The Decline of Racing Games

Loved both videos so far! keep it up!

This video doesn't necessarily just apply to the racing game scene, but moreso the gaming industry as a whole

Micro transactions is what's ruining the gaming industry, not just racing games, all games. The focus is now on money instead of quality games. The whole structure of each game now is based on how companies can further extract more money from the customers after the game is released. So, we end up with mediocre games with no soul.

Forza Horizon 4 and 5 focused so much on making a bigger world rather than focusing on progression system. It is so easy to get new cars that the sense of progression gets lost very early in the game

Midnight Club 3 to this day is still my favorite. The music, the atmosphere, the massive amounts of content, the variety of cars & bikes, the unique powers, the arcade-feel... ALL OF IT WAS PERFECT <3

One series I miss dearly is Ridge Racer, which sadly was left behind due to shift in genre focus

I really miss Test Drive Unlimited 2, there is something about this game that no other racing games have. The feeling of actually spending the racing money on houses and cars + being able to walk in them, inspect every car "in person" was a huge immersion-wise. Every car felt "special" and not just like a toy given to you.

I LOVED the original Midnight Club. I remember as a 6 year old asking my dad what the word "pedestrian" meant, and when he said it meant more people on the pavements, I was like "COOL, MORE PEOPLE TO RUN OVER" 😅 Burnout Paradise was another one I loved, spent hours and hours on it because the map was so expansive at the time. I recently tried to play a Need for Speed (don't know which one), but I much prefer the F1 games these days...

I personally feel like the Pixar Cars games deserve an honorable mention. The THQ Cars games weren’t very arcade-like and they weren’t full blown simulations. They were more so in the middle. And for just being movie tie-ins, they do a fantastic job at standing out. The first Cars game is still my favorite video game of all time because of that. As for Cars 2 and Cars 3: Driven to Win, they fall into the basic arcade style racing game. Not to say they’re bad. Cars 2 is a pretty solid video game. And as for Cars 3…you’ve basically played Cars 2. Just by that alone should give you an idea of the drop in quality of the Cars games.

I'm 39 and haven't liked gaming much in 10 years. I thought I was just getting old but I go back and play these classics and love them. I'm glad you made this.

Until today, I still yearned that one day EA realized they have Burnout in their inventory and decided to give it one more whirl. My childhood was defined by Burnout 3 and Revenge, and it influenced the music I listened to today.

Watching this made me feel so lucky that I grew up in the golden era of racing games in the early 2000s. I don’t really play video games much anymore, once in a while I’ll hop on Forza Horizon or whatever but it feels so boring now. It’s sad that we don’t have many options out there for great racing games now. I will say racing games motivated me towards my career as an auto technician and to get my own project car. And that’s something my inner child who stayed up all night playing Gran Turismo 4, is very proud of!

another example is GTA San Andreas where I could spend hours exploring the map during my school holidays. It was terrafic. I think the simpler the game is, the more fun it actually delivers.

Forza Motorsport 2, you had the option to not only change tire compounds, but also the manufacturer for each tire. And even if you chose a racing compound each one had their own handling characteristics. A small but noticeable detail. One I wished stayed in the series.🗿

Midnight Club is the main thing I would love to see a modern iteration of.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights was my favourite racing game. The pink label races where you risk losing your car were great, and the customisation options were the perfect blend of simplicity & variety

There's one important thing about NFS and its EA studios: only Black Box was consistently the same studio throughout. When Criterion was assigned to NFS the first time around, it already wasn't the same Criterion, as people started leaving the studio after Burnout Paradise. When the franchise was given to Ghost Games, most of the Criterion staff left moved to Ghost Games themselves, with Criterion being reduced to less than 20 people. At this stage, most (if not all) of the main Criterion devs from the Burnout days had already left, either to start their own studios - I believe the one that did On Rush is one of those - or to join other racing game studios such as Codemasters. Criterion then became a small support studio for series like Battlefield and Star Wars, probably helping with vehicles in those games. Then EA bought Codemasters, gave NFS to their Chesire studio with Criterion as co-developers, and ended up merging both studios into the Criterion of today. In short... Essentially and effectively, Criterion ceased to exist after Paradise; Ghost Games is the rotting corpse of original Criterion; and current "Criterion" actually is Codemasters Chesire. When you realise this, it's no wonder that the Hot Pursuit reimagining was somewhat of a safe entry, the Most Wanted reimagining was an attempt to mimick Paradise, every NFS from Ghost Games went nowhere, and Unbound was the closest we had to a return to form.

Burnout Paradise was way too ahead of his time, absolutely loved that game

my last hope is TDU: Solar Crown. I'm glad they had a delay and I really want them to take their time, blood sweat and tears making this as a passion project.

Man. When u brought up burnout I got taken back to my childhood where my mother and sister didn't like gaming. But when I turned on burnout, we would sit for hours just tryna crash each other's cars while keeping a scoreboard of who won the most races.