People are afraid to merge on the freeways of online racing games. While first-person shooters like Battlefield have turned the deathmatch into a mainstream activity, many console gamers are still wary of driving online. The genius of Criterion's Need For Speed titles, with their compelling Autolog function, was that they provided that sense of group competition without the sorrow of being left in the dust by seven other drivers. Now Evolution Studios wants to take things one step further. It wants to make driving online as seamless and inclusive as loading up Call of Duty and slipping into a battlezone.

The idea of DriveClub has been floating around at Evolution Studios for 10 years. While still making PlayStation 2 rally games in the early 2000s, the studio was toying with the idea of a game about driving the industry's best cars through the world's most astonishing locations – and sharing it all with friends.

But even during the PlayStation 3 era, the team felt the technology and audience weren't there – the online gaming sector was dominated by shooters; hardcore experiences for committed players. That wasn't what DriveClub was going to be about. Then came the rise of social networking, and social gaming, and it became clear that a new era of hyper-connected play was approaching.

DriveClub is a game about gangs. Participants can join or form driving squads of up to 12 players, before competing in a huge range of tournaments and competitions – some set by the game, some organised and promoted by the groups themselves. Winning events provides 'fame' – the familiar racing sim take on XP – and this allows your team to access better vehicles and races. You can only be in one club at a time, although you can elect to transfer your allegiances whenever you like – and once you've joined a club, you get a share in their winnings, and the benefits of their current level. Plus, talented players can be headhunted by rival teams via the game's built-in messaging system, so things are going to get pretty heated. The concept is simple: everything and everyone is connected.

"When we were asked a couple of years ago to come up with another new IP for a console launch, we knew straightaway which idea to go with," says studio game director, Matt Southern. "We thought, OK, we've had this concept simmering for a number of years, it felt like the time was right because networked gaming had matured. Within Sony, we were contributing to a conversation about the pillars of PS4, about how important it would be to make games accessible, social and connected. It all lined up."

All for one, one for all

DriveClub draws inspiration for its club-based structure from two quite different genres: the first-person shooter and the MMORPG. As in a Call of Duty team match, every member contributes toward the success of the unit while also improving their own stats – whatever the outcome of the bout.

"Before PS3 launched, the number one game every Christmas was a racing sim, usually Need For Speed, it almost became cliche," says Southern. "Then, over the console's life-cycle, the shooter took over. We did some research with the Sony guys in the US and we found that people moved from racers to shooters because, when they played together online, they didn't like it when only one person could win. Squad-based shooters really nailed that, especially the first Modern Warfare where you could really feel a sense of reward; you could level up and unlock abilities even if you were hopeless. As long as you were in a group of people where at least some of them were doing well, you made progress. We wanted to nail that with DriveClub, we wanted people to feel it was worth racing, even if they never crossed the winning line first."

Every track in the game, then, has a range of side-objectives, separated into two strands. Overdrive tasks automatically reward you for whatever you do in game – donuts, drifts, high speeds – any skill-based activity gets you fame points. Then there are Face-Offs, dynamically generated challenges which test your cornering, drifting or average speed against one other racer on the track for a set amount of fame. So just as in, say, Black Ops II where you can be rewarded for beating a close rival, every race becomes a sort of macro-event housing dozens of duelling sub-plots.

Community spirit

What the game also clearly draws from is the massively multiplayer RPG. Like World of Warcraft, DriveClub is about joining a guild, battling through the whole game together, and levelling up as one: every race is a quest. But there are wider parallels too. "The big similarity is that this is going to be a service driven game," says game director, Col Rodgers. "Once it is out, we will be streaming a lot of content at gamers. There will be developer-driven event lists which are likely to be sponsored, but there will be lots more content like new game modes. What you buy on day one is a ticket to a community that grows around you."

The way DriveClub integrates that sense of community – and the way it presents a dynamic live experience – hints at how all games may work in the next generation. Thanks to PS4's system-level compatibility with social networks, players will be able to tie in their Facebook profiles and compete under their real names, against all their Facebook pals. Immediately the social range is widened. But it goes deeper than that.

