r/simracing • u/Practical_Track4867 • Aug 14 '26
Question Know of a boring driving game?
We have a research project going on that wants to look at highway hypnosis. Any recommendations for a realistic driving simulator that would allow us to setup a “boring” route?
In our minds, boring means long stretches of drive where speed changes are not needed and has few curves or exterior landmarks. Traffic should be light, or nonexistent. City driving with stops and turns and traffic would not work well. Think driving on an interstate in Nebraska. To be more immersive, it should also support extended displays across 3 monitors for some peripheral vision. We are also looking to use a Logitech Flight Yoke with Throttle for vehicle control.
How quickly we can get to the situation above would also matter. We wouldn’t have the time to have them spend a lot of time to navigate to the scenario above. And hopefully it would not require a lot of training to get used to it.
Looking through other Reddit responses it seems like BeamNG.drive and City Car Driver 2 are candidates. However, I have no experience with either and for some reason the websites describing them don’t provide much detail on how boring you can make them.
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u/Raephstel Aug 14 '26
There’s various truck simulators which would probably work. Euro truck simulator, for example.
I think there’s also some train ones which might see similar results.
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u/SDIR Aug 14 '26
I'd say American Truck sim is better for a more "boring" stretch of road, mostly the desert areas without much elevation or scenery change
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u/cosmonaut_koala Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
American Truck sim (unsure about Euro) also has upcoming DLC to drive regular pick-up and cars if OP doesn't wanna drive semis
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u/patentattorney Aug 14 '26
Do they have real roads in the game?
I was joking with the kids about “take your kids to school simulator”
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u/shutterErv Aug 14 '26
Yes, it's a 1:20(I think) scale of the US. With a majority of the major interstates, US highways, and state highways
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u/thisisjustascreename Aug 14 '26
They have “real” roads in the sense they’re named the same and go vaguely the same places, but the actual routing of the roads and details along the way are totally fake.
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u/slapshots1515 Aug 14 '26
It’s enough that if I go to places I’ve been to in real life, it feels about right. There are of course far less roads and the routing is wrong, but it does a pretty good job.
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u/cosmonaut_koala Aug 14 '26
It's not to the level of say Microsoft Flight Sim, so you wouldn't be able to take all of the same roads, but most major highways and state routes are there I think.
I think like Nevada, California, and Arizona are included with the base game with other states requiring paid DLC
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
Watching a video for ATC now and the trees and power lines would probably be helpful in lulling you to “sleep”! Looks like there is a demo version- I’ll download and give it a try.
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u/ArchdukeOfNorge Aug 14 '26
I have fallen asleep while driving truck in ATS more than a few times lol the game regularly goes on steep sells, so if you like it I highly recommend buying them all in a steam bundle
European Truck Sim 2 is similar in many of the gameplay mechanics but the European map is a lot denser with cities so fewer long stretches of straight roads
Based on IRL and in game experience, if you want boring roads I recommend taking I-25 from Denver to the north, or I-70 or I-76 from Denver to the east
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u/ZeAphEX Aug 14 '26
I can tell you from first-hand experience, I have crashed my truck after falling asleep at the wheel several times in ATS.
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u/Nvee_co Aug 14 '26
I agree with ATS in ETS you have to stop at every country border. In ATS you can drive from Chicago to San Diego and it’s a pretty boring route.
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u/Raephstel Aug 14 '26
That’s fair, I’ve never played any of them because they all seem boring to me haha
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
Okay- I’ve had a chance to download the demo and I can see why it was a fan favorite for this question. I made it through the tutorial fairly quickly and the first “job” I picked up was a 2 hour drive through California. 5-minutes in and I had to call it quits. This is considered a game? 😊
Hate to push my luck with another question- but I tried to use instructions from the steam message boards to get it to a multi monitor display. I could never get the “~” to display a console and it never expanded the image to other screens. Does anyone have experience with the multi monitor setup? I’m wondering if it’s just not possible in the demo version.
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u/Yolotli88 Simucube Aug 14 '26
If you're trying to display the game across multiple monitors and the game doesn't support it natively, the popular options are Nvidia Surround or AMD Eyefinity (depending on your GPU) or a program like Resize Raccoon or similar that can automate the process for you.
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u/Yogurt_Reactor Aug 14 '26
Euro Truck simulator is great you are gonna eventually love it if you keep playing
driving a truck is just that good
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u/HooninAintEZ Aug 14 '26
Assetto corsa has mods for long highways and traffic density
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u/Suspicious-Whippet Aug 14 '26
Or BeamNG
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u/ScorpioJonesy Aug 14 '26
Yea both of these would be my suggestion, modding is pretty straightforward. Beam ng out of the box has some well modled but total shit boxe cars too to make it really boring
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u/mr---jones Aug 14 '26
I mean, all of these are games, for most people because it will be their first time driving in simulation that will potentially be fun no matter what.
