5 reasons why Drift City failed

Drift City, or Skid Rush in its original Korean version, is a 3D Racing MMORPG game developed by Naver Corporation and published internationally by GameCampus and Arario. This racing game lets players freely navigate around Mittron Island and explore the vast game environment of its four cities. The game is rich in content and features real-time races, lap-time battles, quests, daily missions, and many more.

Unfortunately, despite the immersive elements of the game and its exciting races and missions, Drift City’s server was canceled and shut down in 2017 mainly due to a low player base. In this article, we will explore the issues behind the decline of the online game’s popularity and reasons why players found the game to be unsatisfactory.

5 reasons that led to Drift City's downfall

1) Inconsistent animation and graphics design quality

Drift City is criticized for its poor animation and graphic design (Image via Naver)

The graphics of Drift City incorporated a cell-shaded style aesthetic. In contrast to the realistic best sellers we are familiar with, the game's graphics have a more cartoonish style, and it took on a Korean comic or a manhwa theme vibe its developer Naver Corporation is known for.

Drift City’s graphics and animation may undeniably give players a unique racing experience in the first part of the game. However, as the story progresses, the quality of the game’s animation and graphics also goes downhill, with later portions of the game having substantially lower-quality texture work.

2) Lackluster storyline

The plot of Drift City takes place in the future when the world's infrastructure has been hampered by a global oil crisis. The online game is definitely lacking in terms of storyline, with few options for players to customize their own gaming experience. While it's understandable that a racing game's plot cannot be as comprehensive as that of an RPG, players think that the storyline could be improved a lot.

3) Cluttered UI and gameplay

Even if you manage to look past the plot, the user interface is something that needs to be improved in Drift City. Navigating is challenging because status updates are displayed in the player's direct line of sight, and half the screen is taken up by text and visuals when gamers are at full speed.

The drifting and controls also take a lot of time to master, and consulting the tutorial isn't really helpful. This, coupled with some bugs and errors, makes the gaming experience clunky.

4) Difficult and repetitive missions

Missions in the game are repetitive and difficult to complete. For instance, in tailing missions where you need to follow a marked car to its destination, you are forced to fail and redo the mission because the vehicles being trailed travel slowly and pass through other vehicles without any collision detection.

You are also required to maintain a fixed distance during the entire game, and even a brief departure from that distance will prompt a mission restart.

In the timed missions in the later cities in the game, the amount of time allotted decreases dramatically, and you will need to fail a lot before you have enough time to finish the mission. Additionally, there are no bonuses for completing the mission in less time or for the first time, which discourages players from returning.

5) Expensive pay to win elements

If you want the best vehicle of any tier and get powerups and upgrades, you’ll need to drop some cash in the shop. Although the game's pricing is lower than those in many other games, you don't actually own anything. Instead, everything has a rental tag.

The game has a coupon system that allows you to own specialty cars simply by playing through the game. There are also incentives after completing certain tasks, such as driving on the wrong side of the road and executing perfect drifts. However, requirements are unreasonable sometimes, like 55 real hours of driving on the wrong side of the road.