Around this time last year, I criticized The Game Awards for being continuous forcing racing games to share a common category with sports gamesto compete for recognition at an event described (by The Game Awards) as “the biggest night in the gaming industry.”
Until this year, it was an award that no time-honored sports game had ever won. This category has been completely dominated by racing games, with the exception of 2015 (Rocket League, which still has cars) and 2020 (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, which is still… on wheels).
This year, FC 25 took the gong. Only one racing game made the shortlist: F1 24. A great racing game, no doubt, but one that It’s challenging to deny that this was an immediately necessary improvement for those who already owned F1 23, F1 22 and so on. What else could have gone wrong? Monster Jam gameplay? Good fun (which shouldn’t be surprising given the developer’s recent form with the Hot Wheels Unleashed series), but I can’t imagine its chances at The Game Awards. The ultimate Le Mans? Well, it’s still supposedly in Steam Early Access, even though… they already sell DLC for the game before the game is officially “completed.” Test unlimited solar corona? No chance.
The gloomy reality is that there simply aren’t enough racing games released in 2024, period. For the first time in my nearly 14 years at IGN, we didn’t even award a driver of the year award. There were simply not enough of them to make a list of finalists.
Sad things.
And now for clarity I To have I had a lot of modern reasons to get behind the wheel this year, but most of those opportunities came as updates to existing racing games I already own. New cars and content have been added to Gran Turismo 7 throughout most months of 2024. As is usually the case with GT, no All these cars have solid racing pedigree, but I won’t pretend I’m not at least a little interested in how speedy an eight-year-old Toyota Hiace can lap the Nordschleife.
The 2024 EA Sports WRC expansion has added several modern cars and two modern countries: Latvia and Poland. There are some excellent stages in the modern countries, and it makes much more sense for Codemasters to improve the WRC this way rather than immediately introducing an F1-style annual cadence (if only the starting price of the DLC wasn’t so uncomfortably close to the cost of a completely modern game).
On the other hand, The Crew Motorfest literally expanded by 50% for free, with all players gaining access to the entire island of Maui, added to Motorfest in November. Maui is not a tailor-made area; was seamlessly grafted onto the existing game world (and developer Ivory Tower even added a fantastic connecting bridge, which means you have the choice of either flying, boating, or driving to Maui from Oahu without any loading screens. Admittedly, it didn’t make me a Motorfest regular, but oh well If some satisfying road sections and some nice areas on Maui – which is, of course, much quieter than the more densely populated O’ahu.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown has developed in a similar way with its expansion to Ibiza (though don’t expect a bridge from Hong Kong to the Mediterranean). Solar Crown’s Ibiza map is a fairly tiny part of the island, which could be a nostalgic bonus for players who remember the madness of the Spanish party paradise in 2011’s Test Drive Unlimited 2, but it’s challenging to say whether it will turn around Solar Crown’s snail-paced start. After all, the map wasn’t Solar Crown’s main problem.
Mount Panorama has finally returned to Forza Motorsport in its latest update, but I must admit that I’m very disappointed with all the bogus sponsors used throughout the track. It just makes it seem completely inauthentic compared to Bathurst in Assetto Corsa Competizione, Gran Turismo 7 and even Forza Motorsport 7 – all of which have real sponsors. This seems like a strange step back for the series, but I hope it can be fixed. The update came with a group of Antipodean cars that had largely been seen in the series before, but nonetheless appealed to me as a dedicated Australian carnivore. There is only one modern car, but this Is great: HSV Commodore VN Group A SV from 1991. If there’s one thing I like more than Australian cars, it’s the 90s, so this ticks both boxes.
And speaking of the ’90s, Need for Speed Unbound just added a motorcycle, which is a surprising and impressive first for a series that literally celebrates This month marks 30 years since its debut in 1994.
So, of course, there’s still plenty of tinkering going on under the hoods of most of the industry’s biggest drivers, but there will be very little modern blood in the genre in 2024.
This is concerning, especially as younger generations in general show an increasing disinterest in cars, but I really think 2024 is probably just an aberration.
I say this because 2025 is shaping up to be an extremely electrifying year in the racing space. Assetto Corsa Evo is shaping up to be one of the biggest racers of the year, and with it An open world map with an area of 1,600 square kilometers in development, I mean that literally. JDM: Japanese Drift Master from the Polish studio Gaming Factory has been promising for some time, and you can already check out, among others, free demo of it on Steam. Tokyo Xtreme Racer will return after almost 20 years of absence. The spiritual successor to Project CARS, Project Motor Racing, is scheduled to arrive in 2025. Lister Storm will be in it.
Yes, please.
And this is only part of what we already know. Will Wreckfest 2 arrive in 2025? The planned release date has not been confirmed yet, but it should be something special. Will 2025 be the year we hear about the future of Forza Horizon? After all, next year will be four years since the release of Forza Horizon 5.
Either way, see you at the starting line.
Luke is a senior editor on the IGN review team. You can follow him on Bluesky @mrlukereilly and ask him all sorts of things.
