Harrison Abbott chats with Sumo Leamington about Stampede: Racing Royale, standing out in a crowded genre, and balancing 60-player races…
It can’t be easy trying to make a dent in the Kart Racer market when there is one (blatantly dominant) titan that has such a firm stranglehold over it.
Indeed, Nintendo’s definitive take on this genre is so many lightyears ahead of the competition that we don’t even have to name it and you still know exactly what we’re talking about. For Pete’s sake, six years after its launch on the Switch Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continues to top the chart, and its popularity is showing no signs of diminishing whatsoever How could anybody possibly hope to overtake that? (Excuse the pun).
Well, the short answer is that they can’t. Mario Kart is so ingrained in the public consciousness by now that trying to usurp its place at the head of the table would be like opening a new fast-food restaurant today and attempting to dethrone McDonalds. It simply ain’t happening.
Of course, that doesn’t prohibit other developers from giving it the old college try and seeing if they can get a slice of the action. They just need to find a sufficiently unique angle that makes them stand out enough. A good recent example of this was Disney Speedstorm [read our review here], which was able to turn heads by taking advantage of the House of Mouse brand.
Yet not everyone has the luxury of tapping into such recognisable IP. Which begs the question: How do you break into this market without relying on a pre-existing audience?
The only solution is to get creative and that’s precisely what Sumo Leamington has done with its latest release: Stampede: Racing Royale. At a glance, this upcoming title appears to be a run-of-the-mill effort, with all of the usual track layouts, arcadey mechanics and staple power-ups that you’d expect from a Mario Kart clone.
What sets it apart, though, is its interesting approach to structuring matches. Pitched to us as Mario Kart by way of Fall Guys, the central idea here is that you join a lobby of 60 players and then, over the course of three rounds, try to survive while this number if gradually reduced.
In the tournament’s first qualifying race, you’ll need to make it into the top 40 and then (after that) the top 20, until you’re eventually vying for a podium position in the high-stakes finale. If you are prematurely knocked out at any juncture, then you can quickly search for another one, given that this whole elimination series only takes around ten minutes. So, it’s perfect for little bite-sized play sessions.
On that note, we were able to try out a work-in-progress build at Gamescom 2023 and even emerged victorious on our very first attempt (against bots, but that’s neither here nor there). Beginners luck aside, we had a really fun time with Stampede and wanted to find out more about its future.
To do so, we sat down with Paul Hollywood, Development Director (and veteran creative force behind the Motorstorm series). Among other things, we quizzed him on the game’s finely-tuned balancing, its monetisation tactics as a free-to-play title, and how he sees it evolving in the long. Here’s what we discovered!
Obviously, there are plenty of other titles out there — in various different genres — that have huge match sizes, where hundreds upon hundreds of players all crammed into the same lobby. But I am curious to know how you managed to make that work in a kart racer specifically. How did you stop it from devolving into pure chaos whenever people are trying to use their power-ups in these crowded tracks?
Well, we have actually embraced chaos to a certain extent. That’s part of the fun and not something that we tried to shy away from at all. However, what’s important is that it’s controlled chaos!
Even though there are all these environmental hazards, boost pads and bombs being [thrown] around everywhere, the balance has been carefully thought through. For instance, the power-ups that we have included were very much designed with that 60-player count in mind.
And we’ve also carefully balanced the item drop table to keep the pack together in a way that feels organic [similar to how your probability of getting a Bullet Bill in Mario Kart increases the further behind you are]. We didn’t want to rely solely on rubber banding, because we know that can be a bit frustrating for players.
Likewise, we have skill-based matchmaking here, along with bot opponents that scale in difficulty. So, when you first load up Stampede — and your skill level is inevitably quite low — we will put you in lobbies with other inexperienced players.
But if you’ve been playing for a while and become quite good at it, then we will start pitting you against tougher and tougher rivals. That way it’s nice and welcoming for the newbies, while still providing a semblance of challenge for our “elder players”.
Before our demo, you gave us that attention-grabbing elevator pitch: “Fall Guys meets Mario Kart”. Was that a eureka moment early on in development, or were you initially just trying to make a standard racing game, and then came up with the hook later?
It was always this unique combination of the two different types of games. We just thought: ‘What if you took the battle royale concept from something like Fortnite or Fall Guys [in which scores of players are progressively whittled down to just a few remaining finalists] and then mixed it with the feel of an arcade racer?”
Its such a simple idea and we couldn’t believe that no one else had thought of it before! And based on the feedback and positive response from people who have played Stampede, we clearly weren’t alone in thinking that’s it’s a good one.
Why do you think that no one had done it before then? Is it just a case of it being too ambitious or difficult to pull off?
Honestly, the simple ideas are often the ones that go overlooked. As a developer, you’re always trying to do something cool and flashy, which is why you sometimes end-up neglecting those [no-brainers].
But that wasn’t the case here, as we knew we had a strong foundation right from the start. In fact, when I joined this project 18 months ago, the game was still in a relatively crude state: all blocks and cubes! Yet the instant appeal of its hook was shining through, and you could tell it was going to be a lot of fun even then.
I’ve worked on games before where, throughout that entire development journey, you are trying to find the fun. Whereas with this, it just came naturally from that premise.
With this being free to play, how is monetisation going to work?
We are a game and obviously need to make money somehow. The way that we do this in Stampede is by giving players the option to spend either soft-currency [earned through continuous racing and levelling up] or real-world hard currency.
Whichever option they choose, they can head over to our in-game store to purchase new cosmetics. Refreshed on a daily basis, you’ll be able to buy things here like new kart skins, wheels, or accessories for your avatar’s wardrobe.
We have some quirky options here too. For example, you can have your vehicle driving on literal wheels of cheese, equip a spaceman outfit or plant a squid on your head. There are complete sets for these cosmetics, but you are also free to mix & match to your heart’s content.
And presumably you have plans for how you’ll add to this content over time? What’s the roadmap looking like at the moment?
That’s correct. After we come out in early access [this November] we will be launching fresh content on a regular basis to keep our fans engaged. Think of it a bit like how other games have battle passes or season passes.
We won’t just be adding cosmetics either. They’ll be new tracks — some of which accommodate 60 players, while others are made explicitly for those later stages when people have been eliminated — as well as new power-ups and even new modes. We’ve got one in development right now called “Zombie Mode”, but I can’t say anything more about that just yet.
The best thing about growing it from there is that, once we are in early access, we’ll be able to get direct feedback from the community. We want to understand what resonates with them most and what they [gravitate] towards. That way we can make better informed decisions about how to support the game in the long-run. Because that’s our overall goal; for this to keep growing and growing.
On that note, although we are currently only on Steam, we are looking to go multiplatform next year. And, with that, we will also introduce crossplay. So, yes, it’s safe to say that we’ve got big plans for the future.
Published by Secret Mode, Stampede: Racing Royale is coming to Steam Early Access on November 2nd. It will launch on consoles at a later date.
Harrison Abbott
