This is the sort of thing that sounds like it wouldn’t work until you realize that it’s literally Microsoft Flight Simulator, but with cars instead of planes.

Here’s a fun fact about Flight Simulator. Years back I used to work in a computer store, and we’d do custom builds. My best sales, by far, were always to the smartly dressed guys in their late forties who came in looking for a gaming PC. You’d ask what kind of games they play, and they’d tell you “Just Flight Simulator.” They really meant it. They were building a gaming rig for one game. And then they would drop the most heinous stack of cash to build a gaming rig that would make the gods weep in envy. Massive towers with double or triple GPU, maxed out RAM, best CPU on the market. Liquid cooled? Sure, fuck it, why not. Their parents built model trains. These guys had Flight Simulator.

As a franchise, that game has 22 million sales. The Forza franchise has 16 million.

All of which is to say that I do think there’s a missed opportunity here. I hate racing games, but I’d play an open world driving game and I know at least one friend who would play it with me. Cruise down a mountainside in Italy, navigating hairpin bends with the hammer down and a beautiful sunset in the distance? Yeah, fuck it, sign me up.

This sounds pretty similar to what I did back in Test Drive Unlimited, specifically the first one not the second. TDU2 might also be able to do the same thing but my brother sold my copy before I could form much of an opinion on the game. I saw one other person in the comments mention TDU2 but saying that they have “racing games like TDU2”, so it seems like they didn’t get the same experience I enjoyed out of TDU1.

The main similarities I see are that in TDU1 you had very pretty cars on a very pretty island with a large number of roads to go up, down, over, and between. The roads were a means to facilitate races and other missions as much as they were there to allow free roam. Missions and races could only be started if you had found their start point during free roam and you could teleport to any part of any road you’ve previously traveled on.

The total quantity of roads you’ve driven down is also a metric that the game tracks and offers an achievement for 100% completion. The game’s minimap would also show untraveled roads as grey and traveled ones as blue so you could always just roam about and try to find new little roads and sections that you previously missed.

The progression of the game was through the missions and races which got you money, but free roam is easily the mode that I spent the most time in. Also you’ll note I keep saying missions and races. I no longer remember most of the mission types but I do remember there were a few and they were markedly different from being races with extra steps/restrictions. The primary one I remember was delivery missions where in game characters would hire you to deliver their vehicles, then you’d get money based on the value of the car and it’s condition by the end of the delivery.

If memory serves then you would also get a 50% bonus to your paycheck if the vehicle made it to the end without going off-road and without a single scratch. I specifically remember these missions not being repeatable meaning that any money you could earn from them was one-time and if you didn’t earn the bonuses then you wouldn’t get a chance to earn that money again. Most of the time that wasn’t too bad, but considering some of the missions were fairly high value for the early game, it (especially then) was pretty beneficial to be very gentle with those delivery missions so you can buy your first few cars.

The experience you’re describing reminds me of what I most valued out of TDU1, being able to just explore around a large world while driving in nice cars. That being said from what I understand your idea wouldn’t have much in the way of progression. For me, I don’t think I would have started exploring the world had there not been an in game incentive to do so. There were plenty of times I was exploring just for the sake of exploring (like the many times I went riding through the countryside off road, or tried to ride a ramp into the airports), but I’d still say the vast majority of the times I was exploring it was for that sense of progress I got from finding more roads I hadn’t yet traveled, finding more missions to complete, and trying to earn that 100% completion achievement.

If at least some of those aren’t in your hypothetical game I’m not certain I would get much out of the experience other than a pretty world existing for the sake of being a pretty world. And perhaps that would be enough for some people, but I don’t think I’d get much out of the experience.

Maybe add a mode where the player can open an app and do gig work, like ride share or DoorDash. So the player can earn money and use that money to customize their car or to buy parts to fix the classic they have in the garage.

Like even truck simulator games have goals. Sure there are people that would love the game that you describe, but if you widen the scope just a little bit and add a bit more gameplay you’d widen the target audience.

It would be pointless and boring to me. I bore of BeamNG rather quickly, as there aren’t things to do, and it has some of the best physics in the industry.

There isn’t a game exactly like you’re describing, but I get the same vibes from various other games, depending what I’m feeling like.

• FH series for all the real cars, good arcade physics.

• BeamNG for sandbox, tuning, and (of course) wrecking cars.

• ATS/ETS2 for cruising

  • This is nice as the truck/trailer provides an added challenge, as compared to cruising in a car.

  • I’ll also mention that ATS is planning a DLC for just driving cars.

