THE PROBLEM

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fuelled has kept the same stat system that was used in its 20 year old predecessor (Crash Team Racing 1999). That works for nostalgia, but it's not a FUN or PRACTICAL system in an ONLINE game.

Players feel a pressure to pick the most competitive stats in the game to fairly compete in the online mode, as well as when competing for time trials.

This has caused an imbalance in the roster, where half of the characters are considered 'viable': speed-based, and acceleration-based, and the other half: balanced, and turning-based, are sub-par. Furthermore, in time trial mode, the leaderboards are dominated by only speed-based characters. People who have a favourite character with poor stats are discouraged from using them.

When new characters are released we await the lottery of whether the character we like most will have stats we can compete with, which can be very disheartening when they do not.

THE SOLUTION

Remove stats from the racers, and provide the option to choose our 'engine'.

This means players can choose the stats they want on any character they wish to use. This is will bring much more variety to the leaderboards, and in online play - and make using your favourite character much less disheartening. This is new-player friendly as new players can choose whatever stats they find easiest when learning the tracks, and means experienced players can stick to their preferred stats.