Eyes On The Road

With the time I've been spending with racing games lately, I've been thinking about how navigating a track is typically handled.  Depending on your game you are either looking at a dotted driving line, flags, mini maps or even in field markers - but there is one thing I always think when playing; I want to keep my eyes on the road.
I have been playing Forza Horizon 3 a lot lately; it's a fantastic game.  The Forza series typically defaults with a lot of assists, whether that be breaking assist, turning or shifting.  The one that I am focusing on here is the driving line.  It's the one that gives you a full dotted line on screen for the best way to take corners or how to take on the course you're on and also changes colors to yellow and red for cautioning how to take turns.  Normally I will make it so that the only time that dotted line shows up is when turns are coming, and this is for the sake of keeping my eyes on the road.

One thing I find myself doing a lot with Forza is looking down at the mini map to gauge when a turn is coming and how sharp it is.  I know it's just a glance down at the bottom left corner, but that can easily take you out of position for drafting or watching for slight bumps that can throw a turn off.  Taking your eyes off the road for a second has the potential to make mistakes happen, and it can sometimes take me out of just driving around.  One thing that helps in the Horizon series is A.N.N.A.  She is your GPS in the open world that will let you know when turns come up, but of course, that doesn't happen with races.

Mafia 3 just came out and did an interesting thing with how it navigates you through the world as well.  While it doesn't do much for the racing genre, it's an interesting idea to put these fake road signs on the side of the road to indicate if you need to go straight or have a turn coming up.  So while you have the mini map with your navigation line on there, you also can keep your engagement to the game screen and still get similar results.

The visual aid that shows up top center when your co-driver shouts it out

Dirt Rally is a different beast all together.  Here, audio cues along with minimal visual signs in the top middle of the screen are where it's at.  There is no mini map and it's trying really hard to keep you focused on the course and not looking away.  You could take away visual aid up top, and so long as your volume is up, do really well still.  Keeping you engaged is important; paying attention to the next set up without glancing away.

Driveclub is one that stood out for me.  It still had the mini map in the corner, but it's flag system is what I really enjoyed.  How this game would work is when a turn is hitting left, on the right side of the course you would have flags directing you that way.  On top of that though, you would also have them colored green, yellow, or red.  Green would signify letting of the gas and coasting through the turn, Yellow would imply breaking a bit, and Red usually means a hard break or a tight drift.  It all served in keeping your - yes, you guessed it- eyes on the road.  You would see the turn come up, and you could calibrate to what was about to happen without looking away at a map most of the time.

All in all, it's interesting to see so many different attempts at navigation.   I can think back to games like The Getaway that tried to have no HUD and your car would use it's blinkers when you needed to make a turn.  Theoretically a cool idea, but you would find it pretty imprecise when trying to get somewhere on time.  Racing games specifically are interesting to me because of how a split second can change your positioning or set up and those can be vital.  I don't mind most of what is above as Horizon 3, Driveclub and Dirt Rally are easily my favorite (real) racing games this generation.  And with Driveclub VR launching today it just got me thinking about it all over again.

-Eddie