PC2 Project Cars 2 Available for Digital Pre-Order

[Skidmeister]

We are officially getting closer to the release of project Cars 2.
The digital pre orders have followed suit with the console versions and are now available for pre order on Steam.
Which version will you purchase, the Standard edition with the Japanese car pack?
Or the Deluxe Edition with the Japanese car pack and the Motorsports Pack?

 

[Skidmeister]

I ran triples (1080p) on a 970, hardly exotic hardware. Certainly pcars is less demanding than RF2 for instance. I have seen screenshots (pc2) showing tools to enter size, angle and distance of screens so I believe it has triple support.

Note: my regular sims are iracing and Assetto Corsa.

I try to keep my framerates at 100 fps minimum @ 7680 x 1440, that way when you race online and the framerate may drop in heavy traffic like at the start, I hardly even notice as it almost never dips below 60.
Will be nice if they have proper triple support this time like Asetto, or even Iracing have done already.

 

[Adam#81]

There is a video showing their in-game options for triples. It's very nice, you can specify angles between screens and even resolution for each screen. Look it up.

 

[thepharcyde]

Okay, so I've gone against my better judgement considering the fiasco of PCars and ordered PCars 2 ultimate through Steam as whilst I will be watching the reviews of the usual suspects I will still have that itch burning in my gut. The first 1:59:59 will be very thorough, so will need to get my wheel setup right prompto to allow me to jump into the game!

 

[InsaneOzzie]

At the current exchange rate PC2 at full price will cost Aussies $75.22 for the base edition, $112.84 for the Deluxe edition.

Kinda makes the deluxe edition pretty expensive for a one off spend, but I suppose all the additional content makes up for the extra financial outlay. Don't get all the hype though, it's just another race sim after all, not sure I'll take the plunge, but we will see.

I'm certainly getting bored of all this constant DLC approach to gaming that we have now. Whatever happened to releasing a polished game with everything in one package, and without the need to patch it several times after release due to glitches etc, guess I'm showing my age, but imo Devs had a better approach to product quality ten years ago than they do today.

 

[Skidmeister]

All I can say is to anyone who is so concerned about getting duped is do some research prior to starting the game. Don't wait till you load it to figure out how to setup your machine, or load the correct video drivers etc., etc., etc. Read some reviews that will be out before you fire it up and save the time. Figure out which cars and tracks are most important to you and see what you think of those first. 2 hours is not a lot of time to fully test a sim, but if you go in prepared you will have ample time to make that call. This is not PCars1, so that comparison really doesn't apply weather you liked it or hated it. My life won't be a disaster if this sim flops, but if it does most of what it promises it will be a lot of fun to race and I hope we all end up cussing each other on the track instead of disagreeing about weather it will be a hit or miss. If it's a game, if it's a sim, if it's a relatively small whim, we will either have countless hours of enjoyment with it, or quickly move on to something else. It's always fun to speculate but in the end, take it with a grain of salt and go in with a positive attitude and realistic expectations and keep it all in perspective.

 

[Kyle Pearson]

guess I'm showing my age, but imo Devs had a better approach to product quality ten years ago than they do today.

Users want more in their games, but want to spend less. When that happens, this is what you get...

 

[Eric Rowland]

I think what bothers me as a hardcore simmer is that a lot of these developers want their game to be all things to all people and as a result the game ends up being too compromised in too many ways. I am very much looking forwards to PCars 2...a lot of my favorite cars and a lot of my favorite tracks and that's ok with me.

 

[Andy_J]

Users want more in their games, but want to spend less. When that happens, this is what you get...

The thing is though that we are not spending less, we are spending ever increasing amounts for games that are no better in quality terms than their ancestors. The might look and feel better but that's down to technology. In the old days of gaming a good sim had quality written all over it. A big box, a big manual and a dedicated team of PC enthusiasts just concentrating on the one platform in most cases. They were the best of days in the PC gaming history of the world in my opinion. And remember, it is my opinion and I miss those days. And strangely enough I also miss those long hours of trying to get config.sys to be more efficient just to get a game working. Sad I know.

 

[Kyle Pearson]

The thing is though that we are not spending less, we are spending ever increasing amounts for games that are no better in quality terms than their ancestors.

We are in terms of the relation to time spent in development and cost of titles. The titles in general are getting more and more complex (more use cases, more complexity). More and more time is being spent on development but the game pricing is not significantly increasing. That's mainly because the market won't support it so most developers then have to go after total sales to help recoup (which has them targeting the console market). I'm not suggesting all this with PC2, but just in general.

However, probably not a discussion for this thread.

 

[InsaneOzzie]

Users want more in their games, but want to spend less. When that happens, this is what you get...

But thats the problem, we're not getting more IMO, GTR2 had more than any current game on the market at release, weather, day/night, a good field of cars and tracks, quality flag system and lets not forget GTR2 was the pinnacle of gaming tech in it's day, and took as many development hours to build as todays modern titles.

And as far as the tech goes, the current devs have a plethora of advanced tech on hand to produce their products. In my opinion gaming tech has exploded in recent years, but the quality of some titles has only improved marginally, and we receive less content on release than we did 10 to 15 yrs ago, agreed the initial financial outlay hasn't grown that much but the advent of DLC has seen the overall outlay grow significantly.

I'll admit PC2 seems to of taken a slightly retro approach to the games release with a horde of content and a limit to the DLC that is in the pipeline, which is great to see. I only hope it resets the benchmark for all devs, and we see an improvement in release content for future titles.

 

[Kyle Pearson]

and took as many development hours to build as todays modern titles.

Unless you were working for Blimey at that time, that's a bold statement.

 

[Rob Every]

Spot on Andy, I agree whole heartedly with you there.

The new push on DLC has made publishers release 70% of a game at the same price as what you bought years ago, and we as players are 100% to blame.

AS if we did not start buying it, it would have died, but they cannot believe their luck, they can make 70 quid out of a 30 quid game, and then release a new version in 2 years that is 80% of the old game repackaged and with some new cars.

Let's face it Polyphony have been doing it for decades, without the DLC I will say a good thing for them.

My peak was Rfactor, that for me was sim-gaming nirvana, every single type of racing from rallycross, stock cars, F1, endurance, drifting. That game for me was the absolute peak of sim-gaming.

You could play it with a 50 quid wheel. Now you need VR, 3 screens, bespoke wheels and pedals to be a sim gamer! I am over exaggerating obviously, but you get what I mean.

I will always remember downloading GP 79, F1 91, Enduracers, Historix and a few more mods and simply scrolling through the cars going "wow".

I rarely do that with any modern sim games

 

[Skidmeister]

Spot on Andy, I agree whole heartedly with you there.

The new push on DLC has made publishers release 70% of a game at the same price as what you bought years ago, and we as players are 100% to blame.

AS if we did not start buying it, it would have died, but they cannot believe their luck, they can make 70 quid out of a 30 quid game, and then release a new version in 2 years that is 80% of the old game repackaged and with some new cars.

Let's face it Polyphony have been doing it for decades, without the DLC I will say a good thing for them.

My peak was Rfactor, that for me was sim-gaming nirvana, every single type of racing from rallycross, stock cars, F1, endurance, drifting. That game for me was the absolute peak of sim-gaming.

You could play it with a 50 quid wheel. Now you need VR, 3 screens, bespoke wheels and pedals to be a sim gamer! I am over exaggerating obviously, but you get what I mean.

I will always remember downloading GP 79, F1 91, Enduracers, Historix and a few more mods and simply scrolling through the cars going "wow".

I rarely do that with any modern sim games

When I started racing you could buy racing gas for 60 cents a gallon and we thought that was outrageous, now it's almost ten times that much. While having enjoyed many mods in the end I would rather pay for DLC than get a free mod. I raced GPL for years and when they started to add tracks and graphics improvements we were all for it and couldn't get enough. Then in natural progression the car mods came to. Suddenly we saw many guys that were perpetually at the bottom of GPL rank breaking Alien world records that were long standing and honest efforts based on skill. That ruined it for me and I realized I was no longer racing apples to apples and left that sim behind forever. I highly admire the skills of these modders and applaud the efforts they put in for free, but honestly I'd rather pay the devs for content, give these modders a job, and in the end have a game with a level playing field, not a bunch of kids tweaking physics to help them win, or a bunch of cars where the physics are guessed at and not in line with the rest of the sim. But that's just my opinion, there really is no free lunch so I don't mind paying for quality content.

 

[Rob Every]

" I would rather pay for DLC than get a free mod"

I simply do not understand that comment. You cannot "try" DLC, you have to buy it then hope that you can refund it if you don't like it, you can try a mod and uninstall it in seconds.

I get that DLC is more likely to be better put together and work perfectly with the game, but not all of it is perfect. Some of the cars Kunos have released in AC have been woefully poor, while in the same pack one or two are awesome.

Not sure how that happens, probably BETA testing and setups that work for a few but not all of the testers are used instead of universally good ones!!

