The Evolution of Racing Game Open Worlds and the End of Innovation

It's been awesome seeing everyone's love and nostalgia for the games that mean so much to them, that unfortunately weren't featured in this video. I loved games like Midtown Madness, Burnout Paradise and NFS World too! Like I mentioned at the end of the vid, even after 43 minutes it still feels like I didn't do enough games/franchises justice. I wanted to offer a window into the games and franchises that I felt had the biggest impact on open worlds, without giving the whole picture - as that would have led to a much, much longer and less focused video😅 So please know that I didn't forget them, or mean to do them any injustice, I just had to make some cuts somewhere and focus on what I felt made the biggest impact throughout the years.

Thank you for calling out the biggest oversell of FH5 - evolving world. There was so much potential just wasted, and what they gave us can barely be called evolving

I sank thousands of hours into Horizon by now, and yet the game that appeals to me the most here is probably TDU2. I guess I really want to see what Solar Crown will have to offer.

The stagnation of open world racing games also ties into DLCs. I remember when expansion like South Central for MCLA or Big Surf Island for Burnout Paradise came out and everyone loved them. Seamlessly added districts to the existing map which provide a completely new vibe and layout. Nowadays Forza still has us fast travel to separate islands, and in the case of the recently revealed Rally expansion, don't even feel all that different. I miss getting excited for DLCs in this genre. Oh, and to add one more game to the list, one that even precedes the first Midnight Club - Driver 2 absolutely pioneered the bare basics of an open world driving game. It even came out before GTA 3 and had not one, not two but four completely unique maps based on real locations over two discs. You could even get out of the car and simply walk around, scare pedestrians walking down the sidewalk and the vehicle handling still holds up today. Also each map had a secret car hidden on each map, such as a classic Mini you could find in Havana. You'd need to find a hidden underground parking garage, which acted like a labyrinth of sorts, and navigate your way through it to find the Mini hidden in it. I miss open world racers having fun secrets like that. Nowadays it's very much "what you see is what you get".

It's not just lack of competition. It's what studios prioritize, or are told to focus on by publishers footing the bill. Games becoming mainstream played a huge role in this compared to when earlier racing games were released. Devs could do whatever they wanted, be it over the top arcade, or more serious sim-lite title like Porsche Unleashed. Now days, it's almost always about pushing graphical fidelity and open world scale versus good (engaging) game play. Some older games are better because they were focused and limited by hardware. So, devs had to prioritize certain features and do them well instead of using the "kitchen sink" approach where shiny graphics, huge but lifeless open worlds and Ray Tracing hide the shallow game play. This goes for all genres, but racing in particular since most people associate it with just car-to-car racing and nothing ancillary that goes with it like story, the quality of world itself, player interaction outside of cars, etc.

Personally the main thing I miss most in Horizon games is a sense of progression. You get bombarded with new cars all the time, making it so that you really don't value any car particularly highly...

The worst part of Horizon for me is the lack of progression. It just throws shit at you in a nonstop torrent of new cars and as a result you become numb. The game literally pushes you to stop caring about it.

And another documentary on Racing Games? Sign me up.

The more I play FH5, the more I feel they did Mexico dirty by literally just throwing a few disappointingly small towns and cities on a map with some landmarks and called it Mexico.

I wanted to mention how Midnight Club, 3 especially, used the open world in its races in a truly special way to me. None of the standard races in 3 had walls or barriers of any kind, just checkpoints. Combined with the more complex and more realistically designed cities of the third game, this means that learning the open world is crucial to being good at midnight club because you can approach the checkpoints from whatever the fastest angle you can think of is. You may see a checkpoint on a square corner, but remember a large parking lot or alley on you can cut through, allowing you to confidently approach the corner at full speed rather than slowing down for hard cornering. Already this makes the races and open world feel tightly connected, and then the game takes this a step further with the unordered races. These races would place checkpoints on the map with no order to hit them in. This was the biggest challenge to utilize the open world because you had to navigate yourself between all of the points while trying to be efficient and keep speed up. Depending on how much you knew about where you were and where you were going, these were either the hardest or the easiest events in the game, and I think they're a genius race type I've never seen again in a racing game.

9:29 Black Box were black magic artists at blending city architecture. The skate series is a testament to their open-world building skills. Has elements of LA, Vancouver, New York and SF all blended seamlessly.

Looking at Steamcharts as of right now I see FH5 has 10k active players and FH4 has 7.7k, This just shows how nothing really changed between those games. Players just chose which environment they like the most at this point. Maybe just patch these two worlds together with an airport and bring the community closer.

To me, the reward for exploring in TDU2 was the roads turning blue (or yellow for off road). I can't tell you how many nights I sat there after I was burnt out from racing, I would just put on my favourite play list and start tracing roads. It really scratched that "collect-athon" itch for me lol. I just finished another play through a few weeks ago, and every time I am compelled to fill that map in.

Bro mentioning TDU, arguably still the greatest open world racing game around. Massive W. In all honesty though, that's a really deep and profound analysis and I appreciate the effort you put into it.

I'd have thought the Midtown Madness trilogy would be mentioned, seeing as it's an open world racing franchise that first released in 1999, earlier than Midnight Club, and I'm pretty sure its sequel released before that game also. The first Midtown Madness attempted to create a scaled back Chicago, and Midtown Madness 2 had recreations of San Francisco and London. The Driver games deserve a shout-out too, first hitting PlayStation in 1999. All that still, still an enjoyable video!

Doing the landmark tour (longest race) the crew 1 was such a memorable moment, especially when doing that with a friend

I like the License system in TDU2, even though they were hard for me to pass, it allowed me to level up my skills. And the multi-race tournaments gave the game a better progression than Forza. I'm looking forward to Solar Crown, especially if the multi-player online is better than Forza (a low bar IMHO).

I think you undersold the open world of Midnight Club LA a bit. I was a good recreation of Los Angeles, with so many fantastic roads, and highly detailed: Lots of pedastrians and good traffic. I never played a racing game where the world felt so alive and independant of me. A very Rockstar experience, so to speak.

if only forza could have a city space again. Most of the time the maps have good roads but have no walls anyway. Its all a giant lot of dirt or grass with some paths in it. For whatever reason I like the more closed off roads kind of map. Like underground to carbon. NFS 2015 was a good map but it was closer tied to being realistic. The freeways and roads in blackbox nfs were so wavy, canted, and not practical in a civil engineering sense but it was fun that way.

I think the thing about all open world games, racing or otherwise, is that they're so much better when the open world isn't just a hub to select the core challenges, it's part of them. Synergy is really important to designing complex, multifaceted games and it's often not emphasized enough. As mentioned in the video, Midnight Club demands you learn the maps and their shortcuts with unordered races and spread out checkpoints. In NFS Most Wanted, the cop chase are arguably the main attraction over the races and those utilize the open world. Burnout Paradise puts its collectibles in interesting places that show you shortcuts for races and areas where you can do things in stunt challenges. All these modern games like Horizon mostly just put you on a track that happens to use the same terrain as a part of the open world but still feels so disconnected from it you hardly even pay attention to where you are. And you end up with tracks that are actually less interesting than non-open world racing game tracks because they're limited by their existence in the open world. Aside from the Eliminator and taking obscene shortcuts in Horizon Stories, there's pretty much no overlap between the cruising/exploring open world and the core racing experience. Yes you can argue that it's good to have the variety of alternating between the two, but like I said, it just ends up making the racing less interesting when it's held back by being nominally still confined to the open world.