NO new WipEout game announced with PS5, sadness ensues

[Racingfan]

I don't praise SL at all - I praise Psygnosis
Look, I'm not saying someone new can't make a good new wipEout game. I just don't think it's gonna happen without people who are REALLY passionate about it, and it wouldn't hurt to have some of the old DNA in there by having people like Lee Carus and Colin Berry on board. Fat chance that's gonna happen, sadly.

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THIS. A thousand times yes. As much as I loved 2097 and w3oSE, the original had a flair to it that is hard to compare to anything else out there. Gloomy, dark, kind of Blade Runner-ish, but still dreamy and positive in a way. I would absolutely LOVE to have that exact game remade with new models, track geometry and textures on a modern engine. Maybe refine the physics a bit But keep the OG soundtrack!

SL, psygnosis, same thing, just-renamed after they were bought.

Even then, why are you so negative about a potential new wipeout game that you've never seen if it's made by a completely different company?

Crash "remakes" were done by an Activision owned company, and it turned out great, i think they were better than the originals TBH, and the DLC level for crash 3, is possibly the best level in crash history imo

Crash 4 is made by toys for bob, another Activision owned company that has never developed any crash or spyro titles (except spyro remakes) and to me so far, it looks pretty good in terms of level design, which is the most important thing for a crash game. And i haven't heard any of the original ND team working on it, but i might be wrong.

DOOM reboot & eternal were made without any of the OG DOOM 1 & 2 developers either, and they're both amazing games

Basically, my point is that even with classic game revivals/sequels can still be good even if the original developers are no longer with the studio, or a different developer making it.

I bet there will be another game in the future for sure, before omega hit ps+, there were around 700k? players on the first 2048 leaderboard, so it should have sold around ~650k copies or so, of course, that number is inaccurate because some people might never played 2048 and just played HD, or they played offline because leaderboards are server-sided and won't upload your times if played offline etc, and ~650k sales for a low budget remaster of a game previously on PS3 that barely sold 1m is pretty massive imo

My only problem with it is... if it ever gets announced & it's good, there's a very big chance i won't buy it over PS5 exclusivity... :/ Not worth paying ~$500 on a console for 1 game, and i bought a PS4 in jan 2014 and i barely used it until omega came out which i played for a few months. Not doing that again.

[blackwiggle]

SL, psygnosis, same thing, just-renamed after they were bought.
Basically, my point is that even with classic game revivals/sequels can still be good even if the original developers are no longer with the studio, or a different developer making it.

I bet there will be another game in the future for sure, before omega hit ps+, there were around 700k? players on the first 2048 leaderboard, so it should have sold around ~650k copies or so, of course, that number is inaccurate because some people might never played 2048 and just played HD, or they played offline because leaderboards are server-sided and won't upload your times if played offline etc, and ~650k sales for a low budget remaster of a game previously on PS3 that barely sold 1m is pretty massive imo

My only problem with it is... if it ever gets announced & it's good, there's a very big chance i won't buy it over PS5 exclusivity... :/ Not worth paying ~$500 on a console for 1 game, and i bought a PS4 in jan 2014 and i barely used it until omega came out which i played for a few months. Not doing that again.

I wouldn't take those figures as a correct representation of the install base that actually paid for the game.
When the PS3 got hacked, Sony gave HD/FURY away for free, that had a huge influx of new players [mostly from the USA where Wipeout hardly had a player base at all ], this only lasted for about a month.
Same thing happened with the Omega pack when that became a PS+ free game, influx of players for a month, but the online player base had died off WAY before that, so you basically had a whole lot of rooms full of newbies either getting thrashed by old hands, or just making a nuisance of themselves, the result was the same, the novelty wore off and the rooms became barren again.

It's these reasons I doubt we shall see a NEW WO any time soon, not a fully fledged one at least.

You might get a small VR only WO game for the PS5, if and when Sony update the VR helmet, as most VR games are short, and if it was made they might not even opt to have online for it, just records for times.
It would be more of a 'Showcase' game to show the prowess of the PS5/VR3, as traditionally that's all Sony has USED the WO franchise for since it acquired the IP rights.

Why Sony just don't reverse engineer and update 2097/XL and WO3SE is beyond me......I suspect because people will forever relate the music that came with those games with those tracks, and it wasn't included people would complain, also it would be too much of a PITA to sort out a new licensing deal
It's not that it can't be done, hell, how do you think BallisticNG got made....it's always surprised me they got away with reading the code off a 2097 disc

[blackwiggle]

I was going back through some really old emails yesterday [going back 12+ years], a lot were old PM notification emails of PM's I'd received at the zone.
This in turn got me reading some of those old PM's, which led me to do a bit of searching for something I remember reading, with interesting results.

