NASCAR 21: Ignition Releases in 10 Days to High Expectations from Fans

NASCAR 21 Ignition Coming Soon 01.jpg
With just over one week to go until NASCAR 21: Ignition is released, there is optimism in the NASCAR community based on what Motorsport Games has revealed so far about the upcoming title.

A few months ago, when it seemed like Motorsport Games had a major announcement every few days, one of the biggest pieces on news surrounding the game developer and publisher was the reveal of NASCAR 21: Ignition. The concept of a racing title using the Unreal 4 engine for visuals and rFactor’s physics engine for the driving experience seems like a sim racer’s dream come true.

The title focuses on the NASCAR Cup Series, and Motorsport Games has been deliberate in distancing themselves from the NASCAR Heat game series. The Heat series had developed a reputation for underwhelming fans of NASCAR, and the hope is that Ignition represents a rebirth of the official title of one of the most popular auto racing series in the world.


Reception of the subsequent game teasers and trailers on the official Motorsport Games YouTube channel has been overwhelmingly positive, with each receiving 95% or more likes. The team has also given the public a few peaks behind the curtain as far as the development of the cars and tracks, and an introduction to some of the members of the development team.

NASCAR 21: Ignition was even playable for NASCAR event attendees recently. Motorsport Games brought the game to select races in recent months for fans to try. While some cell phone footage shot at the live demos has popped up on YouTube, it’s difficult to say whether the title will live up to its potential. Questions have been raised about the level of customization possible in Ignition, and some footage seems to hint at flaws in the AI. But, with the full game not yet shown and many post-release updates surely still to come, there is optimism in the community that NASCAR 21: Ignition will be the game fans have been waiting for.

NASCAR 21 Ignition Coming Soon 02.jpg


NASCAR 21: Ignition is scheduled for release on the 28th of October on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Be sure to check back with RaceDepartment for a full review shortly after release. Let us know what your expectations are for this title in the comments below.
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About author
Mike Smith
Mike Smith
I have been obsessed with sim racing and racing games since the 1980's. My first taste of live auto racing was in 1988, and I couldn't get enough ever since. Lead writer for RaceDepartment, and owner of SimRacing604 and its YouTube channel. Favourite sims include Assetto Corsa Competizione, Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2, Automobilista 2, DiRT Rally 2 - On Twitter as @simracing604

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Comments

JocelynTurmel
numbersevenhull said:
@Austin Ogonoski

Some of your posts are welcome and informative, however I do not feel it right to single out solo members of this production team based on their CV. If they make public comments about their game by all means hold them to account, but I can not see how it is either right nor proper to point the finger toward individuals based on limited knowledge and working assumptions (such as foreigners may not speak better English than yourself).

I think you should delete your last post, it's inappropriate and potentially libellous
Click to expand...
It's all public information.
 
Austin Ogonoski
numbersevenhull said:
@Austin Ogonoski

Some of your posts are welcome and informative, however I do not feel it right to single out solo members of this production team based on their CV. If they make public comments about their game by all means hold them to account, but I can not see how it is either right nor proper to point the finger toward individuals based on limited knowledge and working assumptions (such as foreigners may not speak better English than yourself).

I think you should delete your last post, it's inappropriate and potentially libellous
Click to expand...
So now just making basic observations about the staff of a new sim developer based on publicly available info is libelous. Gotcha.
 
numbersevenhull
Small development team, limited experience, limited time scale - of course all fair points for discussion, but citing individuals with no knowledge or documented proof of their work within a company?

That's the kind of hubris that sees you in court. Can't say I didn't warn him.
 
Mekonrider
Nascar should have just got Sega to re-release Daytona USA as the official game. I'd buy that for a dollar.
 
Ole Marius Myrvold
Staff
Premium
Kyuubeey said:
He does raise a fair point though; can mobile game designers really produce a compelling racing sim about a series they'll have a hard time to get direct contact with? It's hard enough for the veterans who have a decade or more in sim dev and close contact to personnel on the ground.
Click to expand...