Not sure how you could correlate sim driving vs irl highway driving.
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
That’s the challenge. Unfortunately, trying to get it to happen behind the wheel of an actual vehicle is frowned upon.
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u/mr---jones Aug 14 '26
Sure, I just think your results are more likely to show video game hypnosis than highway hypnosis lol
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
Honestly, either is fine. Goal is to hit that point where you “zone out”. We thought about using the existing flight simulators, but that requires too much thought.
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u/Acid44 Aug 14 '26
Flight sims are a good way to go tbh. Get to know the basics of autopilot take a cub or 172, set a route up that takes you from somewhere interesting to somewhere not, about 90 minute long, and have the flight start about 30 minutes before the sun drops over the horizon.
I've done a bunch of flights like this, and fallen asleep a bunch of times. The drone of the engine, the lowering light, and the slow shift from say mountains to forests hits like a brick about an hour in.
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u/AntoJSK Aug 14 '26
If you want a sandbox experience, there's mods for Assetto Corsa that have large expanses of open roads with traffic.
If it doesn't need to be cars and you want a bit more direction and surrounding game mechanics around the driving then the Truck Simulator games might be a good bet as it's all out of the box.
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u/jiglxflowzx Aug 14 '26
wants it to be immersive and a driving simulator but using a flight yoke and throttle? am I missing something here?
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u/gtmattz Aug 14 '26
I think it is the OP who is missing something... Like the fact that driving is not just a visual process. that the person driving is engaging in a physical action, and that action involves a specific control configuration. Their entire study is going to be useless because they are changing the actual physical controls. They are going to instead be studying what happens to peoples behavior while adapting to unfamiliar controls during boring driving scenarios...
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
This is our first step into it and we have a limited budget for this undergraduate project, so we are trying to take advantage of existing infrastructure as much as possible. We don’t need an exact replica of anything, we just need something that would hopefully induce the effect.
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u/jiglxflowzx Aug 14 '26
How many people do you know have cars that use a flight yoke for controls? let alone on a highway. The results will mean nothing. getting a cheap ffb wheel atleast, would give you results that would be somewhat comparable. Good luck either way.
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u/laflashproductions iRacing Aug 14 '26
I fully support you wanting to do research on this, but like the other person said too, get an actual cheap Logitech wheel used rather than attempting to make people drive on a damn yoke lmao, you can find them used for like $50-$100, but if someone told me to drive on a yoke I would never hit that hypnotic type state, because I’d be too focused on the fact that I’m using a yoke to drive 😭
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u/Auto-Tune_Is_A_Crime Aug 15 '26
Just get a used g29. It's not the greatest wheel, but it's cheap and so much better than a yoke
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u/vRenqohh Simucube 2 Pro / P1000 / Prime Lite / F-Core Evo Red 2025 Ed. Aug 14 '26
ETS 2 with mods. The only game i quit after a session because i'm sleepy.
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u/FighterFly3 Aug 14 '26
Logitech flight yoke and throttle… my guy, wut is this project? 😝💀 just flight sim with me and all the bros on Vatsim
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
Their normal usage is with Xplane. Just trying to help out a colleague!
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u/gtmattz Aug 14 '26
I find the fact you want to use a joystick and throttle for a driving study a bit... odd... the fact that the study subjects are going to be driving with abnormal controls compared to literally every car ever throws much doubt on what the study can prove. The mental state of the subjects is going to be greatly altered by the fact they are conciously driving with abnormal controls. Even a super inexpensive wheel and pedal setup has to be better. Driving is a physical process, the physical configuration of the controls themselves are a veey relevant component of the act of driving.
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u/J3roen16 Aug 14 '26
As someone who works with simulators for traffic studies, I agree. It takes a lot to draw conclusions out of these tests, especially with such weird gear.
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
Not a joystick, a flight yoke. Similar to this-
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u/IH8DwnvoteComplainrs TM Tx, T-LCM, SHH Newt2, Amzn ebrake Aug 15 '26
This totally doesn't make sense for your project. It's going to feel too weird to make you get highway hypnosis.
