Making an Off-Road Racing Video Game (Set in Space)
If you know my name, chances are you know that my “day job” isn’t technically in racing, but in racing video games. When you’re not seeing me in off-road, rallycross, or at Pikes Peak, I work at iRacing as Marketing and Communications Manager, where I handle a lot of our news releases, in-game writing, and a few other pet projects. (One of which is carrying the torch for our Dirt Road license class as best as I can… but we can get into that some other time.)
So you can imagine how excited I was to find out that, as part of our expansion beyond the core iRacing product, we acquired a studio named Orontes Games in late 2021 to help them finish their off-road game, which was then called DRAG: Outer Zones. Fast-forward to today, and the finished product, now known as ExoCross, is currently available as a digital download for both PC and consoles.
But it’s a long journey to get from buying another studio and folding them into your main business to release day. I was lucky enough to have a hand in quite a few different parts of that journey, from fleshing out the backstory to bringing my off-road background into feedback on the driving physics. The result is, I hope, a game that all ages and types of gamers will enjoy—and an incredible basis for more off-road in the future.
Building a Winning Team
The team that works on iRacing is second to none, but bringing a totally new product to market would require a little more firepower. When we acquired Monster Games, they already had a full staff that seamlessly transitioned into making World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing with our support. Orontes wasn’t in quite the same space, with a much smaller staff led by brothers and co-founders Christian and Thorsten Folkers, and a game engine of their own versus engines like Unreal and Unity that many games are built from.
That meant we’d need to make some hires, and our team made some great ones. First up was adding Eric Busch, who had a long history with our predecessor Papyrus Games before later working with EA and Tiburon, as producer. Longtime gamers might know Paul Coleman from Codemasters’ DiRT series, where he was Chief Games Designer, and he was the next big addition to the team.
For me, as someone who grew up on the DiRT games, and who can trace their interest in the sport (and in some ways, entire career path) back to them, getting to learn from Paul was like having Ken Block teach you how to do gymkhana. It made me a better storyteller, forced me to step up my game on presentation and organization, and I ended up becoming a better driver out of all of it, too.
My first assignment was to work with Paul on turning his backstory for the game into the script for the intro video. Paul’s premise set the game on a distant planet named Proteus, where nanobots built and maintained the cars and tracks, while players based at all ends of the Earth would compete in prestigious and exciting championships set 100 years from now. I wrote the script, while Ben Willsher (whose credits include Judge Dredd and John Carpenter’s Tales for a HalloweeNight) did the comic book-like artwork seen early in the clip, and Cisco Scaramuzza finished off the video itself. That puts me two degrees of separation away from comic writers about a million times more creative and talented than me, which is pretty damn cool!
But getting the scripts right also meant committing to the backstory, and Paul encouraged me to do some world-building if that’s what it took. While I do plenty of storytelling here, I’ve never been a fiction writer, but god knows that I like a challenge. Bit by bit, month by month, we built out the entire world of Proteus, from its four race zones to the backstories for more than two dozen AI opponents that you’ll face in the game.
Admittedly, we could only integrate so much of that story work into the finished product, but that didn’t take away from the biggest lesson I learned: the more detail you’ve got, the more sense the finished product will make when you’ve trimmed the fat. The ExoCross site will get into some of these stories in the coming weeks and months. Some of them are inspired by real-world experiences of mine, so feel free to hit me up @christopherlion on social if you think you’ve figured one out.
Hitting the Virtual Track
With just a few months left before release, we set up a weekly multiplayer test session for the purposes of getting our team acclimated with the game and finding bugs. This, for almost all of us, was the fun part—and I can’t overstate how much value my real-world experience in desert racing had to the process, so shout out to Jim Beaver, the Martellis, and everyone else I’ve worked with over the years for that. Everything I learned from you guys about the sport played a part in whatever level of influence I had in the finished product.
As mentioned, iRacing does have off-road racing, but it’s mostly top-level rallycross and short course truck racing. As a result, most of our staff is more likely to be experienced in driving things like GT3s, prototypes, or NASCAR stock cars. In addition, short races like the ones in ExoCross can create a sense of urgency for players trying to get from the back to the front, and arcade elements like a boost button (which recharges fastest in the draft of another car, hence the former name DRAG) and virtual walls to reset you if you veer too far off course.
Well, if you know how an off-road vehicle is supposed to handle, much less an open-wheeled one, you know that this combination probably isn’t going to end well! As our play group expanded, those who hadn’t spent a lot of time in off-road games learned just how differently they’d need to drive the ExoCross cars to be fast. Instead of memorizing corners, testers learned how to read the racing surfaces as they came up. I would also regularly compare the cars to Trophy Trucks, because ExoCross isn’t about going full send or catching air—it’s about letting your suspension dance through the bumps and mixed surfaces, being smart with the throttle, and not overcorrecting your mistakes.
At one point, that experience really came in handy with our top-level car, the Titan XC-7000. As you progress through Championship Mode, each car you face gets tougher and tougher to handle. One version of the XC-7000, however, was a bit too unpredictable even for those of us who have spent a lot of time in off-road. Paul produced multiple alternate handling profiles, and a select group of us came to a consensus about the one that you’ll drive in the finished product.
To sum it up quickly: the Vulcan XC-1500 will teach you how to be smooth in the game, the Orion XC-3000 makes it more fun, and the Titan will push you to the limits. Those of you who know the sport well may want to turn all the assists off. My favorite zone in the game is Ultima, as it’s the closest thing to the desert we’ve got, but every zone has its charm. The toughest layout is probably Pandemonium—it’s a figure eight set in Boreas, which is an elevated zone without exterior walls to keep you on track if you slide too far wide. If you can master the Titan on that, you’re a hell of a driver!
Closing Thoughts
I know what you’re probably thinking about all this. Why not just do an off-road simulation? You’re iRacing, sims are what you do! We had a lot of reasons to finish ExoCross. Besides how much work had already been done on the game as DRAG: Outer Zones, this game represents the first release on a completely proprietary game engine. Getting that engine working well across both PC and consoles was the top priority, because that foundation is what will allow us to build bigger and better games in the future.
ExoCross is pure fun, but it also handles in a way that I think the off-road community will appreciate. What you know about driving in the real world translates well to this game. Add in some of the more arcade elements and a mix of both seasons and point-to-point challenges, and it’s something that your kids will be able to enjoy, too. In the end, it’s an easy game to approach but difficult to master, which is what I think every racing game strives for.
And from the iRacing side, I think off-road folks will reap the rewards of ExoCross in the coming years, too. Our staff learned a lot about what makes off-road driving fun, and as we’ve spent the past few years feeling out what the future of the real-world sport looks like before continuing to build, I think we’re motivated to bring some of what we’ve learned back into rallycross and short course on the sim. A few of us have pitched different ideas to build more approachable cars, more raceable tracks, and more accessible series, and I think you’ll see more of that in the coming years.
In the meantime… hit up exocrossgame.com for more info on the cars, tracks, and series within ExoCross, and let us know what you think!