BeamNG.drive Launches for PS5 in 2026 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 1 day ago / 1,607 Views
Developer BeamNG announced the physics-based driving game, BeamNG.drive, will launch for the PlayStation 5 in 2026.
The game is currently available in Early Access for PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, and Humble Store.
View the PS5 announcement trailer below:
Read details on the game below:
BeamNG.drive is an incredibly realistic driving game with near-limitless possibilities. Our soft-body physics engine simulates every component of a vehicle in real time, resulting in true-to-life behavior. With years of meticulous design, intensive research and experience, the simulation authentically recreates the excitement of real world driving.
Why is BeamNG.drive the Game for You?
- Soft-Body Physics – The BeamNG physics engine is at the core of the most detailed and authentic vehicle simulation you’ve ever seen in a game. Crashes feel visceral, as the game uses an incredibly accurate damage model.
- Vehicles – BeamNG.drive offers dozens of refined, totally customizable vehicles for you to experiment with. Whether it’s a compact car or massive truck, you can tweak away at all the moving parts to create just about any driving experience you want. Wheels, suspension, engines, and more; everything is under your control.
- Environments – There’s plenty to discover as you drive. Featuring 12 sprawling, beautiful open-world environments, the terrain feels as vast and diverse as the gameplay options. Test out your new setup through tropical jungle passages, barren deserts, urban boulevards, fast highways, and much more.
More Features
- Game Modes – This goes far deeper than your standard driving simulator. The range of gameplay options are exceptional, whether that’s taking on a simple delivery mission or creating an entire map to test out new car builds.
- Free Roam – Don’t want to feel limited? Take any vehicle to your destination of choice and start exploring. Experimentation is also key in this game mode, as objects and environmental conditions can be manipulated. Try revving up wind speeds for a challenge, or altering gravity!
- Scenarios – BeamNG.drive offers loads of scenarios for every type of driving enthusiast out there. You can complete a truck delivery request as fast and efficiently as possible, or outrun police cruisers in a hot pursuit. No matter the situation, the realistic physics engine will engage and immerse you in the experience.
- Time Trials – Choose a vehicle, environment, and route and put yourself to the test! Refine your skills and compete against yourself while improving your best time.
- Freedom – What sets BeamNG.drive apart from other automotive games is player freedom. It’s about doing nearly anything you can think of with a car or truck and seeing it play out in the most realistic way possible. With our soft-body physics engine and modding capabilities, you can come up with any scenario imaginable. It’s not just about the vehicles, it’s about taking advantage of the expansive and customizable open world to create the driving experience you envision. Combining industry-leading physics, endless customization, and tight-knit community means that BeamNG.drive is the most comprehensive and flat-out fun vehicle simulator you will ever play.
Read details on update 0.39 for the PC version, which will release later this year below:
A considerable part of the upcoming version 0.39 update is dedicated to a graphics overhaul that’s been in development for quite some time now.
There are way too many technical terms to explain in detail, but here’s a concise list of what we’re cooking:
- Atmosphere and Sky – Volumetric clouds with shadows, multi-scattering sky, improved atmospheric fog, and a new altitude-based fog.
- Rendering Tech – A new Direct3D 12 renderer, support for HDR (for compatible modern displays), and a new natural tonemapper that improves both SDR and HDR.
- Lighting and Shadows – Global and local exposure to simulate eye adaptation, improved dynamic reflections, fast screen-space shadows, improved shadow quality and stability.
- Surfaces and Textures – Subsurface scattering and an extended texture detail mapping system.
- Night-Time Rendering – Vehicle lights with realistically calibrated intensity, temperature, and light cookies—textures that shape projected light, allowing for realistic patterns and beam effects (based on technology and market region).
All of this comes paired with underlying optimizations and a fully revised set of graphics quality presets—carefully tuned for a better balance between visual fidelity and performance.
Speaking of performance—we’ve also put serious effort into improving memory efficiency. RAM and GPU prices have recently skyrocketed, and we hope our work can offset at least some of the impact. The new version brings meaningful reductions in both RAM and VRAM usage (depending on what content you’re running and which mods you have installed, of course), along with reduced peak memory consumption during loading screens, which can trim load times in some cases.
On the content side, we’re happy to confirm that a new vehicle is on the way too, together with the usual array of improvements to all existing vehicles, among which is a new orange peel paint effect.
The physics engine is getting some attention as well—the aerodynamics simulation has been expanded to include effects like slipstreaming, side drafting, and bump drafting. This should make racing more strategic and offer new ways to practice hypermiling, if that’s your thing. And the improvements don’t stop there—we’ve also added a new dynamic damping system that reduces force feedback oscillations for a cleaner feel at the wheel.
Beyond version 0.39, there’s another topic we want to address—one the community has been asking about for as long as we can remember. So here it goes: official multiplayer is real (but not here yet), and we’re committed to delivering it.
Development on multiplayer has been underway for several years now, but is still far from what we’d call ready and likely won’t be for quite a while. And when it does land, it won’t arrive as a final, polished package. It’ll follow the same approach we’re taking with tire physics: ship an initial implementation as soon as it’s ready, then gradually improve it based on your feedback. Staying true to how we usually work, we don’t want to compromise development by promising an arbitrary date and then rushing the work to meet it. It’s not a simple project and we want to do it justice, so we held off on saying anything until the foundation had advanced enough to feel comfortable sharing. That milestone is finally on the horizon.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