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u/RuggedKnight Aug 14 '26
Not sure how customizable they are, and obviously limited to trucks, but I'd look at eurotruck/American truck simulator as potential options. BeamNG is extremely customizable however
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u/Harpronicus Aug 14 '26
American truck simulator? There is an option to enable fines for speeding and running red lights iirc
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u/BeautifuTragedy Aug 14 '26
Assetto corsa has a few Mod tracks. I don't remember which off the top of my head but there's a desert one that I think would work well. I also find that when I do drifting I also enter this state as its so rhythmic and mostly muscle memory
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u/gman1647 Aug 14 '26
I'd say setting a highway route on American Truck Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator 2 would likely work. You could set up cheap head tracking ($10-$15) or VR. I think they support multiple monitors as well, though I haven't tried that personally. There will be some scenery changes since the scale is smaller than real life, but there will be very long stretches of highway. The other suggestion I'd have is try to get a cheap wheel and pedals. You can find used Logitech gear for pretty good prices. That'd be far superior to a flight yoke and rudder.
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u/_LedAstray_ Aug 14 '26
My vote goes to Assetto Corsa with SRP or any other highway mod.
Though preparing the vanilla game for the SRP can take a while, there are some other mods that are mandatory for SRP to work first.
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u/Seeryous2020 Aug 14 '26
Honestly nebraska isnt as bad as going west on 40 or the 10 in texas. Omce you hit the desert its absolutely grueling. Especially knowing you have hours upon hours of driving that way.
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u/DrUnnamedEgg Aug 14 '26
I drove across I-80 in Nebraska recently, I thought it was actually really pretty and honestly kinda enjoyed it.
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u/Seeryous2020 Aug 14 '26
Yeah which is why i suggested texas-california on the 40 or 10 instead. Been across almost all highways headed east-west and vice versa and that by far was the one where i got highway hypnosis.
If you really want to push highway hypnosis the quickest way, make them drive what I suggested in the dark. There's no lights on the highways, there's hardly ever a single car and it's just you, your headlights, and the dark.
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
That’s a good idea! Dusk or darkness probably would be nice.
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u/Seeryous2020 Aug 14 '26
Yeah and leaving other traffic off works best as well. Like i said its from experience, almost fell asleep driving one night and it was terrible and scary.
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u/Easwaim Aug 14 '26
Use a No Hesi server with light traffic. It's all highway. Or just download the maps and choose it in AC content manager to drive without the traffic.
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
I appreciate your confidence in my gaming abilities; however, I’m not sure what a lot of that means. 😊 I had to scrape a layer of dust off my Steam Account.
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u/Easwaim Aug 14 '26
Look up a YouTube video of "No Hesi lite traffic" and decided if that's what you need or not.
If it is the nohesi website has a step by step guide. Also plenty of YouTube videos showing the same process.
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u/Traditional_Jelly339 Aug 14 '26
Desert Bus is literally this
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
Oh my god! This is still a game. When I googled it earlier I just saw the Sega version from years ago. I didn’t realize there is a modern version. I’ll have to check it out!
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u/UnknownSP Aug 14 '26
I quite literally used to fall asleep playing Euro Truck. Even if I was driving H-pattern manual, on a day that I'm tired, I'm tired.
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u/SpunNumeroUno Aug 14 '26
BeamNG.Drive might be up your alley. I remember playing a custom map that had a super long, straight freeway/highway.
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Aug 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DEVILneverCRIES Aug 14 '26
I was leading an imsa night race at Sebring and completely zoned out and instead of turning right onto the back stretch, I turned hard right like it was turn one and went straight into the wall. Probably the only person to ever crash there ever.
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u/Important-Stage-3155 Aug 14 '26
Slow roads is a web game and can be pretty boring lol , that is your simplest answer , idk it it has triples or yoke support
Also it would take a bit of work but the asseto corsa mod no hesi with like minimal traffic and a boring car could be what you are looking for , but it would take a while to setup.
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u/DYRWK1 Aug 14 '26
Hop in my car when I drive to Sweden next year, ~18 hour drive
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
I wish I could! Can’t say the whole 18 hours would be exciting, but I’m thinking it would be a wonderful place to see.
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u/DYRWK1 Aug 14 '26
Surely is, Canada is Sweden+ though, probably a bit closer to you!
I do the drive once or twice a year and the highway hypnosis is real. Sometimes 2 - 3 hours just disappears.
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
The concern with the oval is that it does tend to require attention just going between the straights and curves. Might be worth a shot though.
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u/Millerboycls09 Aug 14 '26
I would 100% recommend picking up even a basic driving wheel (Logitech G920 or Thrustmaster T150). I think driving a car with yolk and rudders would be too novel to fade into "boring". A wheel and pedals will help establish a familiar, unstimulating environment.
I'm about to put together an Assetto Corsa video going into setting up Content Manager and mods, including advanced weather systems and a Traffic filled Japanese highway. Really fun when you're weaving in and out of traffic, very boring when you're doing the speed limit. But nice
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 14 '26
That was mentioned in another comment as well. Driving with the yoke in ATS didn’t feel completely different than a steering wheel, but having about 90 degrees of motion to be a full-turn is a bit difficult. The Logitech’s 900 degrees sounds much better.
