Excellent, Sega made the Yakuza and Shenmue games too, and the F-Zero setting is canonically about bounty hunters and crooks racing as a hobby. It would make perfect sense to have Sega return to the F-Zero franchise to make an open-world game in a crime-ridden interplanetary dystopia about racing, car-chases, and punching things.
Yeah, beat-em-up gameplay on foot and racing gameplay in the hovercraft for an open-world sci-fi racing game seems like a good fit. Get cash from bounty-hunting and race purses, spend it on part upgrades, unlock new zones, etc. Samurai Goroh, the beefy katana-wielding bandit with a huge bounty on his head who pilots the Fire Stingray, gets to be your recurring villain. Racing, car chases on elevated expressways, and punching things.
Good point. The lore of the game is that these are all crooks and bounty hunters and this racing thing is a side-gig. A racing-themed science-fiction open-world game is an obvious fit for that.
You’d have to add more content, yeah - more track elements than just mines, jumps, pain-borders, wind, and boosters. Maybe some way to control bumper-spawning as a track-design element or something.
I’m now revising my idea: “Combined F-Zero + Super Mario Kart maker”. 1 Mode7 track editor, 2 games, 1 product. Post the best tracks to F-Zero99 as F2P content, make the editor, track-browser, splitscreen, and SMK the paid value-add.
It’s so much fun. If you’ve got a paid Nintendo Switch Online account, go play it it’s a free download with NSO. That said
The super-short track list is repetitive as hell, they’re currently only running the 4 of the 5 Knight League tracks in normal rotation… and realistically OG FZero only had 15 tracks and half of them were retreads with minor variations so it will still be a problem when they launched Queen/King leagues.
With 99 players constantly brawling, big rewards for ramming an enemy player to death, and some random speed-boost drops, the gameplay feels really random because of emergent factors. It’s very chaotic. It’s fun, and I’ve seen competitive streamers get sucked in so there’s obviously enough skill involved to keep them engaged, but still there’s a lot of races where you’ll do everything right but still lose badly. My only first-place finish was blind luck.
Thinking it further: Combined F-Zero + Super Mario Kart maker.
Yeah. I like worker placement games, but Stone Age seems to think “oh player X goes before you this turn and gets dibs on spot Y so revise your plans” is the most interesting part of worker-placement. Which, no, it isn’t. It’s an important mechanic, but it feels like that and collect-em-up is basically the whole game in Stone Age.
Stone Age. Worker placement and set collection point salad and not much else.
I’d say vehicle weapons is right out and is the line where it ceases to be F-Zero, but I don’t see how RPG mechanics or open-world preclude including racing challenges with an extreme skill ceiling. I mean, with the current Soulslike fashion trend I’d say they could market based on that, particularly with Armored Core 6 demonstrating how “RPG elements with a very low stat ceiling” works well with skill-based gaming.