Yes. Direct contact can be a big help, but mobile game designers/designers of completely different games can make great games that's not directly related to previous experience.
Playsport Games did the transition from mobile Motorsport Manager to PC-version quite good.
DICE went from pinball-games, to (at the time) good racing simulations/games (STCC, NASCAR Heat, RalliSport Challenge), and then over to the Battlefield series.
Geoff Crammond of Grand Prix Series - fame had absolutely zero interesting in racing in general until he started working on Revs.
Warthog Games is even featured on Crappy Games Wiki due to "shovelware titles" "Games are mediocre, possibly generic at best". But they also had Rally Championship Extreme and something called Richard Burns Rally.
ISI didn't do bad with the F1 games either, even though they were a relatively small studio based in the US, granted, they at least had experience with racing sims.

So yes, it's more than possible :)
 
Ole Marius Myrvold
Staff
Premium
Amir Vodokotlic said:
I am gonna take different angle on this post.

Motorsport games is publicly traded company on Nasdaq.

The financials are not looking good and if this continues with absolute garbage games like this Nascar attempt.

They could be out of business in 2 years.

View attachment 511473

Financial metrics quarter over quarter are getting worse.

-negative net income doubled previous quarter
-operating income doubled
-decrease in total revenue
-net income negative

basically they are burning money
Click to expand...

So what you are saying is that I should wait until the NASCAR game is released, see the stock do a dive, then buy in, hold the stocks until the BTCC and IndyCar game is on max-hype, sell and laugh in profit? :D
 
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Kyuubeey
Ole Marius Myrvold said:
Yes. Direct contact can be a big help, but mobile game designers/designers of completely different games can make great games that's not directly related to previous experience.
Playsport Games did the transition from mobile Motorsport Manager to PC-version quite good.
DICE went from pinball-games, to (at the time) good racing simulations/games (STCC, NASCAR Heat, RalliSport Challenge), and then over to the Battlefield series.
Geoff Crammond of Grand Prix Series - fame had absolutely zero interesting in racing in general until he started working on Revs.
Warthog Games is even featured on Crappy Games Wiki due to "shovelware titles" "Games are mediocre, possibly generic at best". But they also had Rally Championship Extreme and something called Richard Burns Rally.
ISI didn't do bad with the F1 games either, even though they were a relatively small studio based in the US, granted, they at least had experience with racing sims.

So yes, it's more than possible :)
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Maybe, but I speak from about 10 years~ developing simulation models as an amateur. It is not so easy to just jump in and learn it in a few months. You either got it or you don't and to now I am not aware of any pipeline that will train up engineers and designers who can produce a good sim, it is something you must learn yourself via many experiences and struggles.

Of course it is largely the same for any game product, but simulations have a different, more specific kind of design target that you must reach. "Being entertaining" is not enough.

If they hired this team because of their apparent inclinations to make simulations and their interests, it can go well. If they hired them because they were cheap and available, it is *impossible* for them to produce a good simulation, perhaps ever.
 
Ole Marius Myrvold
Staff
Premium
Kyuubeey said:
Maybe, but I speak from about 10 years~ developing simulation models as an amateur. It is not so easy to just jump in and learn it in a few months. You either got it or you don't and to now I am not aware of any pipeline that will train up engineers and designers who can produce a good sim, it is something you must learn yourself via many experiences and struggles.

Of course it is largely the same for any game product, but simulations have a different, more specific kind of design target that you must reach. "Being entertaining" is not enough.

If they hired this team because of their apparent inclinations to make simulations and their interests, it can go well. If they hired them because they were cheap and available, it is *impossible* for them to produce a good simulation, perhaps ever.
Click to expand...

