Modern open-world MMO racing games

[Dre]

So I'm a big fan of auto racing and consequently, I'm pretty big into racing games. I grew up playing stuff like Gran Turismo (I've been a fan of the series since the original came out in North America back in '98) the various Need For Speed games, the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series, the Initial D games, Wangan Midnight: Maximum Tune, etc.

While there is certainly plenty of modern racing games to choose from these days, they are often instance-based and take place on closed circuits rather than an open world. To my knowledge, there's been very few true MMO open-world racing games. The most recent such game was Need For Speed: World, but unfortunately EA shut down the game servers earlier this year and I have yet to see another game quite like it.

I know there's stuff like Forza Horizon and GTA (although GTA isn't just about racing), but these games are lobby-based and are not true MMOs. In contrast, NFS: World only had 2 servers, one for Europe and another for the US. The world was a giant, persistent city in which you could encounter thousands of different players while cruising down the streets in free roam mode.

There was tons of different real-life cars to choose from. You could tune your car by upgrading the engine, forced induction, transmission, suspension, brakes and tires. You could apply a whole assortment of visual mods such as bodykits, spoilers, custom wheels and vinyls. Everyone had a car that was uniquely tailored to their specifications.

You could challenge players to private races on a closed track or just race them unofficially right there in free roam. Sometimes you'd encounter entire crews cruising down the road together. There would be groups of people hanging out at intersections doing donuts/having sideshows, random guys drifting on the winding roads going through the mountains on the edge of the city, people RPing as cops with police vehicles chasing speeders, etc. At any given time you could log in to find a city teeming with racers. The game felt really "alive." It was just a really special experience that seems to be missing from other modern racing games.

So, does anyone know of any other open-world MMO racing games that has similar features, preferably with at least a semi-realistic driving/physics engine? If so, I'd love to know about it!

[Dre]

At 9/27/15 12:43 PM, dem0lecule wrote: Nothing beat Need for Speed and Burnout Paradise. The Crew is trash, Ubisoft ruined it the usual way.

Yeah, I've always been a fan of the Need For Speed series. NFS: World was a truly remarkable and unique game due to the fact that it was a true MMO in which you could encounter thousands of different players on the same server at any given time. My only pet peeve about it was the lack of realistic driving physics (the game was really arcadey) and the fact that EA basically did nothing to stop cheaters from usings hacks to abuse the game.

EA laid off the entire original development team and the game went without any updates for like ~2 years. The new devs finally started doing little updates here and there, although they weren't really adding anything new to the game and were simply taking old rare cars and putting them back into the car dealership.

They finally pulled the plug on the game servers on July 14th, which kind of sucks because a lot of people invested a significant amount of IRL money to buy some of the rarer cars in the game that could not be obtained otherwise. Since the game was multiplayer-only, there's no way to play it at all now (although I've heard rumors about some people working on a community server and a mod for the client that allows you to connect to it.)

Would love to see a game similar to the old NFS: Underground games only with the realism of games like Gran Turismo or Forza and the MMO gameplay of NFS: World.