Ripzsaur wrote on 02/19/18 at 03:39:40:
When I was reading this, I thought of a kinda cool concept for an online mode. It would only work with a lot of players in the player base though.
However, it would be a really fun concept to have an online tournament mode where to advance you have to place in the top 4 of each match, then the match would get consolidated. Last man standing type deal, 3 lives... I.e. make it just like single-player tournament. After you lose all three lives, you can leave the match if you desire or watch the rest of it.
The top 4 from that match get paired with the top four from another match. That pattern continues up to the last level where the 8 players fight and whoever lasts the longest wins, earning XP based on your position.
I'm sure some tweaks could be made to make it easier to do the concept with a lower player-base but as an initial idea it would be cool.
In general, I think TM2 is the only real plausible argument here.
It could be remade with relative ease as it's only 8 environments (excluding the hidden levels) and a few handful of car models as opposed to a sprawling open-world or dozens of smaller levels with varying assets. A simple online deathmatch/LMS/1v1 (option to fight a randomly selected opponent, like a fighting game)/co-op system would be sufficient. Hell, you wouldn't even have to code the co-op into the network environment if they wanted to be lazy. They could just utilize the Playstation Share Play (albeit would be a split screen, so points deducted there). At least the beauty of the Share Play option is if the new TM2 servers ever went down, you can still play online co-op. Slap a $20 price tag on it, sell a few hundred thousand downloads, make a cool two million after production costs. Make Darkside and Dark Tooth playable characters in TM2, sell a DLC pack for Twisted Metal 1 Cars/Maps at $10 with, make another million or so.
One possible issue is do they still have the source code from Twisted Metal 2? I remember hearing back a few years after Twisted Metal Head On came out that they originally wanted to build off of the source code from TM2 but the source code has been lost. I could be misremembering this so I could be wrong, I hope that isn't the case.
But I wouldn't count on online features that are anything basic. Although I certainly do like the idea of a tiered tournament mode with 4 player battles, winner goes to the next round.
Just give me up to 4-8 players for deathmatches and give some decent customization options for the structure of death matches (timed battles, stock lives, damage done maybe.) For a 20$ remake with online play I don't expect there to be robust online but a functional online that is balanced with decent basic options would be fantastic.
I also wouldn't expect DLC unless the game is massively successful (In which case Darkside and Yello Jacket plus some TM1 maps would be a great addition.)
I think there is money to make on an affordable remake. It's not a complicated game and there is a big following for that game, toss in a lot of PS1 nostalgia going on and a Twisted Metal fan can only hope.