Why Don’t Racing Game Careers Make You Feel More Like A Champion?

Living the life of a sportsperson is a dream for many children growing up. Whether it’s the glitz and glamour of being a superstar forward for Real Madrid, or getting to hobnob with other celebrities and dabble with a music career while also being a championship winning Formula 1 driver, millions upon millions of people have dreamt of superstardom.

It’s odd then that sports games can often feel like they’re getting this wrong. Some do make an attempt and manage to weave the fantasy and story around your actions in game, most notably with 2K’s NBA games and now FIFA and Madden, but career modes more typically lean toward the more workmanlike side of a sportsperson’s life and the actual sport. That is obviously the real meat of these games, but I find that racing games in particular struggle to create something compelling in this field.

Different types of racing games get to handle this very differently. The last few Gran Turismo games, for example, have leant on Pokémon’s Gotta Catch ‘Em All mantra for player fulfilment, while Project Cars has gone the exact opposite way, unlocking everything from the get go and letting you choose a starting point, working your way up through the different racing disciplines until you reach a pinnacle of your choosing.

To my mind, that’s perhaps the purest and most gratifying form of motorsports career in gaming and I look forward to Project Cars 2’s wider selection of racing categories. Forza 7, meanwhile, is set to adopt a points-based system within categories that are more like a real world motorsports season.

However, not all racing games are blessed with this breadth and depth, whether through choice or being the licensed game of a particular motorsport. F1 games through the ages have always hinged around that particular season of races and its cars, and while MotoGP gets to broaden its scope to include the Moto3 and Moto2 feeder series, there’s the inescapable fact that time stands perfectly still throughout these careers.

Every team sport game, from football to basketball, baseball, or whatever has a career mode that typically starts in the current day and then lets time progress. The landscape changes with player transfers that bring big name signings, let you poach that midfielder you think your team in the real world could really do with, send out scouts to find youth players or let them come up through the ranks as an older player’s understudy.

You don’t get that in licensed motorsports games. The calendar stays the same, the teams and cars or bikes remain identical, and the drivers are locked to the same teams throughout. Your fifth season in F1 will follow the same path as your first. It is, of course, all down to licensing, with rights’ holders naturally very protective of their properties, teams likewise, and the drivers having their own image and sponsors to consider. You won’t see a game let you transfer Valentino Rossi to ride another bike partly because they can’t take his Monster energy drink sponsorship with him.

One answer to this has been to add more of a team management aspect to the game, and while I find this interesting, the examples I’ve seen rarely feel fully baked. I’m very much of the mindset that if you’re going to do something, you need to do it well, or it can actually detract from the game as a whole. Codemasters and Milestone have explored this most recently with Dirt 4 and MotoGP 17, and both came off a little underwhelming for different reasons.

Dirt 4’s overarching team management is an improvement over Dirt Rally, but even as you improve facilities, hire engineers and more, it largely feels inconsequential through affecting all aspects of the game and not just your career. Car upgrades in particular only get to focus on durability, as opposed to improving performance, and that’s largely going to be down to how your team and garage carry across from career to generated single player and multiplayer in an overarching system.

One thing Codies get right, barring the load times, are the sponsors. Each sponsor has particular demands for you to try and meet with the relationship improving or worsening depending on how you stack up to their demands. They could be as simple as keeping penalty free, or as demanding as winning a stage across the event. They quickly scale up and down in difficulty depending on your previous performances, and make for a breath of fresh air compared to the standard and rigid team expectations. In particular, they really help to reduce the need and desire to always top the tables and win every rally.

MotoGP 17 came closest to feeling like a full on management sim, tapping into the game’s multiple classes so that you can run concurrent MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 bikes and six racers across them all. Drivers evolve and improve the more they race, you can pump funds into R&D for your bikes, or boost a department’s funds to improve certain stats or cashflow. Where it falls apart is in the tedium of having to take part in the race yourself and the exorbitant in-game costs to be able to afford your first Moto2 bike, ensuring you have to grind through multiple seasons of racing to get there.

The real positive through all of this is that motorsports provide something of a blank canvas to paint on and studios are experimenting in different ways. I feel that licensed and single discipline games in particular can make big strides forward, but cherrypicking and evolving ideas from across the spectrum of racing games, there’s definitely the potential for more in-depth and engaging careers.