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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No sounds boring af

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?

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.

Not interested.