Well, I have no idea what Motorsport Games/Motorsport Network are thinking. To be honest, if I had seemingly unlimited money (as it looks like they have). I would rather do a Take-Two, and buy up proven developers, and let them make games and just publish stuff. Granted there is a lack of sim-devs/devs of good racing games to buy at the moment, and some also enjoy being free from publishers, but I do think they would've had it better if they had one team of devs on the NASCAR-games, one team for BTCC, one for IndyCar and S397 for rF2 (or the WEC Game, as, well, that's what rF2 is getting known for these days anyway).

I guess it's also down to how much sim vs "arcade" they want as well.

Oh well, I guess I'll stick to rF2 - the one StockCar oval event I've done online there worked without issues.
 
Austin Ogonoski
numbersevenhull said:
Small development team, limited experience, limited time scale - of course all fair points for discussion, but citing individuals with no knowledge or documented proof of their work within a company?

That's the kind of hubris that sees you in court. Can't say I didn't warn him.
Click to expand...
These guys have public accounts on LinkedIn.

One guy's entire resume is graphic design gigs and degrees yet is listed as a game designer and even appears in one of the game's trailers being interviewed as such. Another key player has spent time at mobile game studios working on what amounts to tycoon-like strategy or management games.

It's a weird mix of characters and positions to assemble for a racing sim. If speculation or basic observations are not allowed then just go ahead and shut down all of RD.

If Motorsport Games want to sue some random guy on the forums while their game is a steaming turd I'll make sure to do an unboxing video of my cease and desist letter and ensure everyone who bought this Russian shovelware knows their game wont be fixed anytime soon because chasing after dudes on RD is where their priorities lie.
 
Rodriggo
They are charging $90 dollars for the premium edition which is essentially nothing more than a Bill Elliott paint scheme and the ability to pick any team in a featureless career mode. That is down right criminal. At the very least you can see they are not operating in good faith.

Credit to Austin Ogonoski for not mincing words. :thumbsup:
 
Austin Ogonoski
Rodriggo said:
They are charging $90 dollars for the premium edition which is essentially nothing more than a Bill Elliott paint scheme and the ability to pick any team in a featureless career mode. That is down right criminal. At the very least you can see they are not operating in good faith.

Credit to Austin Ogonoski for not mincing words. :thumbsup:
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I think ppl are giving me too much credit.

I anticipated a straight re-skin of rFactor 2, as if they merely purchased the rights to the engine, slapped in cup cars and the current roster of circuits as a modder would on the steam workshop, and call it a day.

Nobody expected this:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1450620834423484421
 
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numbersevenhull
JocelynTurmel said:
It's all public information.
Click to expand...
Ok Jocelyn, very simple question for you then.

Do you think the problems with this project, clear for everyone to see, has been caused by

a) the ability of individuals cited

or

b) the game engine Motorsport Games purchased and decided to use for the development Nascar 21
 
Rodriggo
Austin Ogonoski said:
I anticipated a straight re-skin of rFactor 2....
Click to expand...
How difficult would it be for a small team of modders to package together as a mod for one of these "sims"; three generic cup models, an average/respectable ai, a user defined season (track list/order) and a narrative no deeper than a championship table?
Has to be a nice little profit margin there right?
These guys clearly aren't going to make a good NASCAR game, the next developer (once they find them) is a couple years away from the next game at minimum, probably late 2023, early 2024 until the next official AAA NASCAR game....
If anyone needs a graphic designer let me know. :sneaky:
 
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Ole Marius Myrvold
Staff
Premium
numbersevenhull said:
Ok Jocelyn, very simple question for you then.

Do you think the problems with this project, clear for everyone to see, has been caused by

a) the ability of individuals cited

or

b) the game engine Motorsport Games purchased and decided to use for the development Nascar 21
Click to expand...

or possibly
c) A dev team in over their head/ Motorsport Games not understanding the task it is to port a physics engine over to a different game?

