There was a little chaff amongst the wheat, of course. Test Drive Unlimited 2 tried a little too hard and derailed itself, and Need for Speed: The Run was a bold experiment which stalled. Eutechnyx's initial crack at NASCAR left a bit to be desired, Milestone's second shot at WRC failed to change noticeably from its first, and THQ's last attempt at its MX series flopped. For revheads, however, 2011 was still a top shelf 12 months. But what does the remainder of this generation have to offer racing fans? Is there anything headed our way in 2012 that can hope to measure up to the bar set by this year's high-quality speedsters or is 2011 the year when racing games hit a wall?
Forza Motorsport 4 is certainly my pick of the year. As a car lover, the sheer breadth of the garage and the excellent audio mixing means playing this game is like mainlining 95 RON into my eyeballs. It'll be my most-played racing game of this year, and likely next. But it's a close-run thing. Personally I believe DiRT 3 is a broader and more faithful rally game than DiRT 2; I found it a welcome step up and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also adored Driver: San Francisco; the sublime, powerslide-centric handling model was a pleasure to play and I loved the fact that it had a fantastic focus on famous movie star cars that simply don't appear in many (if any) modern video gamesBut where can they go from here, on current hardware? Not much further, apparently.
During a series of interviews published as blogs on the Forza Motorsport 4 website in the lead-up to its release, Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt explained some of the reasons Forza 4 doesn't feature things like night or weather effects.
"Forza Motorsport includes alternate times of day for a small number of environments, but those alternates do not include dark night or weather effects, he explained. "For Forza 4, the majority of our graphical investment went into our new image-based lighting model, as well as new material shaders, which give our cars and tracks such a realistic, detailed look. With IBL, supporting the general look of night is not particularly hard. However, we take frame rate pretty seriously – we believe that having a solid 60 frames per second experience with no tearing is very important for a simulation racing game. Delivering night is about more than just getting the general look right. As we found on the original Forza Motorsport, having multiple headlight projections with multiple cast shadows is computationally heavy – even using clever tricks like we did on the less powerful original Xbox platform. This makes delivering a strong night racing experience very difficult at 60 FPS without significant compromise." "If we cut down on the number of cars on track, used original Xbox-generation car models, dropped to 30 FPS, or (and this would be the most effective solution) built specific tracks from the ground-up to have less detail and thus extra performance headroom, then night racing and/or weather conditions may have been possible. Some of those trade-offs, we just were not willing to do. Others would require time that we used to develop other features in the game – specifically, the new graphical look of the game in general. Night and weather are features we will continue to evaluate as the franchise continues. We're waiting for the right time to deliver these features to our fans."
It's a similar story for Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft Reflections art director Mike Haynes told an audience at GDC Europe 2011 that dropping to 30 FPS would have allowed the team to double its budget for adding detail to the game world. As an artist he mentioned his preference would have been additional detail, but pointed out 60 FPS was important to the project.
"A question we get is, is it worth it? Can you even tell?" said Haynes. "From a gameplay standpoint, and within the engine itself, we did have a toggle that would allow you to switch to 30. And it was very noticeable the difference from playing the game. The game plays very fast-paced, with a lot of action and moving around. Navigation is crucial. It was very obvious."
Of course, it should surprise no one that developers are tapping out current generation consoles this far into their life spans. Unfortunately it leaves racing fans in sort of a limbo, at least for now. We don't have a lot of visibility on what 2012 has in store for racing freaks, but the impression we're getting from a lot of developers is that this generation doesn't have much more to give the genre.
Forza 4 fans will have regular DLC to be going on with, of course, but the overhead for that kind of content – even at this stage in the 360's life cycle – is still high. Speaking to IGN a few months back, Greenawalt told us it takes them six months to deliver a car to market. "We've got these shots so well-timed that we get the game into certification and the cars are not yet done, the ones that go on the web," said Greenawalt. "And then they hit and meanwhile we already have three more packs in production at all times. All this artillery's in the air; that takes a lot of coordination, it takes a lot of work... We've tried to perfect the art of having nine women make one baby in one month and we've gotten better at it, but we haven't quite gotten there yet."
Gran Turismo 5's flame is still burning too, with another update set to land next week, as well as the next car pack (featuring three new European hatches and, well, another GT-R). The cars still sound like vacuum cleaners compared to Forza 4, but it remains the segment leader on PS3.But they're only improving incrementally on what we've already got. After a year where everyone seems to have showed the last of their cards I get the feeling racing games may have peaked for this generation. With Codemasters taking an arcade sidestep for its next DiRT instalment, and no new Forza, Driver or GT on the periphery for 2012, what will next year have for petrol pundits that this year didn't?
Source-box360.ign
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