Driving game poll

I have searched for such a game, featuring both realistic driving and open world roaming.

I settled on BeamNG.drive which can do that out of the box, even though it’s capable of much more. While it lacks the high quality environments of the Forza Horizons it has very good wheel and even VR support and is simply the best automobile sandbox around.

Kinda different, but I thought of “The Long Drive”.

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.

I very often just drive around in Forza Horizon listening to my own music, so another game like that would be fun sometimes if the driving model was good and the map was good and detailed. But I also like to spend time on races and challenges in Forza Horizon, that option is very nice. So I think driving only with no goals would get boring.

I actually sometimes used to do this in cyberpunk, just kinda cruise round night city. I think there are lots of games that allow you to do this sort of thing.

I’d be interested, I just drive around in BeamNG quite often. I think having traffic would definitely increase replay value, but I understand if that’s outside the scope of the game.

This sounds like the Train Simulator of driving games, which I’m sure there’s a market for. I think it could have more mass appeal without compromising the vision if you included a set of in-game goals like visiting various landmarks, obeying (or disobeying) road rules, or whatever else.

Just so everyone knows where I’m coming from, I do not enjoy racing games. I like being able to drive in games like GTA, but the racing missions are the worst part of those games.

That being said, I’ve always thought it would be neat to have a driving game with accurate real world cities.

You could just explore the open road, or maybe do a test run if you need to drive in a city you are unfamiliar with, or just drive like a maniac through your hometown doing all the things that would otherwise get you arrested.

If we could have Eurotruck Simulator with cars that would be awesome.

Not interested.

Yet it would be pointless and yes it would get boring. Pointless it can get away with easily enough, but boring, never.

In GTA and even NFS open world games, players would sometimes play by the npc traffic rules. It’s fun and different, in small amounts. But making a whole game about it? Rockstar’s betting on Roblox style development for GTA6. Which means someone’s bound to make a mod for that game doing exactly what you want, but with the foundation already built.
It’s an uneven competition.

So to succeed, this kind of game has to have its own shtick. To make it not boring. A way of showing off perhaps?
Reactions to activities, which reflect a form of growth or change.

As weird as this sounds, I like doing this in GTA2 (still replay it every few years), although I do it became I like the grim-dark, almost cyberpunk atmosphere of the city in the second game. I feel like they’ve never gone that direction since.

Cloudpunk is another game where I enjoy just driving around and exploring with no goal, but once again, it’s more for the cyberpunk feels.

I feel like someone will make this within the next 10-20 years. Especially as combustion engine or even default manually controlled cars get phased out.