There are plenty of hardcore racers that own and enjoy Horizon 2 most of them probably only play the online portion of the game but that pretty much applies to most racing games.

Chris... let it go man. This argument is not about quality.

That's like having a platformer where you simply float over pits, to you know, actually just get on with platforming. If there are no consequences for going off the road, what's the point of having roads at all. Just for avoiding trees?

I guess it's simply a different school of thought. Some like to master the tracks, some just like to get to the next checkpoint whatever way is easiest. Would MK8 be better without penalizing you for going off the track?

Ok, so I just watched a couple of 'races' in Horizon and I'm sorry, none of your skill based arguments apply to this game. Yes, they kept to the road (mostly) but it's accelerate, break, turn and accelerate. That was it. Everything else was redundant because it didn't matter what speed they were going or what line they took. All that happened was they either cut a corner or went out onto the grass. None of these gave them a penalty and it took but a few seconds to catch up to the other cars. That's not skilled based racing. In Driveclub that race would have been lost right there.

In the same way that High Heat Baseball (Horizon 2) is a game designed for casuals while the hardcore baseball purists love Wii Sports (#Driveclub), sure I guess.

Oh man those people should get Horizon 2 then, the whole game world is a track.

Its an open world racer no other game in the same genre penalizes you for going off track or cutting corners.  It still is skill based just like all other racing games if you don't have driving skills you will come in dead last in every race.

If DC is a game for hardcore racers, I really doubt it would be getting the scores that it does.  If anything because DC arcade physics and simulation is the way it is, scores have been all over the place.  In Horizon you can change the game to be more simulation or less Simulation by turning on or off different assist.  This allows the casuals and hardcore racer to tailor the game the way they want.  DC on the other hand has only one type of arcade model and from the reviews it appears you will either love it or hate it.  

What I have gathered from all the different reviews whether positive or negative is that DC is a bare bones arcade racer that looks very pretty.  Since the game does not offer any type of change to what the developer thought was fun, you can either enjoy or hate the experience.  For PS+ user, the good news is that you get a pretty solid demo to check out before making that purchase.

To sum up: Driveclub and Horizon are two completely different games and should never be compared. You can't take mechanics from Horizon and use them to say that Horizon is better than Driveclub and you can't take Driveclub mechanics to say it's better than Horizon.

Driveclub is great because it's an entirely skill based racer.

Horizon is great because it's a fun driving game with races.

See, the competion never existed.

The penalty in Horizon for going off road is speed and handling.  In other words going off road is not advisable for a lot of areas of the game.  hitting the gravel will affect your ability to not over or unsteer thus causing you to slow down.

In DC when you hit the gravel or hit that imaginary boundary, the game engine docs you 3 sec.  Instead of letting normal physics to affect your driving, you have this artificial design in the game that does it.  For most people that gave DC a bad score, this was definitely one of the things that irked them the most.  I know personally the way Horizon handles such situations is more natural than the game engine counting down 3 secs or you cannot accelerate for 3 secs penalty.  That’s not real world and its not close to what any of the best arcade racers have done either.