Driveclub: Playstation's Fallen Masterpiece

thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this video it's real those words will never escape your mind in drive club but i mean specifically this is real drive club doesn't cheat for its establishing shots using nasa's data the same data that accurately maps stars into the sky box the environment is modeled up to a draw distance of 200 kilometers beyond the track the curvature of the earth was accounted for and all for the sake of the sky lightning can now strike at wildly variable distances and the sun can be accurately defused by 3d volumetric clouds a hundred miles away the biggest cast the deepest shadows the darkest cast the dowrest mood the fastest are driven by the same wind speed that influences vegetation cables debris and water rippling but you just wait until the sky gets angry i'm going to make a lot of bold claims in this video the drive club is one of the most underrated racing games of all time but there's never been a better blend of arcade racing and simulation that it is among sony's masterpieces and when they've been justified will solve its murder this was drive club when it was alive [Music] so [Music] drive club has tracks but it is not a track racer it's a someplace wonderful racer the frigid winter and beastly mountains of norway play a perfect contrast to the arboreal paradise in japan wonderfully warm colors in india amongst trees fields and villages complements the vast stretches of the scottish highlands as the olympian ravines in canada due to the sun-baked martian beauty of chile the greatest hits album of planet earth play backdrop to our greatest technological triumphs in what defines drive club's art style the contrast of natural and mechanical beauty it's astounding the pagani's proprietary screw heads and symmetrical carbon fiber weave were translated into the game but i've never seen the spectacle of a track so breathtaking it literally lost me the race it turns out the titanic wall of a mountain consuming your entire view is quite distracting like a glistening rainbow if the weather is just right or the aurora lighting the northern sky in scotland norway or canada wherever you go the wildlife is faithful like the properties of the local streetlights the trees the bushes the flowers and moss even the mud itself which dampens with the leaves and roads according to elevation temperature and the severity of the rain in 2014 this was the most realistic portrayal of rain and snow in any game ever in 2015 they called it a major inspiration for the witcher 3. drive club doesn't cheat as i drive forward the angle of snowfall reacts realistically when each flake crashes into the windscreen the wipers struggle as snow melts into thicker clumps than rain when i move droplets slip across the screen according to my turning force and speed sliding over the crests and valleys created by 260 thousand polygons every sinew every fiber and indentation of the body is there in vivid beauty and that's the impressive thing this is drive club so you can be as descriptive as you like you're not far from just being factual the same engineering data used to replicate cars in factory was used for driveclub's 7-month production pipeline from the shell to the beating heart within acceleration top speed weight distribution and braking details from manufacturers were plugged into drive club's physics allowing a personality to shine and in a hyper car a personality can be so pronounced it's more like a play style the p1's kinetic energy redispersal system is charged by braking and spent when you need the speed it's drs flap sacrifice handling for acceleration if you master the mclaren it's unstoppable where the venom gt channels its thousand galloping horses into a missile the agera r is more of an aeroplane without the wings where the savage rivale is a cumbersome piece of [ __ ] that sticks its ass out if you so much as look at it much like my mate's mother the koenigsegg one to one is lighter than its own shadow but has more power than god it'll dominate as soon as you realize you should never press the accelerator sometimes it was the manufacturers who asked driveclub for help because the most accurate description i can give of the sounds is that they are the most accurate descriptions that could be given of these sounds at the time of recording some were the best in the world mercedes and bmw use evolution's recordings in their own libraries which makes it difficult to pass judgment to not like these car sounds is to not like the way these cars sound that's why evolution turned the music off by default it's hard to say it was worth it as you can see i've done absolutely nothing to the outside of my car and that's because i've spent my whole 300 quid on exactly what a 17 year old wants a banging stereo for me tunes [Music] hybrid score is five tracks long remixed by over 20 djs into what was then and is to this day my favorite soundtrack in racing interspersed amongst the boom crashes of synthetic wub dubs and charlotte james asking how fast you want to go for the 98 millionth time is simple elegance hybrid perfectly captures drive club's hybrid of mechanical and natural beauty you can picture a car gliding seamlessly through mountain roads and only listening to it wouldn't you say the picture kinda looks like forza horizon another communion of cosmos and engine fire a song of ice and tires two games unified by this contrast interesting because they have something else in common too both pedal pure fantasy yet hesitate to sacrifice believability horizons physics are not realistic so why not go all out you would never see a track car skipping across the sand crests