Over the past few years, one of the biggest requests from fans of the NASCAR Heat series has been the addition of a full custom paint booth.
We’re not just talking the ability to make any aspect of a car any color you want, either. We’re talking about a full suite to allowing fully custom schemes, brands, and the importing of custom designs and images into the game for use on cars. Unfortunately for them, it hasn’t been implemented in the game. But that’s not from a lack of desire.
“Our paint booth I feel is hit every year for just the lack of real depth we have in it,” game designer Elliot Henderson said. “So that’s been a constant focus for us to try and enhance and progressively bring forward.”
With NASCAR Heat 5, much of the same returns with the paint booth, but there are more things to change this time around such as the shadow fill color of numbers, the car’s material, rim color, and spoiler color can all be customized.
[MUST SEE: Exclusive NASCAR Heat 5 Gameplay]
Though the studio would like to have a deeper paint booth available for players with the ability to import custom designs and images, SGO was told, there are some things that cause too many hurdles for it to happen. The main hurdle being race teams and sponsors.
Being an officially licensed NASCAR game makes the logistics of adding a full suite difficult. A big worry for sponsors and teams is that people would put their brand on non-partnered vehicles, or you’d see a sponsor like M&Ms appear be placed on the car of Brad Keselowski. It sounds trivial to the average fan or gamer, but to those teams, it’s a major issue.
The reason games like iRacing are able to get away with it is due to the fact that they aren’t officially licensed games with real-life drivers and teams. What’s more is the fact that the creation suite offered by the game itself isn’t that deep, it’s mostly third party software that allows for a fully customized look for drivers. Plus, being a PC-only title makes it much easier to alter game files for custom designs. When you are talking about custom designs for consoles like PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, you also have to deal with restrictions in place by the console makers Microsoft and Sony.
There is the possibility something is worked out for future releases in the franchise, but it’s far too early in the process for anything definite to be said either way.
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