What's the right racing game for you this year?

[[mXm] andy19]

Interesting article.  I read it mostly for the section on Project CARS.

Project CARS
Project CARS is serious business for serious revheads. This is what separates Project CARS from the rest of the racing games releasing before Christmas and, in the absence of instalments for Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport, developer Slightly Mad Studios is looking to make hay while the sun shines.

Project CARS’ focus is pure motorsport. This means a host of real-world race tracks from across the globe and a large range of racing disciplines, from old-school tin-top sprints to the full 24 Hours of Le Mans. This means track-bred, race-spec machines ranging from classics like the Ford Sierra Cosworth to the new BAC Mono. This means events that span multiple days, including shakedowns and qualifying runs. This means dynamic weather and time-of-day. This means a hardcore handling model that, with the assists off, cares not for your look of wide-eyed terror as you try to thread a 25-year-old touring car across the mountain at Bathurst and will flick you into a wall with utter indifference if you don’t have the skills to tame it.

This means damage and mechanical failures. This means a stack of difficulty sliders, like you’d find in the likes of the NBA 2K series for instance, to hone the skill, aggression, and speed of your opponents. This means VR support using Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus; it's something which ought to really shine with Project CARS’ helmet cam – cribbed from Slightly Mad Studios’ own Shift 2 Unleashed.

This means spending several consecutive laps trying to effect a pass on a single car ahead of you, and taking more joy from a dogged fifth place finish than any number of first pace drubbings you dish out against the AI in GT6.

“I think we’re here to present a viable, credible, competent alternative to the usual platform-specific options of Forza and Gran Turismo,” says creative director Andy Tudor. “They’re on their umpteenth iteration of those titles and have obviously had time to refine their content and features, yet we continue to see the same questions and requests for features coming up on forums and a general waning of interest in the tropes that have become prevalent in both titles.”

“‘Why must you start in a slow car and grind for cash every time you start a new game?’ ‘Why aren’t there pit stops or night races?’ ‘I wish I could play this kinda game on PC!’

“Project CARS has been made from day one alongside those players and therefore it has the features and content that racing fans have been crying out for: a totally freeform career mode where you decide your end goal, all cars and tracks unlocked from day one, join-in-progress multiplayer, a suite of social and community features, next-gen graphics with support for 12K gaming and virtual reality, and, as you say, the widest variety of motorsports represented and the largest track roster of recent years with world-class handling.

“So I think if you’re a fan of Forza, Gran Turismo, or any of the other sim racing titles on PC, all you need to look at is the word-of-mouth from your fellow gamers – Project CARS is a fresh take on the world of authentic racing. It looks beautiful, feels great, and people like yourselves have helped guide and mould what the end product is.”

Fan support for Project CARS is high; here on IGN, at least, most racing game articles tend to attract at least several Project CARS evangelists looking to sprinkle a few GIFs of Slightly Mad’s racer in the comments. Tudor laughs.

“Ha, it’s awesome right?” he says. “If you look at the PC racing space at the moment it’s very fractured with multiple smaller titles containing passionate communities. With Project CARS we seem to have attracted and coalesced the fans of many of those titles under one roof and that’s purely been through the chance for people to try the game out and be involved in making the project from day one.”

“We treat our WMD members like staff so the more feedback they give us, and the more they get involved, the stronger the sense of ownership and pride there is there. Which in turn has led to this great, enthusiastic, evangelical army of Project CARS fans that support us all over the web and get the game on the tips of the public’s tongues as the premier choice for racing fans this year.


“Games cost so much money and take so long to make nowadays that being able to get player feedback throughout the project rather than just at E3 or Gamecom time, or from focus tests is invaluable and can help every games developer.”

It’s Project CARS’ fan-first philosophy that forms the core of what Tudor feels makes Project CARS the racing game that die-hard racing fans should be thinking about first this year.

“Project CARS has been made from day one by you – the gamers,” he says. “It’s the first AAA game to ever have been done in such a way which means the features and content in it are what racing fans love and crave.”

“Whilst there are other racing games out this year, they are all on the arcade/action end of the spectrum – if you’re after a more realistic fix this year and want a fresh take on the authentic racing genre then Project CARS is your destination.”

Tudor won’t be drawn on the racing game he’s looking forward to most outside of Project CARS, claiming there’s no right way he could answer that.

“I’ll stick with Mario Kart 8 then,” he says, smiling.

Project CARS is set to arrive on PC, PS4, and Xbox One on November 18 in North America, November 20 in Austrlaia/NZ, and November 21 in the UK. It will release on Wii U in 2015