Wreckreation Preview – “The age of the developer is over, the age of the player begins now”

Prof. Alex Ward seems fairly confident about that headline; “Why is it true? Because I just said it!” he says with a wry smile. His tongue might be so far in his cheek as to cause ligament damage, but you can see his point. Creating your own experiences, stretching a game’s tools to do your own thing, or modding the heck out of something has long been a part of gaming, but we’re getting to the point where developers are more regularly taking a step back and directly providing the tools for players to do their own thing. Wreckreation does that for driving games.

Alex is the Executive Producer for Wreckreation, and one of the seven team members of Three Fields Entertainment. He’s previously worked on Burnout and Need for Speed at Criterion, and though racing games are a clear part of their DNA, the direction of the team’s next game wasn’t always so clear. “When the pandemic started we were all working from home and the [game] world became our office. We met every day in the game.” Alex explains, “Having sorted out online, we asked ‘what game are we going to make?’ Originally, we were going to make a game called Dangerous Driving 2 which was all racing and stuff. So we thought, OK, let’s not do that. What can we do online?”

With this as the starting point, it became clear that being able to collaborate, being able to play together, and to alter the world in the moment were at the heart of their ideas; “We’re very into player freedom, we’re very into letting you do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, however you want to do it.” Alex continued, “we want to put the players in charge, and let them play how they want to play.”

During Wreckreation’s showcase, the team, including fellow Three Fields founder Fiona Sperry, discussed a variety of different modes that players are going to be able to indulge in while playing the game. First up was Live Mix: “As the DJ it’s your job to keep other players entertained. You can design, and build and collaborate together with a group of people online in real-time,” Alex enthused. “Other games let you build stuff, you publish it to a server, you download it, you see that it’s rubbish, and then you’re kind of stuck with it and you have to figure it out. Here Live Mix enables you to build tracks, decorate and personalise the world, and make games modes, publish them and share them and that’s all done in real-time, online.”

It makes even more sense when you see it in action. Despite fighting with a poor internet connection – the Gamescom show floor didn’t have internet for them so the whole demo was being run on a WiFi dongle – they were able to seamlessly build out a swooping, looping track, populate it with billboards and decoration, and then create their own point to point race. They did it all together. It just works, and crucially, it looks like a lot of fun. Alex stops in mid-flow, “In comedy it’s improvisation, in music it’s called a jam session. Maybe magic comes out of that?” He continues, “We wanted to give the players the tools to build and make game modes.” He’s clearly hoping that some of that same magic will be made in Wreckreation.

This is your world. You can put your name all over it – literally, you can rename all the streets with your relatives, cats, favourite football players if you want – and you can make it whatever you want to make it. As long as it’s got cars in it, of course. This is still fundamentally a racing game. Stretching across a 400-square kilometre map, you can copy things you’ve built with friends into your own world, or nab a build from your favourite streamer. There’s a heavy emphasis on working and building together, and the game will help you find other players and their creations with the community curation tools.

While they showed it off with two players, it’s not been decided how many players will be possible to support within a single instance, but the key factor that’ll be the decider is fun. As Alex puts it, “The number isn’t the limitation, the limitation is if it’s any good”. All the cars are unlocked at the start, you get all the good stuff from the outset, and incredibly all of the single-player content is being built in the in-game engine, using the same tools that will be available to players. If you’re the kind of person that’s spent hours on building tracks elsewhere, Wreckreation is looking to be the most immediate, and the most collaborative iteration of that.

Alex finished up with Wreckreation’s true reason for existing, “There’s enough violence in the world, and the world is a f***ed up place. If we can bring people together, show them a good time, put a smile on their face and make them laugh, then we’re halfway there.” On the strength of this showing, I think they’re well past halfway to making Wreckreation an essential part of the racing game landscape.