Tu crois que ça changera dans la version définitive ? Vu l'implication des joueurs je trouverais ça curieux.

Just €25,000 will buy you a senior manager’s position in Slightly Mad’s World Of Mass Development, plus a couple of advertising hoardings and liveries, and access to a patching schedule that alters the makeup of Project Cars daily. With 80,000 backers investing anything from €10 to €25,000 for access to early builds of Project Cars, the studio now has an army of QA testers and advocates, and their influence is shaping a game that already does things Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport never have.

Long before Double Fine’s Kickstarter-altering success with Broken Age, Slightly Mad built its own portal – its World Of Mass Development, or WMD – and gave every backer access to development builds as well as a line to the studio through its forums. When Project Cars’ new physics model was patched in several months ago, universal community approval convinced the team within hours that it was on the right track. When one backer said a certain car’s bumper might be too angular, the error was fixed the next day. “With WMD, we don’t have to develop in the dark for two years and hope our decisions pan out,” says creative director Andy Tudor. “We come from the mod scene, where people go onto forums and talk, so we wanted to have that two-way communication with players.”

Taking so much feedback from so many is Slightly Mad’s way of building a sim racer that does everything for everyone. Already it has made enough cars and tracks to cover karting events, road racing, touring car, oval racing and Formula One. When the game is finished, those fragments will be stitched together into a career calendar you can explore as you please, whether that’s taking the usual zero-to-hero route from Mini Cooper to Bugatti Veyron, or racing three years of F1 seasons in the same car. Along the way, you’ll drive in rain and snow on tracks with full day/night cycles, compete in 64-player races online, and challenge friends through a version of the Autolog-style system Slightly Mad helped create for Shift 2: Unleashed.

“We’re going to provide you with all the tools and all the options you need to dial it into whatever kind of experience you want and whatever motorsport you’re into,” says Tudor. “You can make it more like Need For Speed if you want, or a full sim. Everyone complained our AI was too aggressive, so we opened up all our AI sliders so you can tune it how you like. This is the players’ game. We’re building a sandbox, and all those settings and options will make it into every version, not just PC.”

Those settings are the selling point that should help the game spread beyond its committed players-cum-investors. If you want the game to feel like OutRun, we’re told, it will. Handling models, opponent AI and steering are all highly customisable, with single settings to make sweeping changes, and more in-depth toggles and sliders buried deeper in the game’s litany of menu screens.

The games to beat are Gran Turismo and Forza, Tudor believes, and Project Cars’ pitch is a list of features ripped from both with a promise to better them, plus its own innovations. It’s only the car count where Polyphony and Turn 10 take the lead, with GT’s endless Nissans and Forza’s boutique supercars outnumbering Project Cars’ roster a dozen times over. But in every other respect, Project Cars is ready to challenge the format-exclusive racers. Its physics system is flexible enough to handle everything from a go kart to an F1 car, weather and daylight dramatically impact racing, and it covers more motorsports than Forza, despite having fewer vehicles.

Slightly Mad has Wii U and PC all to itself, since specialist racers tend to focus on one form of motorsport, but on PS3 and 360 the game’s greatest strength is as a force for change. Forza can’t afford to ignore F1 or dynamic weather in a space it will share with Project Cars, and Gran Turismo’s ancient AI routines seem half asleep compared to Project Cars’ murderous automotive bullies. And then there’s the promise of team management, pit stops as dynamic as the real thing, and that unprecedented connection with the community. Succeed or fail, Slightly Mad’s crowdfunding experiment looks set to shake up a genre Turn 10 and Polyphony have developed conservatively for a decade.