calm down about the Aussie thing mate. if their is one thing Aussies can take its a joke. and not much else lets be honest. Also I'm not going to argue with you your opinion is your own and you don't like them. In my eyes that means they have done their job right. note that they liked your post earlier found it quite amusing (they are on this forum although i don't know who the editor actually is).
I agree with him. That article of theirs was entirely schizophrenic. Starting off with how REVSIM's article was spot on, then went right into how most every game and most every developer sucks... what the hell?? Doing the VERY thing they initially said was part of the problem? I felt like I wasted my time reading it, and decided I wasn't going to read any more from the site. REVSIM's however, agree with almost every word.
I think the REVSIM article could be applied to pretty much everything, not just sim racing. Maybe David Icke is right... gonna make me a tin foil forum hat and just drive.
It is true that their perspective are schizophrenic. The main problem is, they are contributing to building up a toxic racing community that goes by the "my sim is better than yours" mentality. They hate pretty much everything as they believe that developers are meant to rip you off to the point, I think they should just cover something else they enjoy than pissing on everything that other people enjoyed. Game development is not charity to begin with where evidently, they do not understand. They are great writers though, with ability to write interesting articles that they decide to use that skill to produce clickbait tabloids that had damaged developer's reputation in the past.
While PRC surely can be provocative and some of their articles are more a miss than hit, they have a valid point in many of their writings too. Lack of features in many of today's racing games that were the norm back in the day are simply overlooked by many of the fans and at worst down played by some developers. I yesterday quickly tested GP4 from 2002 and was absolutely stunned how good it still is. Driving physics, dynamic weather, competent AI, rules, drying lanes and so on are everything there. It even looks OK, although it is running on ancient dx8 engine. Starting from GP Legends and spanning to SimBin titles to mid 2000's, we had a nice bunch of fabulous and complete racing games which many still have active communities and modding scenes. They exist not for nostalgic reasons, but because those titles offer features many modern sims are simply lacking. I for example actively use NR2003, because it is still by far the best platform for SP NASCAR simulation. There are active MP leagues running it too. So, I also won't claim that we are living on a golden age of racing sims. If there ever has been a time like that, in my opinion it spanned a time line approximately from 1998 (GP Legends) to 2005-2007 (rFactor, SimBin titles). People should at least once in a while launch those older titles too. They sure lack the visual fidelity of modern titles, but they can clearly show what we may be missing and that it was possible to offer an awesome racing experience already more than a decade ago. After yesterday, I surely will be fiddling more with GP4 too adding it to my list of "ever greens".
Because games these days needs a lot more time and money to make than the games back in the early 2000s. A car/track could take months to build which it is literally unheard off in the past. That alone will require much more money to make a game these days. Lack of feature is pretty much something that no developers could avoid these days considering the cost of development went up along with expensive licensing in contrast to car manufacturers used to beg 3rd party to make something out of it in early 90s or small team sizes that much cheaper to run day to day. Times has changed, I personally do not mind because games these days has much better immersion and also better physics implementation. I rather enjoy whats available at present, than, keep harping on how great things were back then. It is mostly nostalgia doing the talking than things are indeed great in the past. I dont think R3E, pcars, AC, rfactor 2, GSCE, Dirt, Grid and so on are terrible games despite I grew up with GTR or TOCA. That game is still great in it's own ways like many other old games I tend to revisit from time to time, such as C&C, Starcraft, TOCA or Sim City. Everything in life has it's own strengths and weaknesses, not in black and white like how PRC loves to claim.