of a desert you would never see a laferrari blitzing through a blizzard in the dark because it's insane but also because it's impossible what's the uncanny valley equivalent for when a game is just a little more appealing than real life that's not a rhetorical question the answer is hyper realism hyper realism is the simulation of something that never really existed as if it does what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended leaving no clear distinction where one ends and the other begins an airbrushed body is hyper reality a drink flavored with a berry that doesn't exist batman and catwoman in arkham this face apply it to sex and you get it preys upon the consumer using their desire for actual reality but drive club is no advertisement do you desire this reality i can't speak for everyone but the trend is screaming yes because if all you ever wanted was gamified arcade fun horizon wouldn't have sold a single copy the need for speed would be on top of the world we desire fantasy and believability at the same time drive club is not unique for providing it it's not unique for being hyper real it's unique for being the greatest incarnation of that desire of hyper reality and racing there has ever been i've proven the prowess of its presentation now let me show you how in visuals and handling it seamlessly combines its reality with fantasy to create an experience that is shockingly visceral unfailingly spectacular and utterly fun photo realism is like the speed of light the closer you get the harder it gets to get any closer drive club is a testament to that only magic could free it from the constraints of 2013 water slides into the terrain foliage fails to mesh with the ground textures lack clarity character models lack a lot more than that each hidden where you're least likely to notice even drive club can't trick you all the time it is often worse than reality but the remarkable thing is sometimes it's better the wild doesn't actually look like this terrain that entered life as nasa's data saw in-house tweaks and perfections to enhance its natural beauty like a model on the cover of vogue where environments were made more appealing individual pockets of splendor are packed tightly together so you always have something to see as you drive by in your hype a real car [Music] you'll see the driving itself is the best example of them all weaving a current exec through the bends of a nordic hill climb is exactly the mechanical field of motorsport not horizon drive club has no concern for dodging traffic shortcuts and car to car combat if you aren't thinking about the racing line if you pay no attention to exactly when to brake what you are doing is losing so it's a sim no drive club is not concerned with realism either drifting is not incentivized as it is in arcade but it is easy damage is cosmetic because its place on the simcade spectrum cannot communicate the true nature of its compromise where horizon makes sweeping concessions in realism for the sake of accessibility variants and spectacle yet makes drifting curiously tough drive club is an expertly refined idealization of reality it takes our world preserves what makes a game fun and strips away only what doesn't take drafting to draft is to enter another moving object's slipstream here our resistance is reduced in reality the effect is small but in drive club it is exaggerated to become a worthwhile strategy from the get-go raising the depth of the average encounter now it's fun where some struggle to communicate the feeling of the road under your wheels where they resort to tricks to create their sense of speed drive club is realistic every indentation of the tarmac affects you and that effect becomes fear if you're going fast enough precise control is locked dip in the road shutters the car of course without immediate correction how fast do i want to go uh yeah not this fast not this fast but what would be suicidal in a true sim can be experienced as an adrenaline rush in drive club because the punishment for failure is light too much and i'd never risk it too little and how could i feel the same tension in a game whose mechanical field is racing lines and breaking times tracks are the level design tracks of the challenge it is a light punishment for failure that allows drive club to beautifully weave demanding tarmac as if it were designed to test you without having every misstep end in a restart too much and i'd get frustrated too little and tough tracks would mean nothing too little and the game would be boring without a light punishment for failure how else could i indulge uttar mania hypercars in the dark in the wet in a blizzard i can't see [ __ ] it's ridiculous it's also insanely fun more believable than horizons track cars in a desert and also a vastly more impactful fantasization the blend is stronger and more seamless it gets better you want to see real tension or do you want to see how a monstrous thunderstorm can directly influence gameplay by lighting the sky for a split second before disappearing and leaving you alone in the dark horizon 4 is one of the greatest racing games ever made its seasons are astounding and stood next to the gods that make drive club's weather it feels like child's play if eye racing is a photo realistic capture then drive club is playing drive club is the wild painted as the artist dreams it would be hyper reality everything that makes our world fun is preserved everything that does not is conceded yes none of this would ever happen much of it isn't even physically possible and yet here i am it looks real it feels real i believe that i'm there i don't really want to leave from graphics to physics drive club is a