With World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing coming out in September, we’re looking back at developer Monster Games’ recent releases to see if there are any parallels.
The first one will be on September 27, 2022 World of Outlaws video game will hit the market in more than a decade thanks to the combined efforts of the Monster Games development team and its new ownership group and publishers at iRacing.
World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing is the first title to release Monster Games under the iRacing umbrella since the deal was struck to buy the developer back in January.
The upcoming racing title will feature the World of Outlaws Sprint Car, Late Model, four additional ‘DIRTcar’ race vehicles, a roster of real drivers and over 40 dirt roads – 13 of which are officially licensed locations.
With that in mind, the other 27-plus locations will likely be fantasy tracks, which Monster Games luckily has many of its past racing titles.
It is believed that the game will use a mix of resources and technology from both previous Monster Games dirt racing titles in addition to iRacing. The title, which was not mentioned at the time of iRacing’s acquisition, was already in the works or at least known before the deal was closed.
PREVIOUS MONSTER GAMES RACING TITLES
The promotional material we’ve seen so far seems to have been heavily influenced by the earlier Monster Games dirt racing games of the past few years.
It still appears to be the Unity Engine used for all of Monster Games’ past projects going back to the NASCAR Heat games – albeit with no official confirmation at the time of writing.
While the first game didn’t have it, the second NASCAR Heat did have Eldora and the third and fourth NASCAR Heat titles had a dirt racing series element to their Xtreme Dirt Tour.
After those four NASCAR Heat titles from 2016 to 2019, Monster Games continued to develop and publish its own titles separately from 704Games. In 2020, the studio released two games under the name of a multi-sport racing legend, none other than Tony Stewart.
Tony Stewart’s Sprint Car Racing and Tony Stewart’s All-American Racing were essentially extensions of each other. They came out the same year, both featuring dirt racing and more than 50 fictitious dirt racing facilities split between the two titles.
Sprint Car Racing came out first and had the more traditional WoO style racing included, without the license of course. Three-Quarter Midgets, 305 Non-Winged Sprint Cars and Winged 410 Sprint Cars were the three vehicles to race in and the tracks were all fantasy locations.
All-American Racing was more like local car racing with Big Block Modifieds, Legend Cars, Street Stocks and a DLC pack for Late Models. While the base game is full of fantasy tracks, there are four real-world tracks available as DLC.
In 2021 Stewart found his name attached to another racing series, built from the ground up, the Superstar Racing Experience, or SRX for short. The real series consisted of a handful of famous racers from various motorsports who competed on a handful of short courses during the summer months.
Monster Games was able to build on the strengths of the previous NASCAR Heat titles and the Tony Stewart titles to create SRX: The Game in 2021, just in time for the start of the real series. The series visited six locations and all six, including Eldora and Knoxville, were included.
Of the approximately 52 fictional locations in the Tony Stewart titles, a majority (44) of those songs were reused in SRX: The Game. While it felt like the Tony Stewart titles complemented each other with different cars and tracks in both, SRX: The Game felt like a culmination of both games combined with the SRX movement, plus some extra dirty racing action.
In addition to most of the fictional tracks from the two Tony Stewart titles that made their way into the SRX game, Sprint Car Racing’s 305 Non-Winged Sprint Cars and All-American Racing’s Late Models were also used. SRX also featured the real series cars and some asphalt tracks, Stadium Trucks and an asphalt Super Late Model DLC.
Over the years I have played the three independent Monster Games titles and all of the NASCAR Heat games and there has been a marked improvement over the years, with each new game being a step in the right direction.
While I was never enamored with the NASCAR Heat dirt racing scene, SRX: The Game was a similar but refreshing take on the more arcade style of racing games. Essentially, all the games offered the same basic platform with mild tweaks, from their careers to their online to even the way the cars handle.
If we compare the Tony Stewart games and SRX: The Game specifically, the latter felt more like a complete game with more to do. From a more in-depth career mode, taking players through the dirt racing ranks to the top Superstar Racing Experience, to a more detailed paint booth, Monster Games seemingly took what it learned from it all and made a solid console title.
That’s why I hope World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing continues this progression.
WHAT TO EXPECT IN SEPTEMBER
There have been World of Outlaws games before, such as the various titles offered by Ratbag Games in the early 2000s and the 2010 release by Big Ant Studios. Unfortunately, while these are all the last officially licensed World of Outlaws titles, they’re unlikely to have any correlation to the upcoming Dirt Racing game beyond official game status.
Objectively speaking, it seems that if you’ve played the Tony Stewart games or the SRX game, you’ll probably expect more of the same when World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing comes out. That’s not necessarily to say it’s a bad thing, but it certainly won’t be iRacing on a console, as much as many would like or expect it to.
At the end of 2021, when it was announced that iRacing would be adding Monster Games to its portfolio, console gaming was heavily in the minds of the leadership, evidenced by the fact that the new WoO title will not appear on PC. Getting iRacing on a PlayStation or Xbox doesn’t seem like an easy task.
iRacing is, of course, an online simulation platform based on PC with a ton of esports coming out of it, while the SRX and Tony Stewart games were more accessible racing games, mostly played casually with a gamepad and no official esports associated with the titles.
While this is the first step for the Massachusetts-based sim pioneers to make their name known in the console gaming realm, I really don’t think it will have too much of a noticeable impact on the upcoming game. If you want a simulated dirt racing experience, iRacing already provides that through its own program.
The press release states that iRacing will provide artifacts and will work on improving the physics model of the cars in the upcoming game. So while the game will likely have a different feel to the previous Monster Games entries, it will likely also be a preferred experience with a controller over a steering wheel.
With the licensing agreements it will be valuable to have information and data about the tracks and the cars, but Monster Games already had working models of many of those things too, with the Winged and Non-Winged Sprint Cars in the Sprint Car Racing and the late model in All-American Racing.
So far, the physical details of tracks seem thin on the ground. On iRacing, the dirt roads all have a dynamic environment where the surface goes from sticky to slippery. In the previous Monster Games titles, the tracks don’t, they remain at a stagnant grip level. I don’t think we’ll see that either, but maybe they could have a track wear setting?
The PC simulation currently offers nine of the ten dirt tracks already announced, with the pinnacle of the Texas Dirt Track. However, that particular location was offered as DLC in All-American Racing. Since iRacing provides art assets, hopefully the scan data will help build these tracks.
Like I said, I think last year’s SRX release will be a similar experience to the new World of Outlaws game. This is further supported by Amazon’s recent list of 25-player online multiplayer and an image of the auto-customizer, both of which look and sound very familiar.
It looks like the team will probably also use what it already has to fill out the fictional number grid. Personally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Durango Park to return…
If that’s really the case, hopefully the release will allow the iRacing name to reach a wider audience through a previously untapped medium – the console sphere. It will hopefully diversify revenue streams in a fiercely competitive market, in addition to the release of DRAG.
If this leads to more money for the development of iRacing in the future or even some form of simulation on consoles, it can only bring positivity for everyone involved and the racing game community.
Ultimately, World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing probably won’t reinvent the wheel, but we’ll find out soon enough when we can get our hands on a copy and try it ourselves. It will launch on September 27, 2022 for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One.
Featured image was created in iRacing
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