My point was exactly what you said on your post. It is remarkable how good job they did back in the day with so little. For GP4 for example, I couldn't find much anything wrong with it, except of course dated visuals. Everything else is there and pretty spot on. I bet there are issues, as I didn't spend but few hours with it fiddling, but in some ways it is superior to many sims of this day. That is not a good thing, just sad. PRC's biggest and most valid criticism (and mine too) is that pretty much all modern racing sims lack some of the features that were there a long time ago, such as competent AI, working weather dynamics, game modes, rules, and so on. That is, all the features that make the game a proper game. I'm not yanking anyone here claiming GP4 AI algorithm is good. It really is. I'd say none of the modern sims I've played has anything that good. GSCE gets perhaps closest, but I'd say from my short experience that it is still not there. I find it troubling, if most of the dev teams assetts go for example creating visual aspects and endless fiddling with physics engines and some stuff that makes racing really racing comes somewhere at the end of the list if ever. Claims that "other guys on the team are responsible of those features, so it isn't away from that task" doesn't really help me in that situation, if features just keep lacking. For the lack of features I uninstalled AC, because I just got quickly bored with hot lapping, no matter how terrific the cars looked and were to drive. There just wasn't a any race game the way I see them. I won't also spend one cent on the DLC's, unless the situation with the core game drastically changes in the near future. But that is of course just me. It baffles me why these quite basic features seem to take forever to implement. I'd trade visuals for good experience any given day, if that would do the trick. In a way, perhaps I like GSCE so much, because it does things quite good on all aspects, but it still pretty much looks like it is from 2005. About licensing costs, I think ISI's and Reiza's approach is quite neat: they make "fictional" series closely resembling true life vehicles (like ISI's Stock Car) and leave the community the work to make real life skins. That way at least saves the effort and costs of licensing. I don't think that anyone argues that you couldn't enjoy modern racing sims, because clearly many people do myself including. I still think we as customers and fans of the genre should constructively demand features that undoubtedly belong to a racing and in the end to a piece of software simulating that.
Without getting into the my sim is better than yours, GSCE itself lacks lots of features which GTR2 had 9 years ago. While doing fictional cars and hoping the community will fill the gap for free sounds OK in principle, the reality is fully licensed content sells much better, and developers know this.
Both the RAVSIM and PRC articles make some good points. The former is very idealistic but the latter deals with the reality. I don't believe we are amidst a golden age of sim racing. We could be in a year or two, but not right now. We have six key players that make up the current crop of PC sims and I think it's fair to say most, if not all, are unfinished and/or buggy. For that reason we are experiencing a taster of a golden age, nothing more. One thing is for sure, Sector3 is a shining example of how to interact with a community. Always helpful and tactful, always open to constructive (and not so constructive) criticism. Never any mud-slinging or heavy-handedness with the community. They run an exemplary forum filled with civilised discussion. As a studio they are a class act in terms of community relations.
I agree fully on both. And licensed stuff is better of course, but if it hinders the game development, which I don't even claim to be a fact, I'd personally choose features over all around licensed material. They both can be mixed in one game, after all.
I fully agree. I spent 15 years as a console racer and often heard about how awesome PC sims like rF1, LFS, Race07, GTL, etc. were, about how great the FFB/physics were and about all the awesome offline and online features they had. Then last year I finally make the move to PC, download/install/play AC and I'm like "This is it? Where's all the awesome features? Where's the flags? Where's the safety car? Where's the awesome AI? Where's all the customizable features? Where's the epic online racing? Then I try R3E, same story. In order to get all these awesome features I have to go back to sims that are many years old, or built on engines that are many years old. The first Golden Age of sim racing was about 5 years ago. We're on the verge of the next Golden Age, but we're not there yet (unless quantity is more important than quality). That's not to bash any of the current sims or devs, just an observation of the current state of affairs. All of the current sims have the potential to usher in the next "Golden Age" sims, but they have a little ways to go. Absolutely. They way they interact with and listen to us is exemplary and impressive. They seem to really take our wishes and desires onboard and do their best to work them into the sim, and they provide cool things for us like the competitions and the dev streams which makes me feel more like I'm their friend than just another customer. Sadly, it seems this has spread to many aspects of life outside of sim racing. Politics, religion, sports teams, clothing brands, music, cell phones, personal computers, you name it. If you're not with me, you're against me and I must berate you and insult you into submission. It's a sorry state of affairs really.
