My favorite racing game is still Outrun 2006, which I generally play on PSP. I am a car guy, I enjoy working on cars and have my own project car, but I just don't care about racing or realism in...
My favorite racing game is still Outrun 2006, which I generally play on PSP.
I am a car guy, I enjoy working on cars and have my own project car, but I just don't care about racing or realism in my games. The last major AAA racing game I really enjoyed beyond Outrun (which I hadn't played at the time anyway) was Need for Speed Underground 2. It had that sort of fetishization of cars without trying to be something like iRacing or Assetto Corsa.
He mentioned that this is a greater issue in the gaming space in general, losing mid tier games, which really became evident to me a year or two ago when I went looking for an arcade style/sim-lite style WW2 air combat game. Most flight games out there these days have an excessive level of simulation, which I'm just not interested in; make me feel like a combat pilot without having me worry about trim, choke, etc, etc. I just want to pretend I'm the greatest WW2 ace there ever was.
It's kinda weird how this video doesn't seem to mention Trackmania (to be fair, I did not sit through the whole thing but I did skip around a bit) because that's exactly the thing they are...
It's kinda weird how this video doesn't seem to mention Trackmania (to be fair, I did not sit through the whole thing but I did skip around a bit) because that's exactly the thing they are describing. It's so easy my five year old could play it and they can't even read. And yet hard enough to master that there is a thriving professional scene in both esports and streaming.
I used to play trackmania until my fingers and wrists ached. I've given up now, I watch replays of the competitions sometimes and can really appreciate the extreme consistency and precision of...
I used to play trackmania until my fingers and wrists ached. I've given up now, I watch replays of the competitions sometimes and can really appreciate the extreme consistency and precision of those players. I wouldn't want to be them, grinding tracks hour after hour though!
Did you watch the recent attempts to beat Deep Dip 2? Man that was so good. Proper "get up every morning and check what's happened overnight" stuff. There's a reasonable summary here. I tried it...
Did you watch the recent attempts to beat Deep Dip 2? Man that was so good. Proper "get up every morning and check what's happened overnight" stuff. There's a reasonable summary here. I tried it and couldn't get past the first four jumps or so, despite spending about an hour on it.
I watched bits and pieces - it genuinely baffles me how people can stay motivated to get through something like that. It's a very satisfying narrative now it's over, but I couldn't follow it live,...
I watched bits and pieces - it genuinely baffles me how people can stay motivated to get through something like that. It's a very satisfying narrative now it's over, but I couldn't follow it live, let alone imagine actually participating, just incredible.
Racing sims is a genre that is strongly influenced by legacy games never going stale. In almost every single other genre, you get through content and the replayability needs refreshing with a new...
Racing sims is a genre that is strongly influenced by legacy games never going stale. In almost every single other genre, you get through content and the replayability needs refreshing with a new game. With racing sims though, the old reasons to get the new game - graphics plus control interface - no longer noticeably improve. Racing is racing is racing, at the core of it.
The controller interface has been stable for years, steering wheel and pedal combos are largely game-agnostic, and the latest godraycompressionbuzzword tracing doesn't really do all that much. The libraries of cars and tracks are similarly so chock full of legacy content that it would take a herculean effort to move the needle at all. I think I would pinpoint the moment of peak 'ok we're done' as Forza 3. Not Horizon 3, 2009 Forza 3. And not because that game was some genrechanging masterpiece, but because that is about the moment when new games really didn't have anything left to add to the conversation. The difference between Forza 3 (2009) and Gran Turismo 2 (1999) is just not that wide of a gap even at that point. Games made after that point were very, very good, but it would be hard to point at any of them with no sequel number attached to them and place them in release order by looking at them.
So the only thing left to compete on is gimmicks, hence whacky races Hanna-Barbera style becomes the norm. There WAS another way they could have gone, and to some extent they did and still do, and that is the sport genre solution, which is perhaps the only other genre with the same legacy impact. There's essentially no tangible difference anymore between FIFA n and FIFA n+1, or n+5. But by baking in a 12 month yearly cycle and forcing the online community onto the new release through event and server support and whatever else, they artificially blow out the sales.
That was a longwinded way of saying that simple racing games CAN'T 'die', because they have absolutely no need for new releases to 'live'. They are functionally immortal.
In theory, yes, with regard to gameplay. In practice, however, a game will fall by the wayside as subsequent generations of consumers enter the market, and the game's technology and supporting...
