Star Wars: Galactic Racer director talks balancing spectacle with great game feel

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a game that's destined to bring Star Wars fans' inner child to life. It's full of fan-favourite characters and maps from various Star Wars eras, and it gives them the chance to race in some iconic vehicles. The game could have leant on nostalgia alone to sell copies, but game director Matt Webster knows that wouldn't have been enough to make a great racing game.

"Arcade isn't an absence of depth. Arcade is jump in, have an incredible moment, instantly feel like you're having a fantasy fulfilment, you're getting excited, and you're getting an audio-visual spectacle, and it's feeling great immediately. And then we have a heap of depth inside how the vehicles control, and the dynamics of the three speeder archetypes, and then of course the pod racer as well," Webster told us in our exclusive interview.

Going beyond that initial moment, Webster says the core design philosophy was favouring the player in order to reward them for peeking under the hood and engaging with the depth the game offers. "If you crash, it's a risk that you've pushed too far. It should feel fair," he said.

When we got to play multiplayer, it was clear that while the game rewarded solid racing, there were sneaky ways for people at the back of the pack to have a chance to catch up, sometimes leading to something like a blue shell moment in Mario Kart. "You have those moments of 'someone beat me' or 'something happened to me in that race,' but it felt fair," Webster said.

Check out our full interview below for more details on Star Wars: Galactic Racer's multiplayer and single-player modes: