Couldn't disagree more. It more than holds it's own against other sims IMO (along with Race 07 and GTR2). These three may not look as good, but they still have features that AC and R3E don't have (pit stops, flags, etc) and are far more complete sims than either R3E or AC
You did well. I gave it more time and was wasted time. Being myself mainly SP, the stupid behaviour of the AI (artificial idiots) makes it imposible to enjoy. Spent some bucks but to keep spending time just to get angry would be stupid. At least GSCE won't be lonely in the trash bin, it's gonna have company with pC and AC.
No, it's not "rubbish". It's a great sim, but i would say it is not everybody's cup of tea. Personal preferences differ a lot (which is also a good thing). I would recommend to build your own opinion about AC.
AC strikes me as a great driving model, but I struggle to get immersed in it. I used to treat it as a hotlap simulator, because neither the environments nor the AI felt real to me. The tracks are great but match the track-day sim feel, although infinitely better than SMS' 200,000 people watching a Clio race atmosphere. Looking forward to trying the patch with the new AI in AC but haven't found time to do so yet.
This is the best advice Ive seen, and agree with Ernie on this one, different things appeal to different people. Make your own decision as to whether AC is crap or not, sure, we can all pass on our own opinions of AC but at the end of the day, only you can decide if it's for you. Cheers, and good luck with it!
OK, this is purely my opinion Being "old" like you, I have all racing games as I cannot resist not trying/buying them. Hmm, well, I had GSCE from the beginning but I never play it any more. And I do not think I will in the future either. In fact I did not even support the crowd funding. Wish they based it in rF2 engine but does not seems possible for now apparently. GSE feels old to me, the FFB is miles away from R3E, AC and rF2 and thus it does not give me that much feeling and satisfaction as those 3 give me. Graphics is OK will all full. Its the old feeling of the rF1 engine that I don't like...I appreciate their work, but its not for me. I like AC as it feels quite good to me, so even though it still has many missing things its still a must have in my opinion. I guess its still evolving so online racing will get better hopefully. pCars......pfffffffff....I was a Senior from the beginning and spent EUR 100....what a waste of money for me (actually, I am supposed to get the money back hopefully!). Will definitely not support pCars 2. Looks nice, but I just don't like how the cars feel on track, FFB etc. I cant feel when the car is sliding that that ruins everything for me. Then there is iRacing of course. I had stopped paying last year and that's enough said. rFactor 2...I won't go there. I only enjoy the clios (actually I love them), anything else I cant keep on track for more that 100m. Pickup racing is dead here. I'm not a fan boy, but I get so immersed with R3E that only a few mods in rF2 and AC come close.
GTR2 was - beside RBR - the main race sim I used before AC, my visits into Race07 only was a random interim solution to check its Nordschleife. GTR2 I know very well and used it a lot - years ago. rF I never liked, never. Some of what I already did not like in rF in driving, I met again in GSCE. While I already said earlier that I think GSCE does better than GTR2(/rF)-era sims (after all it appeared just years after these), taking that as an argument to claim any of these are en par with R3E or AC, does not work, logically. As I also already said, it is not just about the looks, but also the feels of the driving, the physics. Last year at around this time, autumn, I had reinstalled GTR2 to see what I think about it now, and how it compares after I had spend some hundred hours in AC Early Access. It was awful to drive. Once you have gotten a taste of the better, you just cannot walk back to what tastes worse. Feature-lists do not compensate for the inferior physics and feeling to drive, the AI - that I held in high esteem in GTR2, I remember - cannot compensate either. Ten years ago GTR2 was fantastic. But ten years ago there was no idea of how things could be even better. Back then I wrote a review on GTR2, and hailed it above all and everything. Well - time has moved on. And I think it is right and good and only natural that it is like this. The ISI engine and GTR2 and the likes, and Raceroom and AC, are separated by - roughly speaking - one decade. If all that would have been achieved by developers over a span of ten years and more, were visual cosmetics only - what would we think and say then, eh? OF COURSE physics and the simulation of driving itself has jumped forward in that timespan. If it had not, this would only indicate a ten-years long stagnation, both software and hardware-related. Lets be thankful that we were saved from such bad thing happening. Finally, you compare two different things here, you compare completed simulations like GTR2 with Raceroom which officially still is listed as being under developement, being in Beta, and MP even in Alpha (their own words). One can question the wisdom to release somethign that is so early that the producer since many years after release still lists it as "Beta" (to me, R3E is clearly not Beta anymore, to make that clear). But obviously with the growing demands and hardware specs available, more and more development time - and more economic risk - has been put into development of games in general, and niche titles in special. 20 years ago doing a game costed you one year or so. Today, it is a multi-years effort with much bigger crews and more money involved. MUCH more money. Like AC, R3E is more a constant work in progress, and will remain to be under constant development until when one year the studio drops it. The business has changed, everything grew, that has its price, the old ways do not work well anymore. And while I like to occasionally wallow in sentimental memories of gaming in my past 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago, I also know that almost all games older than just a couple of years I would no longer play and use anymore. Because I changed - but the games have changed, too, and usually simulations became far more competent in their aiblity to simulate the object they focus on. In racing games that means: usually a sim 10, 12 years ago cannot hold its ground - regarding simulating the driving - to titles that are modern. Yes, GSCE and GTR2 had better AI than AC had until recently. Yes, they are more feature complete than R3E. But the driving is the heart and core of racing simulations. And here, R3E and AC simply sink the overaged opposition. I even include the much-famed RBR here, which was providing a solid challenge, but as a matter of fact had cars so light that they were more difficult to drive than they are in reality. (While DIRT Rally still has a way to go in physics, it is the first rally sim ever that i stumbled over where the cars do not feel like having no weight and no mass, inf act they maybe feel too heavy now, are too difficult to get pushed into a turn....).
Immersion is where R3E scores very high on my list, and AC not so much. I have almost nothing really critical or negaitive to say about Kunos Simulazioni - only their repeatedly displayed attitude to completely underestimate the importance of immersion, as demonstrated lately by Aristotelis in his open letter, and just days ago by Stefano in his stream, being the exception. Actually I complained about the pre-1.2 AI in AC quite heavily, too, but they have invalidated the object of that criticism, and 1.3 promises to tune it even more. I think Sector3 does many things very right with R3E. So does Kunos Simulazioni with AC, both studios lead the pack, and in my appreciation by a very huge margin. But both obviously have different foci their simulations concentrate on. And so I use both.
@Skybird, we'll just agree to disagree. I've yet to find anything that will top either Race 07 or GTR2 in stock content, stock tracks, or single player content. Both are masterpieces and I'm thrilled that they still run just as well today as they did when they came out. I love R3E (its my favorite current sim) and AC/SCE are strong second place finishers, but none of the three can offer up what GTR2/Race 07 offers (strong single player content, current mods, the ability to create custom championships with no missing tracks or missing cars).
Not at all. Some things R3E does better. some things AC does better. Don'T chose between the two - pick both. You will note differences, but if you give it some time to just get beyond the first feeling of "Oh, it is not R3E, I leave it behind then ", you should then realise what a heavyweight it is. I summarised that before, and so do it in short only: AC has the more subtle and and pürobably more complex physics, the better exterior and especially interior car models. Its AI currently is mediocre but since 1.2 functional and sufficiently solid to give meaningfulness to AI-races; its sounds are a mixed bag, some are average, some are quite good, a few are - terrible (that Mercedes C190 on mind, I hate it, it drills additional holes into my ears). More online activity, more active servers, but range of tracks more limited, most people seem to prefer Spa and Nord in GT cars. Advertised features have all been delivered, but some need more polishing, more features beyond that are implemented. It is a sim under cinstant development. The car park is quite impressive I thinbk, focussing on sportscars, supersportscars, streets cars, GT cars, some oldies. I agree with those saying that physics-wise AC is the genre benchmark. R3E, to compare to AC, has the better looking "world", more tracks of more famous names, benchmark sounds in the genre, and a good AI already. The cars models are made of less polygons, and you can see that, the gap to AC in the interiors is even bigger. R3E has a stricter focus on racing cars. Driving is very reasonable and usually predictable, the physics do not seem to be as elaborated but still doing an extremely good job, providing player with a pleasant driving experience. FFB is more robust in R3E, but lacks a bit the subtle complexity of AC which had its FFB going a very long way since release. I like the R3E FFB slightly better, though. Online activity seems to be very inferior compared to AC, whenever I looked into the server lobby, i saw almost empty lists and a handful of lonely hearts here and there. Looks like a dead game, to be honest. 160 servers but all empty, 4 active races, if you are lucky on weekends it is 5 or 6, 12 player in one, 1 or 2 in the other three, and this all around the clock? AC world and race feels sober, a bit sterile. R3E world and race feels alive, and immersive.Kunos focusses more on the car for the car'S sake, on driving itself. Sector3 focusses more on the whole racing event experience and rates immersion higher than Kunos. I came to R3E especially for the SP experience. If player loves to drift-race, AC is the superior choice, drifting is somethign that I think R3E cannot do well or realistically, drifting is somethign that reveals the difference in both physics engines most obviously. Personally, I do not care to drift. But some people love to do it. However, AC physics are said to lack realism at very slow speeds - but speeds that are so slow that they usually play no big role in racing. Both sims have upcoming new content announced, cars and tracks. AC tracks mostly are laserscanned, which is nice - but should not be overestimated.
