Update Speculation thread

If anything were to happen to JRI I would like it to at least include some houses to fit the map. Right now something about it doesn’t seem right and I think it needs some kind of small residential area.

 

Kind of like DRI or more dilapidated?

 

I was thinking an upscale tourist area/resort, and farther away lower income towns for the people who actually live there.

 

Personally my ideal version of JRI would be to have the island feel more desolated as you go further insland. Keep the active port and observatory and maybe add a tourist attraction or two on the coast, make some nice beaches near those points of interest and maybe a small town. Towards the interior could be some of the military assets currently in the map, maybe a half buried something and an abandoned cabin and a small ghost town. Some swamps and fog and it could be a good place for some weird career mode missions and maybe a funky barn find. The map would hopefully feel on the level of WCUSA or Italy if it was that in depth.

Unfortunately the map is just too small to really do much. I think in the foreseeable future JRI will just see updated assets, nothing major.

 

I'm happy that they are releasing the map and are taking about a month to polish it and are also trying to block off areas that aren't finished.

 

that's probably why the highway is blocked off on both ends and some roads are blocked off in the city of WCUSA. they're probably waiting for Italy to be released so they could have the ability to update other maps because of how the engine limits objects in the map editor. they probably updated that limit to a much larger number

 

Nothing wrong with extending the island a tiny bit
Also in WCA there are billboards of a car towing a camper in JRI and one about a hotel in JRI. There is also an upcoming tourist safari bus route along with the existing ones. The island feels way to deserted for that stuff.

 

I really would be surprised if they add any land mass in the foreseeable future just due to recourse allocation. All of the pre-JRI maps could use at least some attention (a lot of attention for some of them) and Italy is still a WIP. It would be great if JRI could get brought up to the standards of the new maps before full release; making it bigger is pretty much necessary for that.

 

Both of those billboards were recently replaced.

I have a feeling that JRI is really only going to benefit from the same asset overhaul as Port & Industrial Site (they are shared assets anyway), and maybe possible changes to the vegetation (take a look at those two curves - one of them now has cattails!). The change in vegetation is what really excites me - we may finally get rid of some of the old bush walls in JRI.

 

I hope JRI keeps its desloate, abandoned feel. As it is now, it has very few, reasonably long mountain pass roads that all look like genuine "best driving roads in the world" material. Like, the kind of roads I wish Alaska had more of. Adding more houses would harsh that.

Speaking of, just looking at that Italy size comparison/map, I can see there's going to be a bunch of really nice driving roads added to the game. Too bad most of them won't get used because no one except Serzari does clean driving videos in Beam, and he mainly does scenarios and BRC.

 

although Im not a big "speculator" i will say that I wont be surprised to see all the vanilla tires get an overhaul with this new update, being that the Autobello tires are quite nice compared to the others, in terms of feel and grip, so they must have made some headway in that department and are going to refresh all vanilla tires....seems very possible, like one of the line items on the historically long changes/bugfixes/content additions list on the new version devblog post...

 

IIRC they said that Automation vehicles helped them learn new stuff about tires, so maybe that's why the Autobello ones feel better

 

Well the island feels way too abandoned for all the stuff happening on the island. If not made to look more lively they could at least add some slightly abandoned looking houses, like what was on DRI. Right now it doesn't seem right for there to be all these buildings and not one house. Also adding houses will not affect any of the mountain roads. If houses were added they would most likely be beach front houses, so the mountain roads should go unmodified.

 

There is a smoking Volcano, it might be that there was wooden houses that are long gone, now it is pirate cache island?

Bus stops looks like something from abandoned world.

Then again there is one slight problem, there are clean roads, roads would be partially blocked etc. in 20-30 years abandoned world if Volcano did erupt and then jungle took hold of new surfaces. There actually would be no roads.

Maybe some jungle growth on surface houses are needed even if it would be abandoned pirate island.

There needs to be good story for it though, some history and background, which creates immersion.

 

I don’t think the volcano would be the cause of anything, because everything (excluding the bus stops, which look way too overgrown to be what they are) looks in relatively decent shape. If you peel away the vines the bus stops are basically brand new. I would like to think that there are still a few people on the island, probably researchers and whoever runs the tourism industry. All of these people need houses to live in, which would probably be dirty 80s looking ones. Also it’s a bit odd that there is not one gas station on the whole island. It makes even less sense because of the port and observatory, which needs gas for their vehicles.

 

I think that fuel dock could be possibility.

Thing is that map was designed quite early on development and today understanding of level design among developers is greater.

As it was mentioned in dev blog that old content need to be revisited, there probably is going to be some additions to JRI too.

In a way it is indeed over developed world, dock is quite massive with huge cranes and all that, some major transportation would be excepted, maybe there were some natural resources and of course some structures to support that would be needed, what were transported, which part of the island and indeed where was population or was it offshore workplace where people just visited at work?

Hmm, maybe I have played too many role playing games, not sure how deep story island of driving game needs

 

I'm impressed with how big Italy is. It's twice the size of Utah.

Edit: I think my math was wrong.

 

It's actually 4 times as big, Utah is about 4 square kilometers, Italy is 16 square kilometers.

 

It even literally says how big it is compared to the current biggest map + shows it compared to Utah:

"There are a staggering amount of roads to explore. Italy is 4km x 4km; four times larger than the largest map before it."


Kids these days, not reading more than the title...

 

I'm bad at that kind of math. And I'm positive now that I did it wrong.