Those are all games that have a strong focus on just driving around in beautiful sceneries with varying levels of minimal objectives. I don’t think any studio would be able to have as many cars as Forza, the physics of BeamNG, or the map size/quality of ATS/ETS2. Not that I’d hate to be proved wrong, but it would definitely not be an easy or cheap game to create.

I already have BeamNG so I don’t really need anything else

it’s got more simplistic graphics and isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but MotorTown is kinda trying to do this. regular big free updates and made originally by a single guy. lots of love in it. I’m big into sims and was surprised how quickly I was hooked by it

Isn’t this more or less what Truck Simulator is? I find the idea interesting, but I’d want some sort of goal. I could be really obtuse and say that Grand Theft Auto 5 is an open world driving game lol.

I like open world games. They get a bad rap because a lot of games that are sort of samey and sloppy use open world aspects, but I don’t think the open world aspect is the problem.

I’m interested, but I think the Dev woukd need to find a way to incentivize “normal” driving.

I think back to my youth playing Driver on the PS1, and it was a lot of fun just… Driving around. Exploring the world. Even dealing with traffic was fun when I was only a kid who could nkt drive myself.

I tried tk do similar in GTA3, and I even had a wheel and pedlas I would use for it. Unfortunately GTA3 is incredibly unlrealistic. The physics are cartoonish, the AI behavior is dumb, the pedestrians are dumb, the cops are dumb. The game incenvitcizes chaos.

The question is: how do we make things likr speed limits and stop signs and pedestrian crossings fun?

My instinct is to model off the real world to an extent. Could involve delivering things that are fragile and cannot handle a bunch of G’s. Could be fines or a karma system of some kind for rolling stops. Could be that a realistic damage modeling system makes dents and scratches look terrible and lead to rust, and repairs are just as expensive as they are in real life. Maybe a LOT of the car is consumable or wearable. Not just gas and tires, but all the fluids too, and brake pads. Maybe taking a turn too hard damages the suspension. Crashing into something means you not only need to repair your car, but also whatever you hit.

The more I list this out, the more this seems like a punishing and tedious slog. It seems really hard to design a game that incentivizes something like this, at least with most of the current mechanics in games today. Maybe a multiplayer social component would help? Like a virtual parking lot and drag strip for people to meet up on the weekends and check each other’s virtual rides out? I would not be interested in that, but my uncle might be.

Maybe it could be heavily story-based. I would go noir-style, where as you drive around either you see things or your driver character provides some narration. Something like “that abandoned building over there used to be an ice cream parlor. That’s where I had my first kiss. I wonder what ever happened to Suzie? I drove a '69 Cobra that night. Lovely car” and then the Cobra is available in the shop. Maybe there is a mystery about stuff going on in the world. Maybe it is a post-apocalyptic world and you’re scavenging, mostly alone and unchallenged, in the ruins of a city, slowly learning what led to this. I think about how Detroit’s population went from ~1.8 million to 0.6 million in ~50 years and what it would have been like to stay there and experience that.

Maybe a parody of Crazy Taxi called Sane Uber where the main priority is ride comfort?

No sounds boring af

I probably wouldn’t play it considering other racing game offerings.

I am an avid racing game player. I enjoy both sim and arcade racers. Test Drive Unlimited 2, Forza Horizon, Need for Speed Underground 2, Midnight Club LA, etc all offer a free roam driving portion of the game. But they keep my interest because of the racing part. Driving just to drive is fun in real life (when I can afford the gas) but in a video game I would rather be doing something I cannot or would not do in real life. Street racing, for example. The mechanical skill of mastering how each car drives, and the expression of that skill in a race, is part if the enjoyment of the game. Without it, the game would need other mechanics to hold my interest, such as The Long Drive, which has driving in it but has other mechanics as well.

Sounds a bit shit to me. Racing is why most people play car games.

But then MS Flight Sim is basically just that but for planes, so who knows. It could find a niche market. You’d probably have to go all in on the details though.

if it had mouse steering. a good one. not like project cars, but more like LFS

As someone else said, you can do this in Forza horizon. Make a custom car, tune it yourself, then rip around the map blasting music.

So ETS or BeamNG?

I hear from a lot of people asking what about racing game “x” or racing game “y” ? That’s just the thing they are racing games. Featuring mostly racing cars and their gameplay and traffic patterns that dictate that. This idea would more fall align with Trucking simulators without the trucking handling. Offering a more wide array of daily drivers and maybe more tame luxury sedans.

But it’s as I thought most people wouldn’t be interested. Unfortunate but I’m not surprised.