Different people had different priorities. pcars had rain and dynamic weather, you'll be surprised that how many people did not use it. While for me, I find the GSCE visuals and general approach to be quite off putting as it looked extremely dated while depending on the community to fill up those voids will not work, like happened to Patriot's GT3 mod that went private after someone leaked the WIP mod out or OZV8 pulled out from modding GSCE over some drama. The dated graphics also provided less driving immersions. I would prefer a more balanced approach between licenses and features which I think SMS and S3 nailed it just nice for me. AC is a bit lackluster in some ways but they are improving rapidly where with 1.3, I could race with the AI now. If 1.4 brings AI pits, I'll be really happy. GTR is great, but I'll take the current crop of games over GTR/NR2003 because racing games these days offers a great variety of vehicles to try than being confined to a few types of vehicles. As mentioned before, PRC had been exaggerating the issues with modern games. You can have all the features but they are useless if no one uses them while implementing complex mathematical models that older games couldnt also takes a lot of time. Times has changed but PRC still stayed in the early 2000. I have absolutely no intention to stick to one game because every game has different features and content made it even more attractive to play all of them frequently. If you are those who prefer to have one game to rule them all, then, yes, having a fully featured game is better than half of dozen of games with less features. That is subjective, as evidently, not everyone thinks the same as if thats true, Forza would be already dead in the water. The reason that basic features takes ages to implement is because these features are never simple to do, like how S3 mentioned in the past that providing a functional mutliclass UI does take quite a bit of time. Games back then had the time to do all these features because they do not have to devote as much time for other aspects such as physics development or asset creations.
So true! You get some really nice bits out of rF2 but the graphics are horrible and the amount of content sucks!!! AC is good with the best FFB, but the AI needs a bit of work. RRRE looks great with decent AI, but need some tweaking and better options!
I'll admit that today isn't truly a Golden Age of racing, yet, but it's really close. A few years ago, it was. The GTRs were great, TOCA was great, Gran Turismo and Forza were both really good racers themselves... for then. As Cheeseman says, those were much less graphically intensive times. It only took a week or two to build a car, and a few months per track depending on size and complexity, and developers had much more time to develop features and gameplay, almost at their leisure in contrast to today. Now it can take a few months or more to make a car, and could take more than a year for the typical track location. I shudder to think how long S3 will work on the Green Hell complex. Probably as long as Polyphony, Turn 10 and Kunos on theirs, well over a year. I really don't want to go back to the mid-00s, where racers looked like they were made for PS2 in higher resolution. GT5 and Forza 6 in particular has spoiled me. What S3 has accomplished is the minimum I expect in graphics. Fold out trees and flat spectators are a little strange, but they're tolerable because the rest of the game is so good. I understand that everyone complains about the missing features in racers these days, and all the current sims are an unfinished work in progress, essentially released in an alpha state that takes a LONG time to get across the "finished" line. But we're to blame for most of that. PRC writers can flame the situation all they want, but we expect to be able to feel the stitching on a Lamborghini or RUF seat in our butts, and have lap times within a tenth of a second of the real world counterparts. With this uber technology available in both PCs and consoles for several years, we expect performance which used to be the domain of high end million dollar simulator systems. Developers groan in interviews of how hard it is to develop realistic physics, and especially a good tire model, the core of the car's performance. How we expect graphics that are at least HD race video quality. And how hard it is to please us, because every little flaw is flamed unmercifully. They end up working as long on aspects of the game that used to be how long and hard they worked on the whole project. And it doesn't help that these games are being made by some very small teams. I was stunned to learn that Gran Turismo maker Polyphony Digital is considered a small team - with 140-plus people! So I understand it takes much longer for these teams with a few dozen members or so to get anywhere. What they've accomplished is actually very impressive! Not being up on game engine development, I didn't expect J-F to say that early design decisions made what they wanted to accomplish in RR very difficult, and they had to put things off for a couple of years. But I take him at his word, as most here do, and hope for some nice surprises to show up in the coming months. And hopefully this means more sales! I trust them to make a good product, because RaceRoom is perhaps my favorite racer as it is. I don't know when this will be, if it's going to have all the goodies I want, but I know that it will be good enough to be called a great racer, because it's a great racer already. At least for me.
Great read. I've never understood the hate for other sims but I've always been a support them all kind of guy.