"What we've tried to do is look even more closely into the growth of the social network phenomenon," says Southern. "What is it about them that's so fascinating? We worked very closely with one of our partner groups in the London studio, the online technology group, and looked at the emerging trends in browser and social network games. One of the things we learned was how important analytics were going to be. It was possible for us to acquire data from business intelligence in Soho, but it could take a while. However, what we saw from social games was that you needed that data immediately – even if it's a day late, it's growing stale."

So Evolution started talking to Sony about pulling out data from the game servers more quickly. The studio then used its Vita release Motorstorm RC to prototype some of its new ideas on social integration and analytics-based design. The studio studied all the live gameplay stats, working out the most popular circuits, the best cars, the bottlenecks in single-player progression. The team also looked at the social impact of players sending each other challenges – they found that people were forging new PlayStation Network friendships through the system. The idea had legs.

"On the face of it, it looks quite sinister," says Southern. "But it's actually really improving the experience – it is mutually beneficial. We could see what was most popular, we were experimenting with micro transactions, we were finding difficulty spikes and addressing them. It felt that the studio had moved forward; we'd found one of those important last steps for the DriveClub concept."

So, like a social network, and the games that run on them, DriveClub will apparently adapt to community behaviours and iterate accordingly. Evolution plans to use the console's micro-patching service to tweak gameplay elements and send out mini-updates, which owners will then seamlessly download. "We can even update the handling," says game director, Paul Rustchynsky. "If there are any balancing issues – if anyone says 'this car is 0.1 second slower than it should be at 0-60mph' – we can make adjustments like that."

Player behaviours may even affect how the game is downloaded, with the most popular tracks being prioritised so fans can jump in and play straight away, while the rest is still loading in. As studio group technical director Scott Kirkland explains, "If we recognise that a majority of people take a particular path through the game that we didn't anticipate, we could dynamically modify the default order that the digital version of the game gets pulled down in – and actually, that same technique could apply to how the data is pulled off the Blu-ray as well. We can continue to make the experience better for the player."

Keeping connected

The team was also researching the theory of social networks – the way we expand our circle of friends online. They studied Grouped, the acclaimed book by ex-Facebook researcher Paul Adams; he writes about how people tend to socialise in small independent groups, and that social networks are designed to bridge the gaps between them. In this way, the influence of weaker social links grows and the service becomes more compulsive.

"There are really simple ideas about how we're connected and how this influences us," says Southern. "It's simple stuff: you're connected to your friends and through them to your friends' friends … These people who you don't necessarily know have an amazing amount of influence over you. We're connected to people we don't know, so we thought, let's make a racing game that's about these people and those connections. It was revelatory to us – it's not the sort of research you find at a games company, it's traditionally market research, but we could see it was a way of building on the gameplay mechanics we'd ceded in Motorostorm RC. There was a massive increase in the PSN friends lists of people who owned our game; people were building networks while playing this game together. It was very academic, but it felt like a very useable approach to a different type of socially driven racing game."

Consequently, DriveClub looks like a social network as soon as it loads up. There's no static menu screen at the front end – instead, players enter the game via the Discover page, which Rustchynsky refers to as "An overview of your life in DriveClub". It shows the latest tournaments and events info from the wider community, as well as feeds of what your friends are up to; beyond them, the links go out to mutual friends, forging links.

"The interface is part of the game experience," says design director, Simon Barlow. "You can spend a lot of time in there exploring the social feeds, and all the different challenges. We've adopted a web development approach to the front end – instead of hard-coding a UI as we would traditionally, we thought, OK, if we need to start interfacing with the DriveClub app and with external servers, this needs to be more flexible. So we've used a lot of embedded web technology in the interface itself: not only is it live, it's very easily moddable, it's easily updated, we can micro-patch it. That flexibility is key."

DriveClub isn't a social game in the sense we have come to know it. The idea is, it's a game that invites you to join a community. And perhaps the most important part of this is that there is no plot, no over-arching narrative for everyone to contribute to. The story is you, your club and your progress. It will be fascinating to see how that works, and whether it points us to a new era beyond wonky matchmaking services and anonymous lobbies. Evolution believes it will.

"The fundamental idea was to make it into a form of social media for racers," says Rodgers. "Rather than having a strict fiction that we lead you through, what we want to do is give you a collection of tools so you can make your own game experience with your team, to set up your own challenges on certain tracks at certain times of day … That's what we were aiming for."

Come back on Wednesday for a look at how DriveClub shows us the future of console visuals.