What Recent Racing Games Lack and What They Need to Succeed.
Racing games over the past 3-4 years have been far from amazing. Despite there being some enjoyable, fun to play and great looking games to play, none have really been classed as a major success in the gaming industry. So, why is that? Well in this blog post I’m gonna take you through that. Keep in mind this post mainly focuses around aspects focused on the playing experience, and not on things like the car list or map. LETS DO THISSSSS
1. Lack of the Ability to keep the game ‘alive’
One of if not the most important things about a game is to have the user want to keep coming back to it. Newer racing games have had very little of this. Normally, after you complete the main story, there’s nothing to do; sure, you might have a few extra missions and the PvP modes to play, but is that really enough to lure you into coming back? The Crew’s summit system is decent, but there is a LOT more that the developers can do to keep the game alive. Competitive races with rewards, missions that are varied and interesting would be able to do this.
2. No Progression.
Most arcade racing games these days have a similar progression system, if even they have one. The Forza series probably is the worst offender of this. You get all the cars first and have nothing to play for. Micro-transactions and don’t help the case either… Like I said, this coupled with the little story make a game very boring and monotonous. In the games which do contain progression, it turns out to be either really easy or repetitive. Talking about repetitive things.
3. Repetitiveness
Race, set waypoint, drift, set waypoint repeat. That’s basically all there is to racing games now. 3 or 4 types of events and that’s all. The same stuff all over again. In a lot of cases that’s the case with customisation as well, because all you do is take an already fast car and max it out. The lack of things to do ultimately transpires into a very repetitive drag, and the only reason you play is to finish the story. As there is no restriction or class, more than 80% of the car list gets ignored.
4. No Exploration
Right this one is mainly focused on open world games and not so much on track racers. Although I said in the beginning that this post won’t pick on things like the map, a small map doesn’t mean that there has to be a lack of exploration. Albeit exploration isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when talking about a racing game, it is still a major part of the experience. If we take the Crew out of the equation, there haven’t been many other games providing a fair amount of exploration. A game might not be focused on the exploration side but new games offer absolutely nothing.
5. Emphasis on the same things
Yes we love drifting but its just too much now. Every street racing game now emphasizes way too much on drifting, touge and stuff. The storylines as well are all basically the same, it’s a common story in a new form and that’s it. I like drifting, don’t get me wrong, but not to this level. The cars used in games are also from a set pool. The only game to have some different cars was Driveclub and the Crew to some extent. Forza also has some cool cars but that’s expected with a game which contains so many cars.
To round it off, car games nowadays are boring, repetitive and not as intriguing as they once were. WIth the new NFS and The Crew 2 releasing, it will be interesting to see what’s in store for us racing gamers.
But for now, I’m out
Comments
Honestly im just fed up with exotics.. i want more jeeps, wagons, low end cars and for some… muscles. Each time there a lot of exotics which are not fun to drive anymore.
I want to have a normal car to drive around and a dirt spec to blaze around the dirt (only reason why i still play the crew because exploring the dirt tracks is so much fun on dirt spec)
Yeah. Id say the crew is the best racing game of the past 3-4 years. The exotics as well are the same ones….
YES I was gonna say this
NFS went too far with exotics,. During the last games, I barely saw any JDM, sometimes none in their games, and exploration is a meh.
It’s fine to have exotics, but when they all drive the same, it gets boring. Real Racing 3 is extremely exotic-heavy but at least there are some handling differences between cars (still could be better - it’s only really noticeable when you get to the F1 cars which have near-zero grip below 100mph).
I once beat FH2 twice in two weeks so I can see where you are coming from here
Real Racing 3 solves some of these. Tons of new content on a regular 6-week release cycle - enough special events and new cars to keep players busy until the next update. Progression is quite gradual with the faster cars being locked until you reach a certain level. Quite a lot of different types of event, although all are basically “drive as fast as you can” (admittedly there are some tricks such as deliberately blocking, obstructing or crashing the CPU players or going backwards to get a longer straight for a higher top speed). But I’ll agree that these are problems in quite a few games.
But that is different. This isn’t an original system. Every free to play game is like that, progression centered and regular updates each month. Of course they would be like that.
These problems revolves more around paid titles for PC and consoles.
The game industry is doing number 5 a lot these days. For example, I don’t know who played Fallout 4 and previous Fallout games. In Fallout 4 there is a voiced protagonist which everyone hated because the dialogue was very repetitive and felt odd and you don’t want that in an RPG. Why did they do this? Because Witcher 3 had it and they thought it would be cool. Another exaple,probably a better one,survival games.Same thing, nothing new every dev copies DayZ and Rust. Drifting games. at least 30 different games doing the same thing over and over again with crap physics and mostly bad graphics. With track focused racing games it’s really hard to make something original, since all you do is race on a circuit.If a game does not have the popular tracks or cars it’s a bad game,isn’t it? Indies who are supposed to open the AAA companies eyes and show them what they doing it wrong, they instead copy them. The game industry is a mess now and it will not change until we don’t buy the same game every year,that has a little better graphics and a minimal new content.