Game is available and playable on Steam as of a couple hours ago. Been online just now with several people from MGI and others who purchased early.
Early Observations from someone who had high hopes for a good game.
- Having to use steering wheel to navigate menus is annoying as hell
- No way to force borderless windowed mode, even with third party apps (a huge negative for me as a Portrait/Landscape/Portrait setup for a 73" 'curved' display)
- Multiplayer menus are pretty awful. I joined the one lobby open and just sat and sat. Eventually the ongoing race ended and i got a countdown to the next race. Would be nice to spectate, or at least see an indication of how long the wait for the next race is
- This one is REALLY annoying -- all but 5 tracks are "locked" until you increase your "Speed Rating" at the start of the game.
- Nobody is going to be mistaking screenshots from this game for the real thing. They're not "bad" they're just clearly not intended to be photo-realistic in the way most sims strive to be, even at max settings on a GTX1080 ROG STRIX GPU.
- Multiplayer was a mess driving with people who had controllers and were swerving all over the place. Was having fun looping Watkins Glen until I encountered people who couldn't get through turn 7 without swerving from one edge of the grass to the other because they were on a gamepad.
- Steering wheel (Thrustmaster TX with Ferrari 458 Challenge Wheel and T500 pedals) is completely lifeless at the default settings. I had more life in the steering 20 years ago when I was playing INDYCAR Racing II on a Thrustmaster T2 wheel!
Really disappointing so far. I took the leap of faith because MGI has made solid games in the past, and even bought all of the DLC but right now I feel like it was a waste.
NASCAR Heat (original) could feel quite realistic, or it could be an arcade game. This one just feels like an arcade game, at least in multiplayer!
This game actually feels worse than the previous "NASCAR The Game" titles, which I have owned and spent time playing all of.
I also have spent time playing the NASCAR DLC for Forza 6 and honestly would tell someone to get that over this if they wanted a decent NASCAR feel.
The one bit of faith I still have is that MGI has always been incredible with patches and feedback. They were still releasing patches for NASCAR Heat (original) a few years ago to help modders, etc. which is unheard of for a nearly 16 year old game. I don't want to be all negative without any constructive criticism, so stick with me here.
The graphics are what they are, and a patch won't change that. Perhaps some third-party tweaks with ReShade/SweetFX will help things down the road if people are interested enough to develop them. It's clear the focus was on other aspects than overhauling the graphics from the NTG series of games. With that said, the car models and textures are well done and should look good on a wide range of PC's with varying system specs, so credit to MGI on that.
Some sort of wheel calibration has to be added. I was shocked at how little I could do to customize my wheel. Can't change which buttons do things like change the HUD and only have a few sliders for Degrees of Rotation, FFB and Sensitivity to experiment with to try and get some life in the wheel when driving. Right now, there is no sense of connection with the road at all.
Instead of pulling the Degrees of Rotation from my wheel's profiler, offer me a chance to calibrate the axis (turn left, turn right to full lock then repeat at say 90 degrees left and right) and show me that you are using the full resolution of the wheel.
Multiplayer hosting should allow the host to require a steering wheel. Races just will not go well when you're mixing folks on gamepads with people racing with a wheel and pedals. There is no question, there are some VERY good drivers who play with gamepads but give the host the option to require things like a steering wheel. Even better if DMR/MGI can take it one step further and allow us to be more granular with the rules, as well, to restrict things like driver aids and force a cockpit view.
The lack of a dedicated server option for multiplayer could be a downfall for online racing. I have a server where I could, and would, host a constant server looping through the tracks unattended. Having users "host" races from their own connections can be a disaster. Was really hoping we'd see dedicated hosts in the lobbies, plus the ability to see things like ping, geographic location, etc.
Please accept this criticism as constructive, because my goal is not to destroy your sales. The product can be improved if the developers don't take the approach of other recently released "simulators" where what you bought is what you've got and don't expect any improvements.
If anyone has suggestions on how I can modify settings to correct some of my complaints, please share them!
