Onrush

» see onrushgame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Every racing game before it asked the same question and Onrush refused to ask it. None of its four modes involved crossing a line first. Twelve players went in, split into two teams of six, and the game scored boost burned and ground held instead of position. If you wrecked, a system the developers called the Stampede put you back into traffic within seconds, because being alone on a track was the one state the design would not permit.

The team that built it had already been killed once. Sony closed Evolution Studios on 22 March 2016, the Runcorn outfit behind MotorStorm and Driveclub, and Codemasters picked up most of the staff the following month as Codemasters Evo. Paul Rustchynsky, who had directed Driveclub through its wrecked launch, directed this one too. Deep Silver published it on 5 June 2018 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Reviews were respectable. Sales were not, and Codemasters cut staff afterward with Rustchynsky among them. A Windows version had been announced and never shipped, so the game's Wikipedia article now sits in a category called Cancelled Windows games.

That canceled port is where this one sits for me. Turkish gaming in the years I was paying attention happened on PCs and in internet cafes running Counter-Strike, not on consoles, so a release that went only to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One was already at arm's length. A PC version was announced early on and never arrived.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the stampede ~

The name describes the output. Players respawned near the pack rather than where they crashed, so twelve cars stayed bunched for the length of a match and the screen was never empty.

Overdrive scored a team on how much boost it burned, and Lockdown fought over a zone that kept sliding down the course. Switch was the strangest of the four: everybody started on a motorcycle and got a heavier vehicle each time they were wrecked, so losing was how you worked up the vehicle list.

All of it needed other people. A game whose scoring is built on a pack of twelve has very little to do when eleven of them are gone, and the solo content was a thin wrapper around the same modes played against bots.

~ the backend nobody owned ~

Onrush did not run its own multiplayer. It rented GameSparks, a backend for accounts and matchmaking that Amazon bought in 2017 and folded into AWS. Amazon announced the wind-down at GDC on 22 July 2021 and closed new signups the same day. Publishing new titles against it stopped on 31 March 2022, and every API and data route closed on 30 September 2022.

Games that could not migrate in time lost their online features and some of them would not get past a title screen. Onrush was pulled from the PlayStation and Xbox stores no later than 18 September 2022, twelve days before the GameSparks cutoff. By then EA owned Codemasters, having bought it in February 2021, and nobody there was going to pay to re-plumb a four-year-old game that had sold badly.

~ what offline means ~

The announcement did two things in four lines. "With player numbers in online modes dropping to low levels, we will be shutting down the servers from November 30, 2022," it said, followed by "For ONRUSH fans who want to continue playing, offline modes will continue to be available." The sign-off was "it's been a RUSH."

So the disc still boots and the bots still drive. What is gone is the thing the Stampede existed to guarantee: eleven other people in the same stretch of mud. The design had been an argument that racing a human pack beats racing a clock, and the ending settled it by taking the pack away and leaving the clock.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »