PC1 Hour and a Half of Project CARS

[William Marsh]

To celebrate the release of Project CARS, I did a live stream of the game on my Twitch.tv Channel. For those who missed it, the video is now available on YouTube. In the video, I take a look at the Career mode, as well as do a couple single races to take a look at some of the features in Project CARS. The video is over an hour and a half, so I recommend a good bag of popcorn.

Watch the video here: http://www.racedepartment.com/media/videos/an-hour-and-a-half-of-project-cars.9175/

Notes:

• I will say that Project CARS, in my opinion does beat out Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport. It’s a more engaging experience, more fleshed out for racing (full race weekends, detailed setups, etc). They even are above titles such as Assetto Corsa, WHEN IT COMES TO SIMULATING A RACE EXPERIENCE (NOT IN TERMS OF PHYSICS).
• AI needs work. That’s a fact. They are commonly over-aggressive and will act more like “Bumper Car Simulator: 2015″ than a true racing title. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.
• There isn’t true Multi-Class Racing yet: I tried two “Multi-Class” events, looking for a Le Mans style field. If I chose a Prototype, I would always be matched with other Prototypes (See 50:30 in the video). I don’t know about you, but it seems pretty imbalanced matching an Audi R18 against a Radical SR3…
  I also tried GT3 in a multi-class event, and I was matched up with Trans-Am, Group 5, Group 4, and GT4 (See the 1 hour mark in the video)
• Day to Night is AMAZING in this game. In my preview I had an issue with Le Mans not getting dark, but I’m happy to see it’s fixed. Le Mans at night in the rain… That makes PCARS a horror game xD. It’s a thrill to drive, and it gets the blood pumping.
• I still would not say the physics/ffb are of a sim level. They are solid “SimCade”, but not sim. I had some erratic moments in the physics as well, so they do need some work.

 

[Brandon Wright]

When people complain about the AI it makes me wonder how aggressive that person is being as well. Are the AI dive-bombing you and attacking at every turn? Are they closing the door on you? Are they braking mid corner for no apparent reason? How are you driving in relation to them? This AI is very different and unpredictable at times.

I usually wonder the same thing, especially when so many other people are having good experiences with the AI. There's a similar issue in R3E, the AI will often ram you from behind when you go too slow but I use that as a sign that I should be able to take that turn much faster. Once I figure out how to get through that turn faster, suddenly I stop getting rear-ended by the AI drivers. So that's more of a human driver problem than an AI problem, and ends up being a good learning tool. I presume the situation is similar with pCars, if you do something strange that the AI don't expect you to do then you're probably going to get hit (just like you would by a human driver).

 

[William Marsh]

When people complain about the AI it makes me wonder how aggressive that person is being as well. Are the AI dive-bombing you and attacking at every turn? Are they closing the door on you? Are they braking mid corner for no apparent reason? How are you driving in relation to them? This AI is very different and unpredictable at times.

Well two examples that come to mind from my experience are the AI braking at times when the should not. For example, I had the AI slam on the brakes at the top of Eau Rouge with the Lotus 49 (no cars in front to prompt that behavior).

Another one is in the video I posted. In the 2nd Watkins Glen race, a guy was hard on the brakes at the top of the Esses. He wasn't in danger of hitting the wall, he just randomly went on the brakes. I was in his draft and I tried to dodge, but didn't have enough time.

 

[Chris Partridge]

Here's my definition of a sim. Where for any given car and track, a near 1:1 correlation of telemetry data is achieved with a real life comparable car and track. There is a fantastic blog on this with rFactor software here:

https://drracing.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/how-close-is-close-enough/#comment-69

A definition of sim varies with whoever you ask - but for me numbers and raw comparable data doesn’t lie.

 

[Connor Caple]

The AI in this game is a disaster. You'd better hope you qualify ahead of all of em and get one heck of a start.

I find they're quite 'assertive' about taking their racing line, even if you have your nose in front going into the corner. It makes overtaking interesting, but I'm still enjoying it.