That was a longwinded way of saying that simple racing games CAN'T 'die', because they have absolutely no need for new releases to 'live'. They are functionally immortal.
In theory, yes, with regard to gameplay. In practice, however, a game will fall by the wayside as subsequent generations of consumers enter the market, and the game's technology and supporting infrastructure age. A 14-year-old today might be willing to try a racing game released 10 years ago, but if they can't play online multiplayer with their friends because the servers are shut down, and the graphics look weird on their hi-res monitor, and then there's no VR support, etc., they'll soon go get their kicks from the latest NFS or whatever. And, even as someone who will happily play the original OutRun today, I don't blame them. They've grown up with a certain standard.
In any case, I think your point doesn't address the real reason, which is that developers think the incentive for new simple racing games has dwindled. AveragePixel alludes to the same point in the the first 3 minutes of this video. Basically, it's indicative of the death of AA games on the whole, and that's the category in which those arcade racers tended to fall. There are quite a few good indie racing games, but I imagine the opportunity cost of developing something with the level of polish of Ridge Racer, Blur, and the rest is prohibitive for most indie devs.
This is my point - graphics improvements in the context of racing games haven't materially improved in years. We can (and do) simulate to the point of it being near indistinguishable from watching...
and the graphics look weird on their hi-res monitor
This is my point - graphics improvements in the context of racing games haven't materially improved in years. We can (and do) simulate to the point of it being near indistinguishable from watching real races on TV. Plants, animals, and especially faces, and the dynamic generation of these are where the effort has been in CGI for a long time, and that's just not that relevant to racing sims. So where in the 80s and 90s you were absolutely correct, that motive for buying the next new racing sim has all but disappeared.
VR is a gimmick (said as someone who personally loves VR, it's not ever going to be the bulk of gameplay or even just the bulk of racing sims), and the servers are often not tied to the games themselves at all - they've spun that out into long-lived services that are decoupled from the games (unless you are EA and need people to buy SportsGame Year+1). Forza 3 that I mentioned (from 16 years ago) looks perfectly fine on a 4k screen, and plays just as well as it used to. The servers for F3 lasted until at least 2021, but the company that owns Forza has been turning the legacy servers back on, so F2 is live even today.
I appreciate his overall point, and blur is definitely an example I'd mostly forgotten that I might have to track down, but one thing was very jarring to me. Is it really niche knowledge that you...
I appreciate his overall point, and blur is definitely an example I'd mostly forgotten that I might have to track down, but one thing was very jarring to me.
Is it really niche knowledge that you can fire things backward in MarioKart? I feel like this has been a thing since at least the N64 or GBA versions.
Many people are deeply uncurious and do not read manuals or experiment with controls or mechanics. If it's not on the screen the first time they happen to look or a simple effect tied to an...
Many people are deeply uncurious and do not read manuals or experiment with controls or mechanics. If it's not on the screen the first time they happen to look or a simple effect tied to an obvious button there's a high chance they will never know about it. They play games the way some people "watch" a show by turning it on in the background while they fold laundry or scroll Instagram.
My favorite racing game is still Outrun 2006, which I generally play on PSP.
I am a car guy, I enjoy working on cars and have my own project car, but I just don't care about racing or realism in my games. The last major AAA racing game I really enjoyed beyond Outrun (which I hadn't played at the time anyway) was Need for Speed Underground 2. It had that sort of fetishization of cars without trying to be something like iRacing or Assetto Corsa.
He mentioned that this is a greater issue in the gaming space in general, losing mid tier games, which really became evident to me a year or two ago when I went looking for an arcade style/sim-lite style WW2 air combat game. Most flight games out there these days have an excessive level of simulation, which I'm just not interested in; make me feel like a combat pilot without having me worry about trim, choke, etc, etc. I just want to pretend I'm the greatest WW2 ace there ever was.
It's kinda weird how this video doesn't seem to mention Trackmania (to be fair, I did not sit through the whole thing but I did skip around a bit) because that's exactly the thing they are describing. It's so easy my five year old could play it and they can't even read. And yet hard enough to master that there is a thriving professional scene in both esports and streaming.
I used to play trackmania until my fingers and wrists ached. I've given up now, I watch replays of the competitions sometimes and can really appreciate the extreme consistency and precision of those players. I wouldn't want to be them, grinding tracks hour after hour though!