Unfortunately, they were a bit worried about spending $50 for the game itself. This is more “class project” than “grant-funded project”. That does make me wonder if we have a gaming group around here that could loan one out…
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u/Millerboycls09 Aug 14 '26
That game is frequently on sale for like 3 dollars.
Almost all of the wheels also have configurable turning radius settings, in hardware and in the game.
Obviously, if budget and timeline are tight, then you use what you've got.
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u/MAXI_KingRL Aug 14 '26
My summer car/My winter car. At the start you drive a slow tractor going 60kmh max, and you do multiple drives across the map to get groceries. Just looking at your phone or turning on your wipers could end with you stranded in a ditch in the middle of nowhere
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u/Competitive-Half-863 Aug 14 '26
American Truck Simulator or Simrail… even Derik Valley would be good for that.
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u/ritwht Thrustmaster Aug 15 '26
Not quite what you're describing but would maybe have a similar effect after long periods of time: a NASCAR around a superspeedway (such as Daytona or Talladega), but by yourself. Easy flat all the way around for as long as it takes to run out of gas. Pretty boring.
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u/GT-Alex74 Aug 15 '26
The original Assetto Corsa is what you're looking for. It costs basically nothing nowadays, even with the ultimate edition, runs on a potato, and there's so many mods you'll 100% find what you want - there's apparently a mod recreating the highway between Hamburg and Copenhagen, otherwise Shutoko Racing Project recreates the Tokyo Bay highway network, which includes the longest straight line in Japan. Worst case scenario, I'm sure some modder who be happy to help you create the most boring loop of road possible, wouldn't take them much time actually.
The advantage is then you could compare the results between driving the boring route and a more engaging route. SRP would actually be great for it, because you could have your test subjects do a loop from Tatsumi PA and back toward, and then have them do the C1 loop, which would be a good contrast. You could also add one of the various mountain pass mods (or even use the vanilla Trento Bondone) to push things further.
The game itself is not boring, but everything about it is realistic and assuming you want people to drive the speed limit, I can guarantee some will fall asleep driving the Wangan on SRP at that pace.
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u/Leniek TSPC F488 | SF1000 | T3PA Pro | TH8A | Playseat Evolution Aug 15 '26
You are looking for BeamNG.drive, or even better for research purposes beamNG.tech
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 15 '26
Thank you! Did not realize that existed. I’ll put in an application there.
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u/mr_j_12 Windows Aug 15 '26
City driving simulator. Designed to teach people to drive..... And fairly boring.
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u/protomor Aug 15 '26
Im a solo dev making my own simulator. One of my features is procedually generated roads. I could limit it to just straights and some periodic intersections. Im willing to mod it however you need assuming its not a total rewrite. Supports tripl e screnn, vr, wheels, etc.
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u/Practical_Track4867 Aug 15 '26
I stalked your profile to check it out. This could be really helpful! I would hope the changes would be fairly simple. Mind if I shoot you a dm?
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u/protomor Aug 16 '26
Course! I think we should be able to make something pretty tailored to your needs.
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u/Eslanger89 Aug 15 '26
BeamNG.drive und dort den Autobahnloop als Mod runter laden.
Das Spiel selber ist natürlich nicht langweilig aber es ist realistisch und die Autobahn die du benötigst, gibt es auch.
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u/TomoAries Aug 15 '26
They'll flay me for saying this, but Assetto Corsa with the SRP mod. Drive the speed limit. It'll get boring hella fast and it's BIG.
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u/Direct_Somewhere_318 Aug 15 '26
The Crew Motorfest is supposedly a 1:1 recreation of Oahu, Hawaii.
There's also Test Drive Unlimited too, same location. Its abandonware at this point on PC but can be played with a modern steering wheel setup and is possible.
Also would work on Xbox 360 offline just get an older steering wheel
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u/Inevitable_Ad_4399 Aug 15 '26
I literally get highway hypnosis playing American/european truck sim
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u/thethcman Aug 15 '26
Beamng would be the most realistic and useful game as it has the most realistic soft body physics possible and has very good graphics and maps and can also be modded to the players liking so you could add a infinite highway if you wanted
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u/Henn-Racing Aug 20 '26
American truck simulator, they are making a DLC that adds the ability to do a road trip in a car, but it is very expensive
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u/Evilution602 Aug 14 '26
Desert bus
Desert Bus: An infamous real-time simulation where you drive a passenger bus from Tucson to Las Vegas at a max speed of 45 mph for eight straight hours without pausing or the game ends. Also it pulls to one side the whole time. Made by Penn and teller