So often seen in sim racing, problems are found because it’s a niche market. Racing simulators often aim for good competition. iRacing has become famous for it. pCars 2 has the licence systems and esports going as well. rF2 is going that route too now. All very good news for the competitive simracing market. But I feel like simulators are missing out on a very big market. This feeling started with the video gamermuscle put up with him driving the AC traffic mod. This made me think back to the days I played NFS Carbon. The times I played LFS and so. They were fun. LFS in particular. It was both a good competitive racing simulator, but also a very fun one. The autocross editor helped a lot with that. You had the freedom to create so much. People created entire cities, death races, drift tracks, practice courses and all that. Demolition derbies were a thing, and of course, nobody will ever forget the cruise servers. Why were those things so popular? Because they were fun. You didn’t have to spend days of practice to drive one single race. How many times have I seen NFS footage thinking about how awesome street racing would be in a racing simulator. The traffic mod for AC totally brought that back to me. With the tech of these days, you can have AI on a map roaming around as traffic. rF2 pro has a city map in the builds for example. rF2 even has different car configurations, so even car upgrades can have effect on the cars performance these days (like tuning in NFS). This makes it not only fun for the ricers, but also tuners for speed. You can have a very light, underpowered car, or you can go the big heavy very powerful car. Both which have their own good and strong points. What am I getting at? I think it would be a great idea for racing simulator devs to think about the possibilities. I of course don’t expect everything to be in one simulator, as that would be insane. But think of an “LFS 2” where you can have a parking lot, autocross objects, and let people go creative. There will be drift tracks made, there will be autocross tracks, there will be those creative people who’d make death races, we’d have the famous ‘booty chicane’ type deal, so people can’t cut the track in certain ways. People would create entire racetracks on abandoned airfield for example. Imagine this in combination with the modability of AC or rF2. One city will be modded in, a thousand drift track, cruise servers, race tracks, gymkhana’s, challenges etc would be made on that one mod. Then of course you have the possibility of making an NFS style game with simulator physics (maybe not as hardcore, as some stuff wouldn’t be needed), where people can street race etc, tune their cars, drive touge courses, or even drive normally on the streets for example. Of course MMO style will probably not work because of the map sizes, but you can have multiple smaller maps (city, touge, desert, town). People can simply make own stand alone servers with their own rules (not locking people out of the content), like in the LFS days. Of course these are all not very thought out possibilities yet, but they are realistic and, I think, a very good addition to the racing simulator market. It will probably take in a bigger audience, thus more exposure to sim racing in general. This was just my mind running, Remco Majoor