Did you watch the recent attempts to beat Deep Dip 2? Man that was so good. Proper "get up every morning and check what's happened overnight" stuff. There's a reasonable summary here. I tried it and couldn't get past the first four jumps or so, despite spending about an hour on it.
I watched bits and pieces - it genuinely baffles me how people can stay motivated to get through something like that. It's a very satisfying narrative now it's over, but I couldn't follow it live, let alone imagine actually participating, just incredible.
Racing sims is a genre that is strongly influenced by legacy games never going stale. In almost every single other genre, you get through content and the replayability needs refreshing with a new game. With racing sims though, the old reasons to get the new game - graphics plus control interface - no longer noticeably improve. Racing is racing is racing, at the core of it.
The controller interface has been stable for years, steering wheel and pedal combos are largely game-agnostic, and the latest godraycompressionbuzzword tracing doesn't really do all that much. The libraries of cars and tracks are similarly so chock full of legacy content that it would take a herculean effort to move the needle at all. I think I would pinpoint the moment of peak 'ok we're done' as Forza 3. Not Horizon 3, 2009 Forza 3. And not because that game was some genrechanging masterpiece, but because that is about the moment when new games really didn't have anything left to add to the conversation. The difference between Forza 3 (2009) and Gran Turismo 2 (1999) is just not that wide of a gap even at that point. Games made after that point were very, very good, but it would be hard to point at any of them with no sequel number attached to them and place them in release order by looking at them.
So the only thing left to compete on is gimmicks, hence whacky races Hanna-Barbera style becomes the norm. There WAS another way they could have gone, and to some extent they did and still do, and that is the sport genre solution, which is perhaps the only other genre with the same legacy impact. There's essentially no tangible difference anymore between FIFA n and FIFA n+1, or n+5. But by baking in a 12 month yearly cycle and forcing the online community onto the new release through event and server support and whatever else, they artificially blow out the sales.
That was a longwinded way of saying that simple racing games CAN'T 'die', because they have absolutely no need for new releases to 'live'. They are functionally immortal.
In theory, yes, with regard to gameplay. In practice, however, a game will fall by the wayside as subsequent generations of consumers enter the market, and the game's technology and supporting infrastructure age. A 14-year-old today might be willing to try a racing game released 10 years ago, but if they can't play online multiplayer with their friends because the servers are shut down, and the graphics look weird on their hi-res monitor, and then there's no VR support, etc., they'll soon go get their kicks from the latest NFS or whatever. And, even as someone who will happily play the original OutRun today, I don't blame them. They've grown up with a certain standard.
In any case, I think your point doesn't address the real reason, which is that developers think the incentive for new simple racing games has dwindled. AveragePixel alludes to the same point in the the first 3 minutes of this video. Basically, it's indicative of the death of AA games on the whole, and that's the category in which those arcade racers tended to fall. There are quite a few good indie racing games, but I imagine the opportunity cost of developing something with the level of polish of Ridge Racer, Blur, and the rest is prohibitive for most indie devs.
This is my point - graphics improvements in the context of racing games haven't materially improved in years. We can (and do) simulate to the point of it being near indistinguishable from watching real races on TV. Plants, animals, and especially faces, and the dynamic generation of these are where the effort has been in CGI for a long time, and that's just not that relevant to racing sims. So where in the 80s and 90s you were absolutely correct, that motive for buying the next new racing sim has all but disappeared.
VR is a gimmick (said as someone who personally loves VR, it's not ever going to be the bulk of gameplay or even just the bulk of racing sims), and the servers are often not tied to the games themselves at all - they've spun that out into long-lived services that are decoupled from the games (unless you are EA and need people to buy SportsGame Year+1). Forza 3 that I mentioned (from 16 years ago) looks perfectly fine on a 4k screen, and plays just as well as it used to. The servers for F3 lasted until at least 2021, but the company that owns Forza has been turning the legacy servers back on, so F2 is live even today.
I appreciate his overall point, and blur is definitely an example I'd mostly forgotten that I might have to track down, but one thing was very jarring to me.
Is it really niche knowledge that you can fire things backward in MarioKart? I feel like this has been a thing since at least the N64 or GBA versions.
Many people are deeply uncurious and do not read manuals or experiment with controls or mechanics. If it's not on the screen the first time they happen to look or a simple effect tied to an obvious button there's a high chance they will never know about it. They play games the way some people "watch" a show by turning it on in the background while they fold laundry or scroll Instagram.