Eight great ideas the racing game genre stole from first-person shooters

5) The immersive first-person view

First person driving

First-person shooters have become more and more immersive thanks to little touches like carefully-animated hands, gun recoil, shaky camera, and more. Racing games seem to be getting in line, quickly adopting many of the same touches to create more immersive experiences. From the subtle first-person touches of the Shift series to the detailed interiors of Forza cars, the classic viewpoint of shooters is getting even better in racing games. Now if only I had my own Oculus Rift…

6) Capture the Flag / Team Games

Dirt 3 CTF

Online multiplayer racers have some issues, whether they’re arcade games or simulators. As a result, many of these games have introduced clever takes on first-person shooter gametypes like capture the flag and king of the hill, giving players a way to get all the crashing and burning out of their systems. Does that stop most players from using the car in front of them as a makeshift emergency brake? Not at all, but it’s a nice diversion.

7) An entire game engine

Racing in Frostbite

Battlefield 3’s Frostbite engine was so sexy when it was first released that other developers within EA started using it for their own games. As a result, we got Need for Speed: The Run, which often looked like a racing game on a Battlefield map. The “Destruction 2.0” even showed up in scripted events like avalanches. The real DICE stamp of approval on The Run was that it even featured BF3’s washed out color palette. Remember when every Unreal Engine game looked exactly the same? Now we just need a Plants vs. Zombies game on the Frostbite Engine… Oh, wait.

8) Single-player, Multiplayer, it’s all the same!

The Crew

Upcoming first-person shooters like Titanfall, Destiny, and The Division are blurring the lines between single-player story and multiplayer action. The Crew, a next-gen racing game from Ubisoft Reflections, is poised to offer a similar experience, putting the single-player campaign and multiplayer racing into the same massive, open world. But the truth is, this concept more likely found its roots in racing games after all, with Test Drive Unlimited’s blend of open world driving and seamless multiplayer. Unfortunately, TDU didn’t make much of a splash, so it doesn’t get much credit.

When developers all look to their genre peers for ideas, the resulting homogenization leads to stagnant sequels and me-too clones. We saw it in racing games, where every racer strove to deliver realism and a boring, dry sequence of events. We’re seeing it now, where every FPS insists on the same old Call of Duty progression system. Developers in the racing genre smartly started looking elsewhere for ideas, and, as a result, the games aren’t nearly as dull and ubiquitous as they used to be. That’s a lesson any game franchise can take to heart.

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Game development is in a constant state of innovation. Every time a studio learns a new trick or introduces a new gameplay mechanic, it trickles from one game to the next, taking on new forms. Sometimes new genres are born out of these innovations, and sometimes those innovations give a genre a nice refresh.

The racing genre has been particularly guilty of stagnation. After all, how many games can you make about cars driving around tracks? (Quite a bit, it turns out.) But lately racing games have been pulling inspiration from the unlikeliest of places, putting new twists on ideas from first-person shooters.

Don’t believe me? Here are some examples:

1) Scripted Sequences

Forza Horizon action shot

One of the coolest moments in racing games last year was the opening of Forza Horizon. With only ten slots left in the Horizon festival, the game starts with an epic race to the game’s central hub area. The trick is that it isn’t really a race at all, with oncoming traffic, opponents drifting onto the highway, and helicopters flying overhead. The entire sequence was scripted for maximum impact, but, despite the smoke and mirrors, it was incredible. These concepts got their start in games like Half-Life, and they're pretty much the foundation of every Call of Duty campaign. It's a technique that shouldn’t be overused, but in Forza Horizon, it left a hell of a first impression.

2) Quick Time Events and an Epic plot

Need for Speed The Run QTE

Going even deeper into the “racing game with an action plot” conceit, Need for Speed: The Run not only featured a cross country race, but on-foot chases driven by QTEs. An epic plot littered with slow motion action moments and on-screen button prompts? Sounds a lot like Modern Warfare, but it’s actually a racing game. The truth is that these sequences didn’t add anything, and we probably won’t see something like this ever again, but the push for more story-driven racing wasn’t a complete loss.

3) Almost Every Innovation from Call of Duty Multiplayer

Blur gameplay

Okay, this one is a little ridiculous. The 20-player online real-car-and-neon-lights-Mario-Kart-clone Blur ganked just about every concept from Call of Duty multiplayer you can think of. It had a progression system with unlockables, perks, and a prestige mode. It had playlists and pregame votes for the next track. It even tracked a variety of small accomplishments that gained you XP bonuses toward leveling up. Making the game more like Call of Duty didn’t help its sales figures, but it did make the game one of the most addictive and underrated online racing games ever made. Those 20-player races were as exciting as any COD match, and the progression system kept the game’s small community going way longer than it would have otherwise.

4) Supernatural Powers

Shifting in Driver San Francisco

From BioShock to Dishonored, first-person shooters don’t have the monopoly on supernatural powers, but they certainly have some of the coolest examples. Either way, the ideas of Driver: San Francisco certainly didn’t come from other racing games. In this must-play sleeper hit, protagonist Tanner can jump into the bodies of other drivers in the world at will. It features one of the most unique supernatural plots ever, and it only gets crazier as it progresses. By the end of the game, you’ll wonder why there hasn’t been a BioShock/Fast & Furious crossover. The result was something wholly unique, and I wouldn’t mind if more racing games introduced superpowers in the future.