before eventually porting Wreckfest over to current generation consoles.

So what exactly do Bugbear have in store over the coming months? Find out below:

NEW CARS
This is really a no-brainer – who wouldn’t want more cars? We know shiny, or in our case not so shiny but awesome nevertheless, new cars are something that everyone always loves so you’ll be happy to hear that we have a batch of new ones in the pipeline, including models inspired some very classic American, European and Japanese cars, some fan-favourites too!


CUSTOMIZATION PARTS
Yes, they’re coming – we’re working on adding customization parts such as bumpers, side protectors and what-not for every car. We’re also currently balancing the gameplay effect these parts will have – for instance, a heavy demolition derby style front bumper will make the car withstand more damage to the front but also make it slower due to the added weight, so these parts will add an interesting aspect of give-and-take to the gameplay.


EXPANDED CAREER
Seeing as the December Update only contained a preview of the career, obviously we’re also working on expanding it by adding the rest of the championships and tweaking the ones already in the game. Also, series restrictions will be shown in the series selection screen so it will be a breeze to pick up an eligible car. To spice up the career we’re also working on special challenge events with some very unique vehicles but more about those later!


NEW ROUTES AND IMPROVED TRACK ART
We’re making the final push to make the tracks look nice and dandy. As you’ve no doubt noticed there are still some proxy assets around, but you’ll be relieved to hear that for example those pesky gray prop vehicles littered around the tracks will be soon gone for good. We’re also adding a few new routes to the old tracks, including something very special that’s going to rival Crash Canyon in the amount of crashes!


MECHANICAL DAMAGE V2
We’re working on taking the mechanical damage to the next stage: the effects of the different damage states will be more meaningful, and we’ll have new visual and audial effects to add to the immersion. We’re also planning to implement a setting to choose between normal and realistic mechanical damage, so those looking for a more hardcore experience can have that.


OPTIMIZATION
Better performance is always high on everyone’s wishlist, ours too, and we’ve been researching ways to improve the rendering performance in particular, so improvements are very likely at some point.


USER INTERFACE
The current user interface is still being heavily worked on, so expect many changes until the final release.


As always, behind the scenes we’re also working on a number of important bug fixes and other improvements, many based on the feedback we’ve received from you. The next update will already contain some welcomed additions, such as a more detailed gamepad vibration effect, track length and surface info in the track selection screen, easier and better-balanced AI on easy difficulty and a new Pause Menu, to name just a few.

And yes, the million-dollar question – when is the new update coming out? We’re still working on almost every aspect of the game and while bumps in the road are entirely possible, our plan for now is to have the update out by the end of January. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted.

Wreckfest is available for PC with console versions due to release during 2018.

Wreckfest Roadmap 1.jpg
Wreckfest Roadmap 2.jpg


Check out the Wreckfest Sub Forum here at RaceDepartment for the latest news and discussions regarding the sim. For added excitement we have an already immensely popular and exciting Racing Club, details of which can be found here.

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Looking forward to the future of Wreckfest? Impressed with the development undertaken so far? Let us know in the comments section below!
 
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How is the FF and physics with a wheel? I don't expect pure sim, but it it decent?
Yes, absolutely. It's not a sim but "real" ffb wouldn't be that awesome in such a game :roflmao:
You feel the car, you feel the grip. It's a bit like dirt Rally for me actually. Feels very lose but grippy though.
Drifting is just fun, physics are believable.
It's kind of like a sim but with an "easy mode" filter laid upon it so you won't get a full shakedown over bumps, crashes etc. After touching this game with my g27 it's hard to go back to the Xbox pad!
 
What I'm interested in is performance.
I used to play this in some "early early" version (now it's just "early":D) and was quite surprised by really low game performance. Does anybody feel like they solve it ? How many fps do you get out of your pc ?
 
Yes, absolutely. It's not a sim but "real" ffb wouldn't be that awesome in such a game :roflmao:
You feel the car, you feel the grip. It's a bit like dirt Rally for me actually. Feels very lose but grippy though.
Drifting is just fun, physics are believable.
It's kind of like a sim but with an "easy mode" filter laid upon it so you won't get a full shakedown over bumps, crashes etc. After touching this game with my g27 it's hard to go back to the Xbox pad!
I agree. FFB is good enough. I just wish that if you crash big, like a head on, a little 5lb lump hammer springs out of your desk and hits you in the face. That would be really cool and realistic. :sneaky::)
 
What I'm interested in is performance.
I used to play this in some "early early" version (now it's just "early":D) and was quite surprised by really low game performance. Does anybody feel like they solve it ? How many fps do you get out of your pc ?
I'd say for what you get on your screen it's decent!
Everything stated below refers to 60fps + vsync without drops.

