Best mmo racing games

From there you construct a driveable, moddable vehicle down to the most minute nuts and bolts, teaching you exactly what an exhaust manifold looks like and what happens when it rattles loose along a lakeside single lane road at 70mph. Car ownership has never felt more satisfying and personal in driving games than in this slightly janky but beautifully esoteric builder-meets-racer. Venerated for decades and still playable in , Grand Prix 3 was a turning point in racing games.

Grand Prix 3 was a new level of fidelity. It modelled things like tyre wear, wet weather grip, and tiny setup tweaks - things that games had only been able to approximate in the broadest manner previously. Simply put, it felt like sitting inside a Formula One car. And to look back on today as a playable museum piece, it has the added incentive of capturing the sport at an especially exciting time, when legends like Schumacher and Hakkinen were battling for top spot and previous champions Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve struggled at the back of the pack.

This is the descendant of SimBin's once-mighty racing empire. Think of it as GTR Online: it's the ruthlessly-authentic car sim you remember, but retooled for online free-to-play. The GT racing is beautifully modelled and captured through a good force feedback wheel, the online competition fierce and well-structured, and the catalog of cars and tracks deep enough to really specialise in a certain series thanks to that free-to-play model.

Which is also its weakness. Once you get the cars on the track, it's all terrific and familiar. But off-track, RaceRoom is all about selling you bits and pieces of the game. Pick a series you want to race, and immerse yourself in it. There's more than enough to learn about vintage touring cars to occupy you for months, if not years, before you need to go dribbling over the in-game store menu again. Autosport is Codemasters' easiest, most entry-level track racing game.

The car handling is very forgiving, but with just enough fight in it to teach you the basics of corner-braking and throttle-control. Outside the car it does as deep as you're up for, though. It's got full-race weekends, typically strong opponent AI for Codemasters, and tons of variety in its racing formats. With the ability to "shift" between NPC cars at-will, Driver:SF is one of the only post-Paradise open-world racers to think of something fresh and new to do with the freedom of the open world.

In truth the brilliance of its central idea does outweigh the feel of its handling, which aims for Need For Speed but doesn't quite excite in the same way. It's still rough and ready enough to power a brilliantly odd story and bring San Francisco to life, though.

Welcome to the Michael Bay Motorsports Hour, where fake sports cars will rocket through desolate, orange-filtered urban wastelands at blinding speed while drivers accumulate enough energy to trigger bomb-drops from overhead helicopters, vicious sweeps from out-of-control cranes, and even the odd explosion of an entire city block. Racing games aren't often treated to remasters.

The big franchises iterate so often that there rarely seems much point, but in the case of Burnout Paradise everybody was happy to see an exception to the rule.

In 10 years, there's been nothing quite like it. And yet the original model still surpasses its imitators. It's so much purer and more exciting than the games it inspired. It doesn't have any licensed cars, so instead it features car-archetypes that crumple into gut-wrenchingly violent wrecks.

Compare those to the fender-benders that wipe you out in Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Criterion's attempt at topping themselves and where you get the sense that just depicting a shattered headlight would have entailed hundreds of meetings with Lamborghini's lawyers. Paradise isn't an online "social" experience. It's not all about collectibles and unlocks.

Titles like Project Cars 2 and Assetto Corsa now feature virtual reality modes which mean players have the chance to feel like they are well and truly behind the wheel of the vehicles they are driving. In addition, with emerging titles like Orbus VR bringing a virtual reality twist to fantasy MMO gaming, it seems like it is only a matter of time until MMO racing games take that step too. Racing is a sport which has always been a natural fit for gaming and it remains as popular as ever.

Combining the genre with MMO elements has opened gamers up to a whole new world and given them a chance to compete against rivals across the globe. Whether you are an experienced racer or an MMO fan seeking a new challenge, online racing games can give you a chance to enjoy life in the fast lane. In this guide, we are going to examine everything you need to know about this area, including: What are MMO racing games? When did racing games start? How can you play MMO racing games?

What are the top MMO racing titles? Are there MMO racing eSports? When did Racing Games Start? To get involved in the action, you need to: Select the game you want to play Download the app or visit the website Register your personal details Get racing! What are the top MMO racing games?

What is the future of MMO racing? The 18 years that EVE has been around could fill the pages of a textbook actually, it kind of has —but only if you're studying How to Lose Faith in Humanity Its reputation for being a callous, uncaring universe was forged over a decade of war, betrayal, and scandal.

But that same spartan culture has also given birth to the kind of camaraderie you'll never find anywhere else. EVE Online is obtuse and complex as hell, and there will be times where you'll stare at the screen, clueless of what to do. CCP Games gone to great lengths to make EVE easier to understand, but your best teacher will always be the sting of failure. The good news is that a few years ago EVE Online started offering a free-to-play option , letting you dive into its sandbox with a limited set of ships and skills to use.

