lots I could answer on this but I am a little pushed for time, so I'll focus on a couple of things

It seems to be a common misconcpetion that there are LOTS of wipeout fans out there.
Yes there is a core dedicated amount of fans that is for sure, however Pure was the first wipeout to sell over 1million. Yet despite a limited release in america, the most successful Wipeout on consoles (as I am told) is actually Wipeout Fusion. Wipeout fans are dedicated and loyal but alas it is a large genre racing, and a niche of that - futuristic, ergo we dont have the fan base of say NFS or burnout, or GT or even F1

The inital Wipeouts got a lot of acclaim and at the time they sold 'relatively' well
Its often said that in the first 3 months of ps1 in europe, 50% of people owned wipeout - that sound HUGE, but when you consider there were at most 100,000 ps1s, you suddenly see that the figures arent large.

When I talk about making Wipeout more accessible, I am not talking about attracting the people playing singstar or buzz, I am not talking about the casual market, I am talking about attracting games players who simply find the entry bar too high.

As such a new wipeout has a struggle, its a hardcore game, yet hardcore gamers are hard to please and often want something new, ergo you have to try and appeal to the gamers who are not the 'new breed' of casual gamers but who are games players who dont necessarily buy into the latest things but do have gaming tradition.


My best friend is a hardcore gamer, he buys games every week, owns almost every system and he spends as much of his spare time as his girlfriend allows, playing games, and a variety of games too. I havent given him Pulse yet, but when he played Pure it was his first wipeout since 2097, he plays a lot of racing games, but he really struggled with Pure for the first 30mins or so.
It was an eye opener for me, I thought it was too easy, yet here is someone I know is better at games than me in the most part and he is struggling early on, now he continued, cos... I told him to and he wanted to improve and see more, but it really made me realise how hard Wipeout is and can be even for people who are big gamers.

I think it is something that it is easy to lose sight of, I suspect these forums pretty much contain the top 200 Wipeout players in the world, indeed everyone on these forums is probably in the top 5000, even foxxy ! Its amazing to see how tricky the game can be initially for people who play games but are not Wipeout addicts. I really think again people on here would be surprised to see how hard the game is in the hands of someone not a huge dedicated fan.

Now I am not saying we make the whole game easier, but the entry bar has to be lowered in order to broaden the appeal, not to the mass market - Wipeout is niche and always will be, but it needs to be broadened to catch the eye of some hardcore fans who ignore it and also to try and catch the attention of the bulk of average gamers, and particularly racing fans.
Its tricky, because that appeal has to be there, yet we cant let down the hardcore fans who are, in reality maybe 5% of the overall players.

The point I am laboring to make is that the definition of an average gamer that I want to appeal to is different to what you see an average gamer as, and the reality is we need the game to appeal to more people and information.

We arent chasing buzz fans, we are after other hardcore racing fans and games players who maybe find the entry bar a little high, and it is especially compared to many games out there, and to be honest that is a flaw - Imagine spending £30 on a game for your son or buying it with your wages and getting frustrated due to the difficulty within the first 30mins - now thats not something you guys get with wipeout, because you know how to play it but its what happens to many.

So the entry bar needs lowering whilst the top end has to remain hard (which in Pulse it possibly doesnt remain hard enough)

Regarding Pulse being a little too easy at times - part of that was choice - make the campaign a little easier so more people see the game and stick with it, and then venture online where the REAL competition lies. The aim was to make the first 12 grids a challenge but doable for many, phantom is then more of a challenge (but perhaps should have been harder than it is) and the racebox hard races are actually harder than the 'hard race campaign races for the most part'.

So for people seeking more challenge racebox is useful, the grids themselves have an independant difficulty curve that means a hard race on grid 1 is easier than a hard race on grid 2 which is easier than a hard on grid 3 etc to give a progression feeling
Where as in racebox all hard races as equivalent to grid 12.