passion for cars methodically adapted from emotion to video game and in my opinion the smartest balance of sim and arcade there has ever been doesn't it make you wonder why it's dead every racer with licensed cars is doomed to be delisted someday but drive club is really dead the franchise is over the developers history the servers closed if we're going to find out what killed this game the first place to look will be its failures drive club is difficult and to achieve its vision there were sacrifices being distracted by beauty is one thing being literally blinded by it is another if you're in a fast car and you don't know the exact nature of the turn coming up getting flashbanged by the lighting system flips a coin the cost of beauty is heavy and to be unmatched drive club would have to be locked to 30 fps it is still unmatched and it never claimed to be a sim but it is difficult and as responsive as the controls may be nothing can change the effect of 30 fps on precision a clean lap is a big ask with roads this thin and ai this barbaric there are hot laps where the difference between the top star in the middle is hardly visible to the naked eye there are times like the venom gt trials that i think boy a nice red paint job with pink and white flakes sure would look good on my car and boy that toaster sure does look like a great bath toy and boy maybe 30 fps was kind of a big sacrifice so it comes as a great surprise that the trend of drive club's failures has no relation to its vision at all the unifying factor behind everything else this game gets wrong is inconsistency in drive club difficulty is influenced by five factors the ai difficulty setting easy medium hard the pre-event car choice uniquely selected by the devs for each event where stats influence potential performance and then the difficulty of handling the chosen car or in other words how hard it is to meet that potential the koenigsegg is a beast but it is tough to tame next there is the relative difficulty of the star boundaries and finally the mood of the penalty system on that race ai difficulty is in your hands the handling of the cars follows a well-oiled difficulty curve that progresses you through hot hatches to hyper cars over the course of the tour which means the problem lies with the other three and begins like everything with the stars the difficulty any given star proposes varies wildly second only to the venom's brawl the norwegian open has the goal to break your balls but if i recall it's one of the first [ __ ] events time limits on a point to point are usually trivial time limits on lapped races are sure as hell not and at its toughest the car select screen can be the difference between having a fighting chance and hopelessness one race you can get by in the car you like the next you take the best stats or you get smoked this is small in japan in the fastest choice you're given this is small in japan in the second fastest five attempts of a canada hotlap in the maserati fail one in the gtr demolishes it when drive club star boundaries inconsistently decide to visit their interstellar cousins or nose dive to triviality a car choice will inconsistently allow player freedom or become a gun to your head convenient because there'll be times in drive club you'll ask for the bullet i'll put it simply this is the most incompetent penalty system i have ever seen in a game with drive club's mechanical field cutting corners should be disincentivized then why does it let me cheat but another time in the same race when i fly off the track and become one with the tire wall scold me for honestly failing it isn't just inaccurate it actually performs the opposite function for which it was designed driveclub will punish disaster with further consequence but let shameless infractions slip by if i spin out that was the punishment that's why it's called racing not spinning i've got a [ __ ] kidney in low earth orbit but the horror of my crashes are made comedic by a dominatrix penalty system tko my already pureed balls into a fifth state of mata and collision penalties they're no smarter penalty [Music] nothing penalty nothing penalty nothing inconsistent but it's worse than that because of how drive club handles violence you want to lose or you want to fight we get dirty so our time stays clean there is no tactic more reliable or effective it's super gt's vision of hell everyone is a rammer and every corner is turn one on monza this isn't a track racer the cars are wide the roads are thin the ai is barbaric don't expect them to play along if you want to be a pacifist and if you can't adjust to that this is the deal breaker but it doesn't matter who you are or what you like the penalty system takes no prisoners if sometimes violence is overwhelmingly rewarding but other times it's disastrously punishing how could i not be frustrated when the coin flip doesn't go my way drive club goads you into violence and inconsistently punishes it sometimes it allows you to cheat but other times it spits in the wound of failure and now you have seen the face of drive club's flaws its beauty can be blinding its scattered difficulty can force car choices and the penalties are [ __ ] up beyond all recognition not insignificant and yet no match for the scale of the game's qualities we saw problems but no murder weapon it must be somewhere else like backwards in time because here's a twist if i reviewed this game seven years ago you might not be so impressed today we don't have to worry about a car list or running out of things to do but there's a reason drive club's perfectly paced tour doesn't include japan or a single race with weather because when it was released drive club didn't have