I readily admitted twice now that the older sims had more features on release, didn't I. But quantity and quality are two different things, and the quality standards of those older times were lower than they are today. Hardware also did not allow to do the ammount of calculations in the background that are possible today in rF2, AC, and R3E, not without severly hurting all other aspects of the package that need to be displayed on screen. We disagree on the ammount of importance attributed to both, quality or quantity. To me, the driving experience itself is the key object of a driving simulation, next comes the dogfighting with AI cars. Until here, I agree with Aris and Stefano. Its just that I hold immersion beyond this core thing at much higher esteem than they seem to do, judging by their comments.
what about their incompetence in creating a ui and lack of options its the killer for me. the fact they haven't overhauled the ui to allow setting to be changed in game and having many setting available only from .cfg files makes setting up the game tedious unless you like how it comes out of the box and have a "mainstream" wheel. also don't bother picking it up if you have an old system the graphics really cant be turned down enough to deal with older cards there is no "none" setting for shadows or reflections.
As Stefano just rolled his eyes over and said in his latest Stream two days ago: you have to understand that there is a community, and that what you maybe prioritize not necessarily is what the community prioritizes. A feature is important if a large part of the community thinks it is. - Most customer never play online, and even less customers care to ever visit a forum. Forums are brimming with activity from people that are above-average communicative, but represent as small minority of total customers only. The tech specs are what they are. My system is medium standard and four years old or even 5 - and I run it smooth and nice. Seein my sig - it is anything but a special rig. I agree though that the wheel setup options leave to be desired, they indeed should have enabled ALL game commands to be mappable from that menu, not just some they have decided to be important. However, that is only one minor thing that imo does not justify to condemn the whole package. I use an external wheel setup software, and am done. The style of the menus is a question of taste, like in just any other sim and game as well. I never had any problem with it. P.S. And since you called it their "incompetence" to do a UI you like - their implementation of accessing apps from within the running race/driving, is ingenious, and a first in the genre, AFAIK. Others could learn from that. As a matter of fact I like the whole menu and user interface very much.
Get it, it's a great sim, but... It has a "je ne sais quoi" that makes it kind of depressing, the replays feel as if all tracks were in Silent Hill. I used to launch it from time to time only because of the Nordschleife, but since a while ago, it`s impossible for me to drive my favourite cars in my favourite track (17-19 FPS) so now AC is dead to me.
GSCE got its 1.50 update today. It is using the first inhouse built exe based on their modified rFactor 1 source code. I guess Reiza is a proper developer now I did a vanilla test with it and it felt really good. I haven't tested any of the popular mods yet. Reiza says that there are quite a lot of changes so mods may require some updates. As said, I haven't tested any mods yet (CART Extreme, I'm looking at you). But GSCE is definitely going forward and good ol'e rFactor 1 engine is getting the treatment it deserves from Reiza boys, which are as passionate as our S3 friends! So guys and gals, R3E is awesome, so is GSCE! Both are in active developement and both devs are terrific guys. As I've said, you can't have too many racing sims on your hard drive, so support these guys if you already haven't
@The_Grunt, make sure you get Patrick's new version of Spa and Monza. He did a remarkable job on em. They're up for download at RD. I've played the beta a lot and love the Lancer cups. Fun little car to drive.
Has there been any talk of merging Formula Truck with SCE? To me it would make sense as a DLC add-on rather than a separate game that is almost identical to SCE. Anyway, I haven't driven the trucks for such a long time. I need to revisit them.