 

[Kyle Pearson]

My peak was Rfactor, that for me was sim-gaming nirvana, every single type of racing from rallycross, stock cars, F1, endurance, drifting. That game for me was the absolute peak of sim-gaming.

I saw it much differently. I thought rFactor was a sham from a product perspective. It launched with only a handful of cars and tracks, and then expected the community to fill in the gaps.

Don't get me wrong, the isiMotor engine was fantastic but the rFactor release was just terrible. Granted, the community eventually responded by porting over older SCGT, GTR and F1 2000 mods but even most of those were iffy as far as quality. There were a handful of quality mods for rFactor but there majority was junk, along with the hundreds of announced mods that never materialized (hence, racesimcentral).

I'm all for DLC if it's quality and allows the developers to continue to release patches and updates to an existing platform. At the end of the day, the developers need to get paid for their work. If there is no more money coming in on a title, the desire to continue to put more work into it is going to be diminished without returns.

 

[Rob Every]

Interesting.

Before then I was playing Race 07 mainly and older GTR and GT Legends titles, that were good but lacking in a bit of content.

I found RF utterly refreshing in that I came to it a bit later on when there was plenty of stuff around you could drop in and the game could be whatever you wanted it to be.

Agreed the basic package you got with a purchase was below par, but that was fine for me as I already knew stuff I wanted to download.

Simply put, I found the chance for me to buy a basic core game that I could plug literally anything into far more of a good package than a one size fits all normal game.

Obviously the mods were free which helps and probably explains my lack of enthusiasm for paid DLC!!!

 

[Skidmeister]

" I would rather pay for DLC than get a free mod"

I simply do not understand that comment. You cannot "try" DLC, you have to buy it then hope that you can refund it if you don't like it, you can try a mod and uninstall it in seconds.

Oh contraire mon faire, last year I mostly raced here and used R3E. They actually let you demo their DLC content for a limited time before buying, I think a great policy if you are on the fence about something. I'd much rather see this as at least the physics are "not adjustable" and in line with the rest of the cars the dev produced.

I get that DLC is more likely to be better put together and work perfectly with the game, but not all of it is perfect. Some of the cars Kunos have released in AC have been woefully poor, while in the same pack one or two are awesome.

Not sure how that happens, probably BETA testing and setups that work for a few but not all of the testers are used instead of universally good ones!!

And yet it seems almost everyone sings praises for AC, even though it too was released with very little content. Woefully little in comparison to Project Cars 2, so I say lets at least applaud them for that. I am just saying I'd rather pay for good content then get something for free that will eventually ruin a sim. Imagine practicing for a big race, working your craft till you achieve you best results. Only to see someone beat you and not being able to know if there is more left in the time than you had, or that someone simply adjusted their physics to beat yours. Or you are the winner and everyone wonders why you suddenly are running so good, is it practice or simply code adjustment, it takes away from the achievement. This is why they have tech inspections at every real race, and as a former tech inspector I can say we caught a lot of guys pushing the boundries of the rules every week, and several cars needed to be adjusted before passing tech inspections. IMO opening up the code for self interpretation invites cheat coders to destroy a sim that otherwise would be a lot of fun. And this is not taking anything away from some of the excellent modders, these guys are so good they should be paid for the countless hours they spend doing their work. I have been sim racing since Geoff Crammonds World Circuit was released and It has been my experience that open source code ruins sims for everyone. I'll gladly pay people to do work on my house I don't know how to do or want to do, so why should this be any different. We just need to work with the devs to let them know what content we want, and what is a reasonable price to pay for it.

 

[Kurupt CDN]

I simply do not understand that comment. You cannot "try" DLC, you have to buy it then hope that you can refund it if you don't like it, you can try a mod and uninstall it in seconds.

If every sim had a test before you buy like Raceroom does we wouldnt have to worry about these issues.
Personally I much prefer official dlc over mods but usually wait for reviews before I buy it.

 

[Rob Every]

I think the Raceroom model is very good, Automobil thingy had a similar thing a few years ago aswell I think.

The issues there with Raceroom are that it is getting a bit like Iracing, in that the costs are quite high if you want a lot of content!!

But yes, I usually prefer DLC, but really a good mod can be almost as good, better I fact.

 

[Kurupt CDN]

I am probably just gonna pre-order the standard edition with Japanese pack.....does anyone know if I'll be able to get ahold of any dlc from the deluxe version down the road? Being a touring car fan I really want the Opel Astra TCR car