BlizzCon 2023 is in the books! This year’s show featured a flood of exciting news, and we’re here to recap the latest beats announced for all of your favorite games.
Alaskan Road Truckers is a highway to madness, and not in a good way
20.10.2023 - 16:55 / destructoid.com
As was foretold, I jumped into the newly released Alaskan Road Truckers the other day. I knew it was going to be a rough road judging from the demo and every trailer shown for it. However, the roads are pretty beyond rough. They feel as though the roads, as well as the people on them, were created by someone who has never been in a vehicle before.
Alaskan Road Truckers has a lot of problems, but the biggest one is that the central gameplay – the driving – sucks out loud. Part of this is the driving controls and vehicle physics in general, but the other part is the world around your truck.
One of the first things that struck me was a bump in the road. Right by your HQ is this big dip followed by a hill, and if you hit that thing at a speed faster than a crawl, it will pop your rig up. If you have a trailer, it will severely damage your load, as well. The highways are littered with this sort of thing. Not just uneven patches, but turns that are far too sharp and aggressive swerving that don’t make sense. Maybe they make them different in Alaska. Or they were crafted by some sort of trickster god.
The speed limits are beyond comprehension a lot of the time, both from a gameplay and traffic engineering standpoint. Before every single intersection, the speed limit drops to 15MPH. It might even abruptly drop from 55MPH, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a three-way intersection and you’re going in the direction that doesn’t face a stop sign; you will need to quickly slow to 15MPH. Or not, because with all the speeding I did, I never got ticketed.
I mostly had to watch out for other drivers, who are much more mindful of the limit and will quickly brake hard for these changes, regardless of how close you are following them. Yet, the braking speed of your truck is, realistically, a lot slower than that of a car, so it’s not uncommon to be joining them in the back seat. In this bizarre world of strange traffic laws, you are at fault. Always. Even when someone doesn’t yield for right-of-way.
I’m speculating here, but I think the sudden changes in limit are because someone programmed the AI traffic’s speed to be tied to the area’s limit. So, rather than get creative with the traffic AI and give them realistic behavior, the developer changed the speed limit for every intersection so the NPC drivers would slow down before attempting to turn. I haven’t seen Alaskan Road Truckers’ code, so I don’t know this for sure, but there’s evidence of similar shortcuts taken in the programming.
Like, for example, there are stoplights in the game, as you’d expect. Also, as you’d expect, they turn from green to yellow to red. Typical etiquette for a stoplight. However, when it’s their turn to change back, they then turn from red to
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