Crash Team Rumble: State of the Game #1

Hello, Bandicoots! I’m Steve and I’m the Executive Producer here at Toys for Bob. It’s been just about a month since we shipped our first-ever live game with Crash Team Rumble, and it's been exciting to say the least! We wanted to take a moment to check in with our community and provide a “State of the Game” update in these early days. First of all, we knew the game was fun, but we had no idea how much fun we’d have playing it with all of you. The excitement and engagement we’re seeing within the community and around the game are inspiring to all of us working on Crash Team Rumble. We’ve seen strategies, stats, and plays we never anticipated in the years we were testing internally. We are excited about the future and look forward to continuing to evolve the game with this community.

And that evolution has already begun thanks to the input and passion of the community! Straight off the bat, there was a desire to see a true calendar of our live events instead of just a list of what’s coming. We worked internally and delivered one that provides a cleaner calendar layout of our events and we will continue to do so,  so you’re prepared for what’s around the corner!

In fact, today we have our first ever Limited Time Mode (LTM) for the game called Zap Trap. Zap Trap plays similarly to the main competitive mode except for one electrifying difference: when you’re within a certain range of a teammate electricity will arc in between you, and if you’re able to maintain that distance and get an enemy in between the two of you they’ll be knocked out instantly. It adds an exciting twist to an already exciting mode! Over the course of this weekend event you’ll be playing to earn some unique rewards, and of course to have some fun. We plan to make more of these modes in the future and deliver them throughout future updates, but for now, jump into the game this weekend to enjoy our first run at LTMs!

Next up: we heard some complaints from some users about stability and crash issues that we didn’t see prior to launch or in our Closed Beta. These were hard to track down, but once we did, we fast-tracked fixes which have been live now for a couple of weeks. I’m happy to say, those fixes worked and we’ll continue to keep an eye on anything else that may pop up. Most recently we pushed a handful of balance changes based on our internal analytics and feedback from all of you in the community! We’ve heard the desire for more tweaks, but we’re fully evaluating and testing balance changes before we have them go live. With the recent addition of Ripper, we definitely want to observe how the meta shakes out before we consider and drop another round of adjustments.

That release of Ripper certainly appears to be shifting the play behavior of the community, and with Bogged Down on the horizon players will have yet another map to experience.  Only a month into the game and we’ll already have two big updates to the game, which included a new hero and a new map that provide more variety to the meta. Later this season, we have two additional big updates that will definitely shake things up, alongside more XP, Badge, and Limited Time Mode weekends throughout.

Before all of that though we have another update dropping in the next few weeks that we call the Midseason Update. This update is primarily focused on bug fixes for issues that are live, and to tee up our events for the second half of this season. Keep your eyes out for the patch notes dropping in the not-too-distant future, there are a ton of great fixes in there both large and small! 

I’d like to close out by saying how appreciative we are with the constant communication we’re getting from the community, and how that back and forth is improving the game for the better, day by day. If you have ideas, suggestions, or just want to chat please don’t hesitate to contact us on our Subreddit, our official Discord channel, or hit us up on Twitter. We’re always regularly popping in to listen to what you’d like to see!

Since this is our first “State of the Game” blog I’m also going to throw a little teaser in there for our next big meta-shifting event that releases our first new power, Sticky TNT. When used, this crate acts like an explosive game of hot potato! When one player has the crate attached to them the crate will count down, and they have to pass it to another player to avoid getting blown up! We are excited to see what you do with it – stay tuned for more details.

Until next time, I look forward to seeing you in-game!

Steve R.

Executive Producer