I mean, I do run the rF2 club here, so obviously I will be somewhat positive to rF2, even with the weekly "it's not a bug, it's a feature" - joke.
However, I don't think a possible NASCAR 21 fail can be put on the decision to use some rF2-engine physic/tech in the game... I mean, you can run a Stock Car event in rF2 with a lot less bugs/issues than what's been shown in videos here.
 
randomcallsign
Stuff like NASCAR21 happening, in the context it has been happening is not exactly new. Company hires dev that either over sells or suffers from scope creep.
It's a trainwreck, but not the first time.
 
JocelynTurmel
numbersevenhull said:
Ok Jocelyn, very simple question for you then.

Do you think the problems with this project, clear for everyone to see, has been caused by

a) the ability of individuals cited

or

b) the game engine Motorsport Games purchased and decided to use for the development Nascar 21
Click to expand...
Austin gave a very detailed list earlier, which shows that he understands an actual workflow for very similar projects.
I've been following the gaming industry pretty closely for 10 years, and this is not new. It actually reminds me of Mass Effect Andromeda, in which one of the problems was the bad lip-syncing caused by the lack of touch-ups to computer-generated movements based on the lines of dialogue.
The team thought the process would give them usable animations out of the box, but it wasn't even close, so they had to improve this aspect by hand after release.
It's a bit like automatic translation without human input to correct the mistakes.

Basically, they were using the features of the engines thinking it would all come together, and like Austin said, they had the nice surprise of having to write a lot of code and became engine developers as they were supposed to be making the game itself, and they obviously failed. Even with baked-in features and buying middleware, making a game of this scope from the ground-up takes several years, unless everyone is experienced and knows what to do from day one. A ragtag bunch can work well when they are passionate like Reiza Studios and they can take their time, but the pressure of hard contractual deadlines just didn't allow them to figure out how to make everything work.

You're out of your depth on this subject.
Austin is in the credits of Fast and Furious Crossroads, you can trust him.
 
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Richard Wilks
Well throwing my 2 cents here, i don't think the aspects pertaining to rf2 would be hard to manage themselves (making physics, and driving and pitstops aspects of the gameplay) and they SHOULD have been easy to work out. Harder would be to fiddle with the AI to make it competent on ovals. Not impossible, maybe not even involving much coding, but time consuming for sure.

But what i see there is that the integration of that with the new graphics engine and the new features they had to code went horribly wrong. I can't even understand how some of the bugs are possible.


Comparisons with Reiza are pointless because Reiza are little more than content creators. These guys basically atempted the same thing Kunos did with ACC, except they were more ambitious because this game features a lot more things than ACC, but unfortunally they indeed underestimated the possible problems and bugs that could creep in.

I took two years for kunos to make a stable and very simple game out of ACC. Granted, MSG team is bigger, but like we say in the field, 9 women don't make a baby in one month.
 
M
Richard Wilks said:
Comparisons with Reiza are pointless because Reiza are little more than content creators. These guys basically atempted the same thing Kunos did with ACC, except they were more ambitious because this game features a lot more things than ACC, but unfortunally they indeed underestimated the possible problems and bugs that could creep in.
Click to expand...
Truth to be told there aren't many physics engines available nowadays and even less developers groups capable to make them or change them significantly. Most of the current "managers" of existing physics engines have shown to have a seriously hard time to get into the depths of the engines someone else created. Reiza is coming on top of ME only this days after 2-3 years, the same SMS lost many of their most expert figures on ME long ago and today probably it would not be capable to build ME from scratch if they wanted. S397 has had its fair share of difficulties and the progress of RF2 in recent years is there to demonstrate that they don't seem to be as knowledgeable as the guys who made it. Kunos also took years to develop their own physics engine which still has a much smaller depth of simulation and more simplification both compared to ISI and Madness Engine and a very reduced scope of application.
The reality is that thinking that S397 (which is quite small in itself) and MG (who had no tradition and knowledge with proper simulation or even good F1 20xx style games) could handle Nascar in less than one year from when they announced the merger together with Indy and WEC coming shortly after is just hopeless IMHO.
It always meant that their products were going to be very much arcade or stubs of games at best if they really tried to go a bit deeper.
 
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