I’ll be honest, I’ve been quite bored with gaming recently. COVID has put a halt to a lot of titles I was looking forward to playing (Arkham Knights, Back 4 Blood, Aliens: Fireteam Elite and Forza 5 to name a few), Call of Duty Warzone has run its course, and I can’t for the life of me get into Grand Champion on Rocket League, so I’ve been forced to crawl through the seemingly permanent Playstation Store Sale in the hopes of finding an older game to tide me over…
Fortunately, one of my old uni housemates has recently got his hands on a Playstation 5 (finally) and had messaged me for some set-up and accessory advice, so we both decided to buy a PS5 title and bring him up to speed with his new console together.
We settled on Dirt 5, a game I’ve wanted to play since it was announced, and at a very humble £15 (reduced from an extortionate £54.99) it was a deal too good to miss.
Like most racing games, Dirt’s campaign focuses on ‘events’ that you work your way through. Each one featuring a different racecourse, an exotic location, and a pre-picked selection of vehicles to choose from. With every win or side objective completed you earn ‘respect’ and money, therefore increasing your reputation and level, and growing the selection of cars in your garage.
I’ve put some 10 hours into it so far, and while a fun, arcadey and surprisingly visually stunning game (despite it being a PS4 release updated for the PS5), I was surprised to see how poorly fleshed out the multiplayer was, and how little collaboration or cooperation mattered in a game that is clearly calling out for it.
I know, I know! I’m criticising a Single Player game for basically not being Multiplayer. But even single player racing games tend to have passive competitive leaderboards that keep track of your performances and compare them to your friends. Other single player games still have online tournaments or events you can participate in that create an illusion of importance for the player.
Dirt has nothing.
Its attempt at ‘multiplayer’ is individual online races, with no stats for players to analyse, no race history for them to recollect over, and absolutely no meaning once that checkered flag is waived.
Video game companies with revenue in the billions spend years of development time trying to establish ‘online communities’, create huge social media followings, and spawn passionate fanboys in the hopes that they’ll put playtime into their game, buy future DLC (additional paid content) or pre-order their next release. All the while offering a product with sub-par multiplayer integration that they are expected to play in silos.
Racer fans are some of the most die-hard and fanatical gamers out there and driving games that attempt to scratch their cooperative or competitive itch tend to do very well (The Crew, Need 4 Speed and Trackmania are fan favourites because of this).
It wouldn’t take much to offer the same experience but with the option to invite your friends in to your own ‘story mode’ and race your way through it together.
Dirt is a fun franchise with an engaged and passionate following, it’s got all the components to be a much more successful title in terms of sales than it currently is. It’s fundamentally a single player experience that shouldn’t be.
A frustratingly stale rally, albeit through beautifully rendered environments, that causes every unique event and high-speed pursuit to blur in to one.
You’re supposed to care about beating characterless AI, in the same races over and over, to unlock cars to show off to no-one.
Publishers need to start understanding that to attract the casuals, which you need to do to generate the megabucks they’re all so desperate for, you must offer a good party system, a way to track your progression and stats, and a way to compare them to your friends. If they don’t, their game will end up on Xbox Gamepass or EA Play much earlier than they were anticipating.
Oh…
Matt Adkin 