For anyone who is immersed in the world of simracing, news earlier this week that EA would stopping all development and investment into the Project CARS franchise hardly came as a major surprise.
Originally set up using an ambitious crowdfunding model by developers Slightly Mad Studios (SMS) – putting the ‘community’ into ‘Community Assisted Racing Simulator’ – the franchise has been brought into the pits for the final time after three mainline entries and a mobile spin-off. In doing so, ‘PCARS’ becomes the latest in a very long list of franchises – that includes Burnout, SSX, Command & Conquer and many more – that have been unceremoniously cast into the ether after being acquired by EA, who took over ownership of the Project CARS title by buying Codemasters, who had themselves purchased SMS in late 2019.
While simracing is dominated by the PC platform, Project CARS was a breath of fresh air in how it embraced the massive console market to offer a genuine simulation racing game experience on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. As a racing game, Project CARS was not unique in offering hundreds of cars of every kind of class and purpose possible and a huge roster of tracks on which to race them on. But unlike the likes of Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport, where the emphasis has always been heavily on collecting production road cars, PCARS aimed itself as a motorsport simulator from the very beginning.
Whereas Gran Turismo will always start players off doing two lap Sunday Cup races in underpowered Japanese Kei cars, PCARS allowed players to kick off their virtual racing driver career in karting – just as all the real world international level drivers do. From there, PCARS’s extensive career mode offered players the ability to live out their own racing driver fantasy, with the option to progress through single-seater categories all the way to ‘Formula A’ or take a completely different approach and climb from Ginetta Juniors and GT4 sports car racing up to LMP1 endurance racing.
No racing series had offered console players so many forms of motorsport in one package since Codemasters’ own Race Driver series back in the 2000s. But while Race Driver evolved into the popular GRID franchise, it became a fully arcade game, abandoning any pretence of offering an authentic racing experience. That left motorsport fans on consoles with only officially licensed franchises like Codemasters’ F1…
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