Racing by myself
I can’t help but notice that racing games seem to be making huge strides backwards anymore.
More often I am playing a game where I race the clock, have to drift so many feet, earn points, cross checkpoints, drive “with style”, etc. What I am doing less of is actually racing other cars.
At a certain point this is no longer “racing” and is just a driving test.
In my mind the best racing game I have ever played was Burnout 2. Ok, fine, it’s not realistic, it doesn’t have real world licensed cars, and it doesn’t even have great visuals for the time it was developed. Yet in Burnout 2 the entire game is centered on not just racing other cars, but doing so in heavy traffic. The AI drivers would wreck just as often as I would, and sometimes take me with them. The experience was sphincter tightening fun that was not so technically demanding but retained a sense of start-to-finish adrenaline that left you short of breath by the end of the race.
Even future installments of the Burnout series would start to leave this model. Project Gotham Racing 3 has you spending more time alone on the track then with other drivers. Drift racing in the Need for Speed series left you alone with your thoughts, your car, and tractionless tires. I find when I’m just trying to beat a timer or surpass a score I’m not near as interested. The game becomes a chore in the hopes I can do something interesting or earn enough money to get a new car. I’m not doing races because I want to, but because I feel I must before I can move onto something more interesting.
That’s a fundamental flaw in your game design, when you force players to do something they really would rather not do. Why do that to them? Are you just trying to pad out the game and hide your lack of creativity? I’m sure some players do like these races, but are they really so popular that it has to supplant actually racing other cars?
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May 21st, 2008 at 9:20 am
At some point game developers created some industry law that every game had to include two things:
1. The main game effort.
2. The adjacent “minigames”.
Minigames are okay if they are optional or are there to reward me over and above what the game offers as it progresses. What is grinding my gears is that minigames have taken on a perverse life of their own and they demand things like being proficient at them before advancing in the game or earning some essential piece of harware. The entire drivers tests in Gran Turismo made me scoff. Apparently I have to prove myself worthy to the developers of driving one of their cars in their fracking game.
Its like being stopped and told to play Bejeweled to earn a new turbocharger
At a certain point these side quests have become interwoven with the game so tightly they become distractions you have to trudge through while trying to stay focused on the main gameplay elements on your own.
Racing games are simple by design and I never felt puzzles or challenges to earn progression (like drivers licenses) was anything more than crappy ways to extend them. I just want to go fast, smash things and win a race. Burnout 2 is the only race game that stands out in my mind as being the right combination of balance.
Here is an idea, quit wasting time on these sidelines and give us more and varied courses.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:30 am
I don’t know. I think there is something for everyone. I have all the popular race games except the PGR series.
Burnout 3 was my favorite, but it’s really arcade mechanics. Forza 2 is the closest that comes to mind with driving realism. Even in that, you can make it more like an arcade game. I just picked up DiRT based upon the demo of GRiD alone. It’s fun, but not really driving at all. It’s moving floating squares that look pretty and sound great.
Of course, I’ve never actually raced, so who am I to know?
May 21st, 2008 at 11:23 am
There probably is something out there for everybody, I’m just a little discouraged by how much I see racing games focus less on racing and more on goals.
In the era of Excitebike that was fine because we just didn’t have the processing power to have AI racers. You might get a game like Pole Position where the other drivers were really little more than obstacles.
I think the limitations of the 8-bit era have long been surpassed. I can understand mixing it up to some extent, but what I want to spend the majority of my time on is actually racing other cars.