CPU isn't a problem I think but my GTX 1070 definitely likes this game...
I use 4x MSAA, everything on maximum.
Then grass one down from ultra to high, deactivated motion blur, reflections one down and the "effects" to "low".
Effects is the crucial one as it gets my GPU jumping from 40% load to 100% when set to high. It's mainly particles and if you get 10 cars in front on a dust track, hallelujah...

If you can live without the particle effects (like I did some time to use sparse grid supersampling), weaker GPUs should run it quite nicely. It surely looks good anyway! :)

What GPU do you got?
 
What I'm interested in is performance.
I used to play this in some "early early" version (now it's just "early":D) and was quite surprised by really low game performance. Does anybody feel like they solve it ? How many fps do you get out of your pc ?
https://www.youtube.com/user/kapitanTaifun/videos
check out "wreckfest rd supercut" and "wreckfest department" videos, theres fps counter in upper left corner, i have gtx 1070 and i5 4690k oc 4.4ghz
 
FFB doesn't communicate crashes. Dunno if this is intentional design choice, or if they plan to add it.

Some FFB options could be useful, now there isn't other than strength which in a way is good (they trust their vision of FFB, not shoving it to players responsibility like so many devs who can't make good FFB) but feeling impacts somehow would be nice
 
Ok, thanks for all the intel guys.
But still have to say... feels like the game still isn't among the properly optimised games. Even among just the newer racing games.
Seems like all you guys have GTX 1070 these days,:p yet you still can't go near Max settings in this game. I have a wreckfest gpu compared to you - GTX 780 (oc'ed 20% and i5 3570K oc'ed from 3.4 to 4.1 GHz) and I play Project Cars 2 with I would say higher settings than most post here, no problem whatsoever.
F1 2017 practically all to max, Dirt4 same and don't even let me say how much fps I squeeze from Asseto on max, Dirt rally, and some other racing games who look amazing and delivers stunning performance.
Ok, I'll so some more research then I'll decide. Thanks.
 
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Even though it finally received some much needed updates and patches, I still can not recommend it at the current price tag of 40 euros. This game also never seems to go on sale.

It's been on sale at least twice, last Christmas sale and some time before that when my friend bought it for a half price. So I guess there's hope it will be on sale again.

Though I must say that imo it's starting to be recommendable for it's price as the development has taken huge steps in last few months and looks like it will be finished soon™.

But having been there from the start of the early access I know it has been a rough and slow route to get where it is now.
 
Replays don't run as well for me as actual driving. For some reason. Replay doesn't have proper rewind/forward functions which makes using them a pain anyway, though

Driving itself runs fairly well, didn't use to but lot of optimization has happened already
 
Dev post from Bugbear forum.

Sorry not today
sad.gif
Was too tied up with the update and didn't have any time. We're racing against the clock especially in regards to the configurable damage but hopefully we will manage to get it to presentable (working) state next week, even though it will only affect mechanical damage for now. Speaking about mechanical damage, it's starting to make more sense now, with the higher setting it really does harm the performance and the added effects (smoke, sparks, gear grind audio etc.) add greatly to the immersion. Can't wait till you get to check it out!

About new game modes and suicide race in particular, it's not straight-forward to implement (otherwise we would have done it a long time ago knowing how much you'd like it) since our AI and nav mesh implementation is based on the assumption that the tracks are driven in one direction only, and suicide race would mean rewriting a significant bit of the code. That said, the next update will feature a new Speedway 2 route that uses the same exploit as Crash Canyon, i.e. everyone starts driving in the same direction but on the back stretch the routes go next to each other so that eventually players will be driving against each other. Also, the loops at the ends can now be taken in either direction (also in Crash Canyon) which makes more sense especially in multiplayer.

Oh, and pit maneuver is finally a score event
smiley.gif
It's actually quite a bit of fun trying to go for those now
.
 

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