After all of the leaks surrounding Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing Steve Lycett of Sumo Digital under his S0L tag has been mostly absent in the SEGA/Sonic community but has made one post in a topic over at the Official SEGA Forums Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing board.

Obviously Steve can’t confirm or deny the leaks but he does address some questions people might have on their mind and what had to be taken into consideration when making the game such as the variety of audiences the team had to cater for.
Steve’s full post is below –

I’m breaking cover in this thread of wrongness

First -I’m not going to talk specific characters – certainly not till I see anything official. I don’t see any official reveals – and until you do – I wouldn’t believe anything either 😛 Don’t bother asking or PM’ing me either. My lips are sealed!

When all the characters are revealed, I’m sure we’ll hear a couple of things…

1. “Why isn’t character X in the game! I’m gonna cry and cry till I’m all out of tears till you add them!”

First, wipe your nose, second, stop crying. It’s not a good look on a 35 year old man!

When we make these games, we do two things. First we need to ensure we have a varied and ranged cast – that – and hold yourself- are as interesting to a non-Sega fan, as they are to a die hard Sega fan…

Take yourself back to when you’re a small child, someone hands you the joypad and you take your first steps into videogaming. You’ve no pre-conceptions, you are mesmerised by the blue skies, the vivid green grass, the character you’re playing is joyfully jumping on the heads of passing Koopa’s – no wait – Badniks.

You’re about to be a gamer, you realise this is GREAT! But you don’t know the characters, you don’t pore over the names of stages, you’re enthralled as you’re having fun and you’re lost in a whole new world. Remember games are about fun 😛

So we’re making this game for that kid too. We do out best to get the fan service in the games, and yes, a big part of what it’s about it nostalgia, and we try our best to sit in both camps. But… this game has to appeal to a very wide audience, and we’d like to get some new gamers in and teach them something about Sega too.

2. “You are calling this game Sega All-Stars – yet character Y appeared in only one game, and they shouldn’t be in as I want character Z! (note the Z doesn’t stand for Zool OK!”

So maybe you disagree with our and SEGA’s choices. Be our guest! Again, we’ve got to make sure the cast is varied for Billy’s Gran who got a Wii for Christmas. She’s heard about that game where you can race a hedgehog against a fox, and she wants some of that action!

As we’ve always maintained, we’ve gone for a good mix across ALL ages of Sega. For all those fans who don’t like Jet Set Radio, we’ve got a forum full elsewhere who all high-fived when they saw Beat drift into view. We can’t please you all, but I think when all is revealed, we’ll have pleased a lot more folk than we did with SST.

You can’t accuse of us not listening either. We did a LOT of research after SST shipped, and I feel we’ve got in a lot of characters that were requested last time. Remember Ryo, we wanted him, and we’d got the research to prove that you guys wanted him too! It might never have happened otherwise. Yep, we’ve had a late rush of support for some characters this time, and if we do something along these lines again, or do DLC, maybe we’ll look at trying to get them in a future title. Or maybe some of them are already in, but not in a form you expect. I know at least one that’s going to make a lot of folk happy.

The other thing – is that some characters may not fit in the style of the game we’re making here. We’re doing a bright, colourful, happy shiny game. Some of the ones we’ve had suggested – are clearly not bright happy colourful characters. We’ve also got an age rating to adhere too, and some characters very much certainly would scupper this…!

It’s good you’re all so excited, it’s good you all want to fight for the characters you love. We feel the same way! But we’re still human and we still have budgets and timescales. We still want to spend some time with family and loved ones, who haven’t seen us for months as we’ve been putting the extra special effort into this game for you.

Finally, remember we’ve been doing our very best to make a game for everyone, be they old fans or new, or fans we’re going to recruit soon who will then love Sega in future, just as much as you love Sega now.

Right, back to fixing bugs, or you’ll never get your hands on the game.

—
S0L
—

A cheeky little hint at a character that appears in the game in some form or another that people are going to like ay? I wonder who that will be?

Thanks to Clisp at the SSMB for the heads up!

Steve Lycett from Sumo Digital in one of his communitty visit’s has recently answered alot of fan’s questions in the SEGA forums. Since some questions weren’t as relevants as others we’ll only list the more important info to come from the answers

– You can play your own music during gameplay on the Xbox version but not on PS3.
– The DS version contains an exclusive Crush 40 track(track as in music of course)
– You can influence the colour of one vehicle in the game though Steve doesn’t state which vehicle.
– Snaking isn’t possible
– Sumo Digital’s network model should prevent cheaters/hackers though this can’t be 100% guaranteed.
– Some platforms will have downloadable time trial ghosts and all versions will all be able to save local ghosts.
– Only Xbox 360 and PS3 versions support voice chat via headset.
– Steve Lycett’s favourite track is Lava Lair using tree tops for drifting. Steve says “you’ll see why”
– The game starts with things locked, then you have to earn Sega Miles to buy new content in the Shop.
– Every version but the DS version has some very difficult Ghost cars from the track designer to beat.
– Steve’s favourite playable character in the game is still Big the Cat and one character he can’t talk about yet.
– Controls plan for the PC versions is for keyboard or game controllers.
– Steve can’t touch the topic of PS3 exclusive content right now.
– When asked about a Thank Your For Playing screen at the end of the game Steve says the game does say Thank You For Playing but that’s all he can say right now.

Full list of questions and answers can be found all together in my post in the SSMB topic.

Source: SEGA Forums topic