them it didn't have functional servers it didn't even have the same physics system today we have three switch on hardcore handling from the menu or just leave the cars behind for drive club bikes it's first only and now dead paid expansion seven years later we have the privilege of playing the snyder cut on the very same disc game's radar called it arguably the finest collection of post-release content gaming has ever seen but the black mark of its launch would never go away and much of the blame lied with its usp drive club was not called pretty screenshots of room room game unfortunately it was called drive club one part drive one park club and with only minutes left i have still yet to mention it because the clubs are that insignificant it was nice that you could join a clan it was nice that you could seamlessly face off with other players scores and events but this would not be a significantly worse game without it it wouldn't even be significantly different yet this was the feature drive club was sold on named after and delayed for a ps4 launch title originally drive club was pushed back over a year for the sake of a pseudo social media system they called the dynamic menu a truly innovative socially connected experience that would surpass expectations sony worldwide boss shuhiyoshida promised in the delay announcement you set expectations you're meant to live up to them and when drive club finally launched the servers didn't even work the brand name carried an identity crisis the launch was embarrassing for everyone involved but the case is not yet closed drive club sold two million copies it's the most widely played racer on the ps4 by an estimated four million unlike split second and blur drive club was a success but it suffered the same fate there was another factor at play in 2016 the year of evolution's closure sony were recovering from a severe economic stagnation as ground was lost to competitors in nearly all of their diverse markets buildings were sold branches and perhaps connected was a restructuring of their european studios guerrilla cambridge and sce london studio like evolution suffered massive redundancies ea do worse with no pressure at all optimizing profits is as much of a motive as survival is so perhaps the answer is simple obscured by lacking transparency perhaps sony lacked faith in evolution in their franchise perhaps they didn't need another gran turismo perhaps drive club was more trouble than it was worth but whatever dealt the blow now drive club is dead for good there's no rabbit to pull out of a magic hat there is no community of loyal fans that resurrected the corpse of its connectivity with a necromancy of land not because no one cares but because no one could playstation exclusivity ties its fate to sony forever and if it cannot be pirated time is running out a physical copy is the only option left its discs its memory and its legacy are all that lives on drive club director paul roshinski joined by the redundant staff of evolution would next go on to produce a spiritual successor to motorstorm on rush had you heard of it not likely onrush was a failure and rushinski's next project wouldn't fare much better project cars three people in the know seemed excited the man behind drive club was back but so was david kirk tim shepherd nick and chris pope the physics and audio engineers who worked at evolution a quote from push squares review project cars 3 takes inspiration from all over the place but it's perhaps most closely aligned with sony's own drive club it would seem then that the ps4 cycle is ending the way it began project cars 3 is infamous for betraying the series legacy and graphically resembling a mobile game it looks like it released six years before drive club not six years after there is no happy ending except for this one gran turismo sport is far from perfect and thinly focuses on a singular experience project cars betrays itself motorsport 7 was a disappointment gotham is gone this slice of the genre is troubled and drive club was to be its next generation seven years ago but even in death it feels like the next generation today what are you waiting for gt7 forza 8 drive club can be here now and how fast do i want to go the truth is i don't care as long as it's in drive club the dynamic menu is dead but its concept has never been more alive a car hardly needs a hub of seamless connection but a person lives in the year 2021 squarespace can offer you a nexus of net a robust assembly of blogs stores member exclusive content newsletters and social media updates squarespace can be your bio and your profile picture but not for one site for all of them and you can construct it by hand with tools as capable as they are simple in 30 minutes with squarespace's crisp and diverse 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Channel: Whitelight

Views: 181,678

Keywords: playstation 4, sony interactive entertainment, ps4, ps5, sony, playstation, driveclub, driveclub ps4, driveclub ps5, driveclub review, driveclub review 2021, driveclub analysis, driveclub racing game, ps5 racing game, ps4 racing game, driveclub whitelight, driveclub weather, driveclub graphics, sony playstation 4, evolution studios

Id: mPGaYRIz3es

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Fatal-Strategies]

Inspirational. Never played a game before or since that's like Driveclub, this is a 2021 love letter to the game and unfortunately as he says at the end, the genre too.

[u/Lamarios]

Great video !

[u/Golferbobert]

Does anybody know why my servers don’t work?

[u/tonycandance]

Came here because of this video! I'm confused, I read that the servers were shutdown - am I still able to play this game?