The Forza Horizon games are great racing games. But something else they excel at is virtual video game tourism. They're based on real-world destinations, where you can jump in your favorite ride and take a tour, seeing the sights: the Mediterranean coast, the Scottish highlands, the Outback, Tokyo city.
This is an activity I treasure. I love road trips, both in real life and in games. I love them to the extent that I mapped out and built a guide to the best scenic drives across every Forza Horizon game. But still, there's an unreality to the Forza road trip experience that bothers me.
The maps, as big and spectacularly beautiful as they are, are condensed, theme-park versions of the real thing, where you can drive from a Cotswolds village to the Scottish highlands in five minutes. You don't get that sense of journeying from place to place. The Test Drive Unlimited games I played on Xbox 360, with their 1:1 recreations of the islands of Oahu and Ibiza, were much better on this score. But, on these islands, there's a limit to how varied the terrain can be, and to the sense of long-haul adventure they can inspire.
Trucking fans know the answer to this conundrum: SCS Software's peerless, long-running and hugely popular sims, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. These feature astounding, continent-spanning maps on a roughly 1:20 scale, parceled out as DLC, and expanding all the time.
In these games, you can drive from Uppsala, Finland to Malaga, Spain, or from Galveston, Texas to Seattle, Washington. It will take you hours instead of days, but the in-game clock is to scale, too, so you'll watch the light fade and the stars come out as you drive. You'll even need to plan stops for rest and fuel. Now that's a road trip.
But you're in a truck, and instead of heading to scenic hotspots, your destination is usually a logistics facility in an industrial park. There's a workaday romance to this, but it's not quite as inspiring. This has been the one thing holding the SCS truck sims back from being the ultimate road-trip games… until now.
American Truck Simulator recently received a game-changing DLC called Road Trip which adds two features: cars and tourism. It is, quite literally, the answer to my prayers.
At present there are only a few cars available, all Fords: modern F-150 and Bronco models, the classic 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback, and the humble yet iconic 1998 Crown Victoria, also known as every taxicab and police car in every movie you've ever seen. A Dodge and Ram pack is coming soon.
Road Trip also adds Tourist Boards in seven of American Truck Simulator's current 21 states. Drive to one of these and you'll unlock an itinerary of local attractions to visit and tick off. In Northern California, for example, the Sierra Crossing board guides you to Lake Tahoe, Eldorado National Forest and Yosemite National Park, among others, while the Golden Horizon board includes Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Santa Cruz beachfront. These highlights can be quite widely spaced; it might take an hour or more, and a couple of days of in-game time, to drive around all the points of interest from one board.
These sights are rendered with realism rather than the dramatic spectacle of Forza Horizon. But it's still awe-inspiring to reach them, because you actually feel as though you've traveled to get there, plotting your route and stops and watching the landscape change as you go. You can race if you want — the penalties for law-breaking and damage in American Truck Simulator are pretty trivial cash sums. But the truck sim way is to hit the highway, turn on cruise control at the legal speed limit, and watch the world go by. (This might be the ultimate podcast game, by the way.)
The verisimilitude is amazing. I've driven from Las Vegas to Flagstaff, Arizona in real life, stopping to see the Hoover Dam on the way. The same drive in ATS might be 20 times shorter, but it looks unmistakable. The game's exquisite skyboxes, day/night cycle, and weather effects only add to the feeling of being there.
The truck sim brand of realism creeps into the road trip experience in other ways, too. Jumping in on a fresh save, with the states of Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington available to me, I chose Flagstaff as a home base, because I've been there and it's a nice town. But I couldn't start touring straight away; I needed cash to buy a car.
I took some trucking gigs until I'd earned enough for a Crown Vic, with some gas money to spare. Then I hit the road, setting off for the nearest Tourist Board, located in Death Valley. It was an overnight trip and I needed to stop at a motel to rest. I spent another day and night exploring the parched landscape, and earned a postcard I could pin to my dashboard. Then, out of funds, it was vacation over: time to start trucking again. I want to earn enough to redo my Crown Vic's upholstery before the next trip.
In American Truck Simulator, you can establish your own trucking empire, hiring other drivers to run routes and rake in profit. But I'm role-playing it as an itinerant trucker-for-hire, just working toward his next vacation. I couldn't be happier.
With Road Trip, American Truck Simulator gets close to being the perfect road trip game. It has a couple of flaws. The cars are perfectly convincing, but there's no disguising the fact that they're not as fun to drive as the trucks. And the road network is understandably organized around trucking, with a focus on major interstate arteries over winding, scenic roads.
But the map itself sweeps any concerns aside. It's no theme park; it's an amazing scale model of the real thing. I've barely scratched the surface of the fraction of it that is available to me. For their part, after 10 years, the developers are still working their way east, having reached as far as Illinois and Louisiana. All that endless horizon, just begging to be explored. Is there anything better?