Basically I googled Wipeout Pulse and started reading the Wikipedia page on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipeout_Pulse

In the article, it has a quote from Colin Berry [Colin started as a tester I think he told me once, at SL and ended up as lead designer, he also posted here ]
In the Wiki article [see the Development portion of the page] Colin is quoted as saying.

Berry stated that by the end of Wipeout Pure, Sony Studio Liverpool had designed almost 100 tracks as potentials to include in subsequent games, although the team were only satisfied with 32 of them. The remainder of the tracks were either disregarded or amalgamated into other games.[12] Berry reflected that the tracks using the same 3D computer graphics software as its predecessor meant that certain repetition appeared and caused the team to "dry up on ideas". The developers recognized that track design was an important aspect to the game, and also accepted the difficulty in designing a track that is both memorable and enjoyable. Berry felt concerned that the team were starting to repeat design features, and thus decided to create new variables to the track design: as a result of this, the team conceptualized the "mag strip" – a section of a track which would feature artificial gravity so that a player could safely circumnavigate loops, steep slopes, and upside down sections.[12]

The interesting thing of note and relevant to this thread, is the amount of track SL were happy with, and more than likely had completed to a near complete level, otherwise why give such an exact number, and most of them obviously were tracks that ended up being used in the later Wipeout's Pulse and 2048.
I doubt SL could have put together 2048 in such a short time for the VITA's launch if these tracks weren't very close to already being finished.

So this leaves the question, where are the missing tracks ?

If 32 tracks had been identified out of nearly 100 good enough for major development [and remember this was mentioned back in 2007, 5 years before SL closed ], and you take away from those 32 tracks all the main + DLC tracks contained in PULSE [16 tracks], plus the 10 tracks from 2048 that only totals 26 tracks.

So where are the other 6 new tracks nobody has seen yet ?

Interesting isn't it ?

[Jonny]

Probably gone and forgotten in the recycle bin of some SL work computer

[T-301]

I'm surprised they were drying up on ideas for tracks for an antigrav racing game. I always thought they could've been a lot more bold; the tracks we got to see seldom provided things like big jumps and long curves that let you gaze out into the horizon and see the rest of the level. There should've been way more bombastic tracks like Sebenco, Altima I and Sol. Whenever I look at Redout's gigantic tracks for example I wonder how they would've looked like in WipEout.
Or this: https://cityofsound.typepad.com/blog...wipeout.ad.jpg

[blackwiggle]

Probably gone and forgotten in the recycle bin of some SL work computer

I doubt it.
Sony owns all that SL work, and you can bet your last dollar that it's safely hidden away in the archives, why Clever Beans weren't given the chance to use the yet unseen stuff seemed a bit strange when the Omega Pack was released, we all ''unofficially' knew of it's existence.
Once it was realized that the Omega Pack was really more designed as a showcase VR title, you realize where their time had been spent.

As for SL track ideas drying up.
Well they did say it was mainly because of the confines of the programs used to build them at the time.
What SL could have done with the as yet to be released Unreal 5 engine and the PS5 we sadly shall never know.
I doubt SL would have changed the formula very much, certainly not to the extent that it morphed into a REDOUT .

[Jonny]

The BNG community really shows that there's still a lot to do in terms of track designs. Hell, even the official content pretty much innovated the classic "Ballistic AG racing" setting with Outer Reaches.
Of course you are a bit more limited when the basic features of the track are given. But the tracks in Pulse really are pretty samey...

[blackwiggle]

Yeah I agree about the Pulse tracks, especially the 4 DLC ones
It makes you wonder what these 6 other tracks are like.
Are they more of the same ?
As in being similar to the Pulse tracks, or heading more into 2048 territory ?
Hard to tell, as I guess SL new that the Pulse DLC was going to only be released in Europe and Aus/NZ, so they used the least interesting ones for that, and would have held back the best tracks for the next wipeout, it was after Pulses release they were told there wasn't going to be anymore wipeouts.
Only because of the VITA release we got 2048, so I suppose they would have used the best ones for that, wanting to go out on a high.
That leaves the ''presumed'' missing tracks somewhere in the middle I guess.