Today sees dune buggies hitting the tracks in the PlayStation 4 racer Driveclub, in a nod to the anarchic PlayStation racing series MotorStorm.
First spotted last Friday by AllGamesBeta, the MotorStorm dune buggy downloadable content is now official, and it’s free to download from the PlayStation Store. It’s only in the European store right now, but as North America wakes up, it’ll likely appear there too. It’s a great hat-tip to a much-loved racing series from the previous console generation, but it might be the closest we get to an actual sequel for a while.
Evolution Studios, the U.K.-based Driveclub and MotorStorm developer, laid off a number of staff earlier this month. Sony said the job cuts were part of a refocus at the studio, which will now work on updating Driveclub “as a service” and bringing gamers the long-promised PlayStation Plus version of the game — a stripped-down free edition of Driveclub for all subscribers to Sony’s online gaming service.
MotorStorm was one of the racing highlights of the last console generation, with bikes, trucks, and dune buggies all competing on the same dusty, end-of-the-world tracks. Its sequels saw players racing across beaches and through collapsing cities, and MotorStorm: RC turned the gameplay into a precise top-down racer for PlayStation Vita and PS3.
With the lay-offs at Evolution, it might be too much to hope for a proper MotorStorm sequel on current-gen hardware. This DLC is great fan-service from Evolution, though, and helps further enhance Driveclub, which is now almost unrecognizable from its rocky launch state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PcgT_aW1vo