This holiday season should see no shortage of good next-gen racing games. Bandai Namco hopes Project CARS will be one of them, as the company has announced it picked-up the distribution rights to Project CARS for PS4, Xbox One and Wii U. Project CARS will be available for all three platforms in November.
Bandai Namco’s distribution deal covers the Americas alone. The game will release worldwide, but Bandai won’t be handling it.
Project CARS gathered its worldwide following during a rather impressive crowd-funding campaign. The “investment” community has been involved in the development process throughout to create their ultimate racing experience, resulting it somethign Bandai is calling “the most authentic, beautiful, intense, and technically-advanced racing game on the planet. ”
Project CARS allows players to create a driver, pick from a wide variety of motorsports and shift into high gear to chase a number of Historic Goals. There’s also a competitive multiplayer component, with online modes such as race weekends, leaderboard-based time challenges, and continually updated community events.
In a nice twist, Project CARS will give winners of some of those events real-world prizes.
Project CARS has the largest track roster of any recent racing game, as well as dynamic day/night cycles and weather patterns. As a next-gen racing game, it also supports in-depth tuning as well as Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus.
That last bit is particularly interesting. The Project Morpheus support is built into a Project CARS game that’s releasing in November, yet Sony hasn’t announced a Project Morpheus release date. Maybe the functionality is the developer (Slightly Mad) playing it safe and “future proofing” its game. Or maybe Sony’s closer to announcing a Project Morpheus release date than we think.