yeah, well put, Lucid.
in this racing game (youtube it, for reference) you go faster if you stick to the road and there are dirt roads, off-road is the slowest, then dirt is faster, then tarmac is smooth sailing (even sort of boring). I guess the idea was having to decide which shortcuts to take, taking them right and judging if the terrain and accidents would really shave off the few seconds you need.
But it turns out it's rather bland.
I love GTA to tiny bits, you just get out of the apartment and get into trouble. I walk around places, see the sights (sights in FUEL are great, but samey since it's a rural zone) and then mess with somebody or steal something and then run away from the police, which usually escalates to "omfg helicopter after me" levels. Which is fun. It's the minigame of getting away with it. And as a reward I get to keep the car I stole. I used to collect police cars, for example. SWAT vans, etc. The difficult kind. In FUEL you can just win or lose the race and that's it. It's even hard to crash, you'll usually just bump into things and keep going, you have to go really fast to get into a real crash.
come to think of it, a multiplayer circuit editor or just getting jumps graded would have spiced things up. Even grading spectacular crashes. You think that would do it? or is open world a no-no for racing? has anyone tried the OTHER open world racers? (Test drive Unlimited and Burnout Paradise) are they any fun? why?
It still puzzles me that I found Minecraft addicting considering its simplicity. I inmediately started tunneling. Perhaps the promise of a large hidden mine? or the goal of building a nice fortress kept me interested. Maybe multiple simultaneous goals is the way to go?