They've since expanded the program, giving free players even more choices of what ships to fly. Those who persevere will find a whole galaxy of possibilities at their fingertips—and really, that's always been EVE's greatest accomplishment. It's truly a living world where those with the will to rise to the top can find a way—even if that means using all those daggers in the back of the people who trusted them as a foothold.

Korean MMOs are often negatively viewed as brutal grindfests, and while Black Desert Online doesn't break that stereotype it does offer one of the most expansive crafting systems ever seen in the genre.

While the active, combo-based combat is great fun, there's dozens of career paths to take your character down in this dynamic sandbox MMO. You can be a merchant, a fisherman, or invest all your time into building a massive production empire of beer. This is all thanks to Black Desert Online's complex node system. Each region is divided up into nodes that provide various resources, while properties in cities can be purchased and converted into blacksmiths, fisheries, or storage depots. Instead of doing all the hard work yourself, you can hire automated workers who level up and have their own innate skills to do the heavy lifting.

It's an intimidating system to learn when you're just starting out, but the freedom it provides is unparalleled, and it's unlike anything else in the genre. It can be just as rewarding to spend an evening tweaking your farms and leveling up your workers as it is taking down one of Black Desert Online's brutal world bosses. And if that doesn't suit your fancy, the node system is also the foundation for weekly guild wars, where guilds race to conquer various nodes for special bonuses—making BDO a great choice if you're into PVP as well.

With such an emphasis on huge worlds and freedom, telling a coherent story in an MMO isn't an easy thing. All those pages of pointless quest dialogue are, more often than not, tossed to the side in favor of just getting the job done and moving on to the next task.

So when an MMO manages to build a world and tell a story worth listening to, it's a rare thing indeed. Listed below are the best MMOs to play if you just want to immerse yourself in a rich story instead of getting all wrapped up in the vain pursuit of grinding for new gear or leveling up.

And like Lovecraft's best, The Secret World is a bizarre page-turner that will have you digging deep to unravel all of its mysteries. That love of a tale well told is best demonstrated in The Secret World's investigation missions, which require donning your detective hat to search the internet for clues to decipher puzzles.

You'll pour over Wikipedia pages and through backwater websites hunting for that one piece that will make the whole picture come together. The overhaul doesn't necessarily fix everything, but it does go a long way to making The Secret World more enjoyable for newcomers. Early in its life, The Old Republic had a kind of identity crisis that initially turned many away from playing. It wanted to be both a followup to the cherished Knights of the Old Republic while also giving World of Warcraft a run for its money and, at the time, did neither very well.

But just like its setting, those days are long in the past and the Old Republic of today is far more enjoyable thanks to a refined focus on what it's always done best: telling a great story. Where most MMOs offer only a single overarching narrative, The Old Republic has eight different class stories to experience in the main game, and all of them are exciting and fun.

Whether you want to sex your way across the galaxy as a seductive imperial agent or just murder everyone as a Sith warrior, The Old Republic has some of the best storytelling ever seen in an MMO. Bioware spent a lot of money making sure that the voice acting was top-notch and it really paid off. The Old Republic's presentation is unparalleled.

In recent years, The Old Republic has expanded on that foundation with a series of expansion packs that each tell an overarching and extremely cool story. What's better, SWTOR has removed much of the friction you'd normally experience in an MMO, like having to grind for levels, so now you can just blitz the story missions one after the other like a singleplayer RPG. It's great. It took The Elder Scrolls Online over a year to finally find its legs, but now that it has it's quickly become one of the best MMOs on the market.

That's in part thanks to the steady stream of excellent premium expansions that have gradually opened up new areas of Tamriel to explore. Fans of Morrowind can venture back to Vvardenfell, the home of the dark elves, but ESO has bravely opened up never before seen countries like the high elf kingdom of Summerset and, soon, the Khajiit homeland of Elsweyr.

Each of these expansions is notable for their self-contained stories and often excellent side quests. If you're a lore nut for Elder Scrolls, then ESO has so much story to offer—and much of it delivered through great voice acting and fun quests. If that's not your cup of tea, you can also design your own house, participate in chaotic three-way PVP, or explore the world in any direction you please. Thanks to the One Tamriel update, you level-scaling now let's you approach even endgame zones at any level, giving you more freedom over your journey.

Questing and raiding are fun, but there's nothing quite like defeating another player in a contest of pure skill. PvP in MMOs is a time-honored tradition that remains a pursuit for those with the iron will to master the mechanics of a game.

These MMOs honor that devotion by employing awesome combat systems that go above and beyond the basics, offering competitive-minded players a rewarding place to test their mettle.