5 Ways to improve Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled's Online Multiplayer

Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is an impressive remake of the old school CTR kart game launched back in 1999. Developed by Naughty Dog back then and now by Beenox, this game has so many amazing new features and customization options. One of the most anticipated features on release was online multiplayer and while it is a fun way to spend hours and hours racing with other people online it still needs to be tuned up in order to achieve greatness. As such, we have put together a list of 5 ways to improve the online multiplayer mode.

Better matchmaking and ranking

If you have played races online you know that you can get players of any kind of expertise, and usually the expert players go way ahead of everybody else and finish so early that the rest of the racers can’t even finish the 3 laps. So the solution for this problem to make the game more fun for beginners and more competitive for pros is to establish a ranking mode where you can play with people of similar skill as yours and that way keep getting better.

Cup mode

The offline mode has been tailored perfectly to the needs and preferences of the target audience and one of the options for racing offline is to do Cup races where you can go from race to race back to back and depending on your place on the race you achieve the corresponding points and the winner is determined by the most points. Online mode does not have this option but we think it could be a very interesting way to do races.

Waiting time between races

This is a big one, the time that it takes for a race or battle to start is way too long, even after the track has been voted and everyone is ready to go, you still have to wait around 30 seconds for the race to start and by starting I mean going to another 30 second load screen and track previews.

Illegal shortcuts and glitches

Beenox has been working hard on this game and you can tell the amount of preparation and tests they did on the game but they definitely missed some big stuff. The old school CTR had a lot of “glitch shortcuts” that gave people incredible ways to beat times and clear some parts of the game easier, the bigger problem here is that online this kind of glitches generates a backlash on the community because a few that know this glitches will take excessive advantage that has nothing to do with skill and more with “cheating”. Some bugs like graphic distortions are not as alarming as using illegal shortcuts on every race and taking an unfair advantage, though it doesn’t create fun and fair gameplay.

Custom weapon setting in private lobbies

When you play online in a private lobby, just like you play split screen in your home, you are doing it with friends and the customization settings should be the same ones that offline, weapon selection is a big part of making your own rules with friends and makes the game way more fun.

Bonus: Online Battle mode

We were really excited to battle online, especially Last Car Standing and Limit Battle. Playing this mode online seemed like a really fun and chaotic way to play the game, and a lot of people out there have battles as their favorite part of the game. Unfortunately for us our online battle experience was underwhelming, starting with how we couldn’t find the last car standing mode anywhere. While Beenox didn’t consider that mode to be relevant for the online community, they did include steal the bacon that is literally the same as capture the flag with only one flag. Another little inconvenience was that after dying on Limit battle the screen stayed showing a wall where we died instead of showing other players’ cameras, so if you die early on the game you can either stare at the wall where you died or get bored and quit to the lobby and wait several minutes for new people to play with. Finally, the last recommendation we have is to show the opposite team’s score so you and your team know how far you are or how many point do you need to win the match.