By Christina McGrath :
We have very exciting news today. We’re delighted to announce that on the 25th April, Codemasters will be expanding its portfolio of studios to include the highly-respected and very talented team from Evolution Studios.
In this day and age, it’s rare we experience a warm fuzzy feeling when we boot up X (formerly known as Twitter, of course).
But the past few days have been lovely: our feed is full of people talking about DriveClub again.
The discussion started when someone posted a clip of the game and its infamous rain effects. The caption reads: “Still can’t believe this is a 12 year old game.”
This was one I was hoping would have some kind of boost from the PS5. The devs locked that sucker so tight...
I play the PSVR one even though it doesn't look as good, because that one is 60fps.
I interviewed them twice back in my gaming journalist days... Once at E3 2006 and again on a podcast about a year later. Really nice folks.
The guy we interviewed both times' name was Simon, I can't remember his last name, it was 20 years ago, but he was a really nice guy, and was very passionate about his job. It broke my heart when I saw Sony shuttered Evolution. I do hope they bring some of those folks back, but I remember another studio ended up hiring most of them back in those days, and they've been releasing new games since under that studio... Codemasters, maybe? I forgot which....
But the amount of talent that Sony has shut down over the years, it's disturbing. Psygnosis, Evolution, Zipper... just those three studios produced some of the most innovative games that PlayStation has ever seen... and those games need to be brought back.
If they were to release that game on the PlayStation 5, there would be absolutely no need for a remaster or a remake. The whole appeal of the original game was that it consistently exceeded people's expectations.
Higher rendering res and textures, higher framerate, maybe toss in some global illumination/ray tracing, but other than that, they could keep every polygon the same and it would still look absolutely incredible as a current gen title.
Sony should reassemble the team and make Driveclub 2. Driveclub was so ahead of its time it’s crazy.
This is what I hate about gamers sometimes
There is a segment of gaming communities that always want an old game to come back. But when the game(s) were in their prime, nobody supported them or not enough people supported them. Driveclub, Killzone, Resistance, etc all fit that profile.
I want Driveclub, Killzone, Resistence, and etc all back too. But I say that as someone that bought into, played, and own those games.
Too many people like to talk but not put up the money to support when it's needed. I even lump two of my own personal friends into that. I remember how one of them constantly said "I always wanted to play the Resistance games", yet never made an effort to buy any of them. No way that's an isolated event.
There are certainly games that fit that description, but I'm not sure these are a good fit:
- Driveclub infamously launched in a truly terrible state. It had a central focus on online & social features, and those were broken for about 6+ months before people could reliably play it as intended. It was so bad that the PS Plus Edition was delayed, along with its companion app. It also released less than a year after the PS4 launch, so it had to deal with a smaller total of launch PS4 owners to sell to, and Driveclub's rough launch certainly did it no favors.
- Resistance got 3 main console entries, and one handheld title for the PSP and PS Vita. Killzone got 5 main console entries across 3 generations, and one handheld title for PSP and PS Vita. This was also the era of millions of shooters, especially of the First Person variety, & genre fatigue was getting heavier by the year. So I feel these did pretty good at 5 and 7 titles respectively, pointing to enough people showing up for at least a while.
I'm not saying people don't exist who fit that criteria for these games, but I also don't think they were the primary issue. I think after a solid break from the IPs, as well as a lessening of shooter oversaturation, these titles could find healthy audiences if they came out with new entries at this point.
Killzone on the PS4 had the graphics, but the gameplay was tragic, I only rated Killzone 3, although the first game on the PS2 was decent. The Getaway was another game Sony canned, the sequel was so bad. Plenty of games need a sequel, the likes of Ridge Racer, Wipeout, Project Gotham, Wave Race and F-Zero have been retired. The racing genre these days, I'm sick of Turismo and Forza due to the same tracks and any other clones.
I think the original Motorstorm was the game that convinced me to buy a ps3. Way ahead of its time.
Surprised Sony didn't release a collectio, but all they seem to do these days is release God of War and Uncharted collections. It kills me that I no longer have a PS3, so a collection would be awesome.
An update on EA SPORTS™ WRC.
Dear Rally Community,
Every great journey eventually finds its finish line, and today, we announce that we've reached the end of the road working on WRC.
'It marked the first time the studio had used the license in 18 years since 2022’s Colin McRae Rally 3.'
Can you not get AI to do proofreading?
Weird article written by a bot.
In any case I knew EA would ruin Codemasters.
Multiple games developed by Codemasters have been delisted on Steam just recently without any previous warning from EA.
Here’s the deal with this bullsh*t, and this is the single reason I f*cking hate digital, this wouldn’t be so much an issue if these people would give an announcement before they pull their games so people have a chance to get them before they’re gone. I mean, how hard is that to do?
Like, I prefer digital for the convenience of it and making me less of a hoarder, but stuff like this can drive me up the wall and I’m aware this also happens with physical games, but you can still acquire a game from eBay, though all scalped to hell, whereas digital you’re SOL… unless you have a PC.
Not to mention they also replace old base games with "bundles" back at full price. Some of the old and shittiest COD games are still full price on digital stores.
yup everything you said is correct, but with digital you can also acquire it lol thanks to piracy, thats what made me a pirate . Spec ops the line got delisted last year and I just pirated it and never looked back, unfortunately these bigger publishers dont care about older games so dont even give a reminder, so if they dont even care about their own older games, why should I help them with their new games, ill pirate those as well. GOG is the best, you dont even need to pirate those, the games literally dont have any drm, and you can keep the files permanently too.
the reason why i hate digital is because in 20 years when the servers go down, you can't play single player games anymore because shitty fucking companies want you to login to some arbitrary service to pad the numbers.
When a company like GoG does better than a titan like Sony, you know how terrible the state of gaming is.
Technically you are not wrong, only forgot to add Rights Management after the "digital".
These games had exactly 0 players. If you haven't played any of them by now you really didn't care in the slightest. Suddenly you're dying to play one of these classic turds? Sail to cs.rin.ru.
Replies(1)
i mean .. i hate this practise. atleast give people like a 2 months headsup.
idiots
They joined with Codemasters, the team gets to stay together.
Just submitted the article.
Finally some really cool news.
I thought folks here said that most of them were placed in other Sony studios.
Great news, now that can make pretty racing games with awesome game play.
Wow, codemasters just leveled up!
after playing dirt rally all of last week an some drive club over the weekend this is awesome news grats guys :D