Hi guys, thought I would post my thoughts on Project Cars 2 here seeing as this one of the few places on console running anything at present. I do go on a bit so you’ll have to forgive me lol
I installed pCars 2 the other night after I had finished an Assetto session, I left it doing its business overnight. I am not intending to do anything setup wise or get into it too much until that next patch as it will probably change a lot and could negate any work put in beforehand. Anyway, I gave it a first run out with just enough time for a quick 30 minutes in the Corvette at the Ring so I could do a very direct comparison with Assetto where I have been racing that combo for our Sunday F1 Support Series. I was actually reasonably pleasantly surprised with pCars. Graphically I think it is probably a little better than Assetto in so far as it has a bit more atmosphere I think. It felt a bit more real mainly I think because you can set the date so I was able to run it as if there now and the colours felt very Autumnal as opposed to Assetto’s very clear and bright look. It’s clearly not very well optimised though and a few places around the circuit got a bit sluggish even with just my car on track in a practice session. Admittedly the Ring is probably very resource hungry with so much detail having to be loaded into memory but I do hope the patch alleviates that a little. It made little corrections of the car at certain points of the circuit quite difficult, far more so than Assetto. If anybody here has any tips for helping to improve this please let me know.
One thing that was very apparent to me though was the lack of a real sense of speed. Even when flat out down the long straights I never really got that feeling of speed. It reminded me a bit of Forza in that respect. I'll have to test other cars and tracks to get a true picture and the open wheelers may provide a better sense of it but at the moment that's something that is a little disappointing. Assetto in the same car and track is much better in that respect and you can almost feel the wind rushing by the car.
For me based on that little test Assetto is superior in FFB, Sound and handling. The FFB in pCars 2 is pretty good and admittedly I only tweaked it a little as it was too strong around centre on default but it just felt to me more gritty and clumpy with some feedback coming hard rather than having any great transition. Hard to explain in words but with Assetto its very smooth in how the FFB is transmitted and gives a better sense of the cars attitude and makes little corrections easier to make. Assetto has just half a dozen settings and I've rarely had to adjust them since the first time other than when an update comes. It just works perfectly for every car. I'll play around with the pCars FFB to see how much I can improve that affect.
One really clear as day thing for me is the lack of road feel in pCars 2, it's kind of glass like and a bit detached from the road as a result until you get to a bend or turn where the side forces start to come in. In Assetto (and F1 2017 for that matter) you can feel the road beneath the wheels and as a result there is a much more dynamic feel about the whole thing. I went into the settings and started tweaking things to try to find something that felt more in line with what I wanted and went through the various 'flavours' and also tweaked the settings beneath those flavours that are meant to improve the road feel but I just couldn’t get anything that worked for me. Their attempts to simplify the FFB settings are welcomed but I do feel that maybe the merging of certain things under the ‘Tone’ setting (Mz and Fy) have not quite worked and means you now have a compromise situation. That being said I am still in the early days of playing around with it so have not given up on finding something that will give me what I want and something that comes close to what Assetto gives so easily.
One thing that did frustrate me immensely was that after playing around with the settings and then starting a new testing session when I went back out on track everything felt very light. At first I thought I had turned everything down too much but it quickly became apparent that my old nemesis had reared it’s head very early in my pCars 2 experience.. complete loss of FFB. Now I had heard that you can recover the FFB much easier than in the previous game where it required a reboot of the wheel (sometimes more than once) but I couldn’t find any way to get it back and had to turn the power to the wheel off a couple of times before the FFB came back. Now this was a pCars 1 problem that only used to surface online so to discover so early on that they have ‘improved’ this bug to now hit offline as well was not something that thrilled me!!
Sound was more immersive in Assetto, it had more depth and vibrancy and was more how I expect it to be in the cockpit of the car. It may grow on me the more I race it but first impressions are pCars is still pretty good but it’s not quite there in comparison to the Kunos game.
The interface of pCars 2 knocks Assetto for 6, far superior and a massive improvement over pCars 1 with most everything now adjustable from within the race session. It used to bug the hell out of me how you had to back out of a session every time you wanted to tweak something like the FFB, graphics, etc. Definitely hats off to them for listening to what so many had been saying.
Now onto something that I found really crazy. The Nordschleife…. If anyone has had any time on track here I would welcome your feedback on it as what I discovered shocked and really disappointed me. I went to a ‘Private Testing Session’ at the Nordschliefe to do another comparison run with Assetto but was confused when I wanted to get my car back to the pits as the ‘Return to pits’ option was not available.. It was there when I tested Monza so I found it very odd. The only way to go straight to the pit garage was to use the ‘Restart’ option which of course meant a complete start from scratch of the session losing the previous lap times information, etc. I carried on and decided to come to the pits the old fashioned way by driving to them only to find the pit entrance blocked by those hard white tyres!! Huh!! I was confused. In the end I had to abandon the session and decided to have a proper race session instead so off back to the menu’s I went. More confusion then began… the option to set a practice and quali session was locked and only ‘Race’ was available.. strange I thought. I went to the preset races section, and tried to set something that allowed me to race the Schliefe but nothing enabled that. Removed all defaults tried selecting various cars but still no joy, only a race on it’s own could be set. So a bit baffled I went for it anyway and just had the game start me from a random position on the grid. Had some fun with the AI over the first couple of laps but then picked up some damage trying to squeeze past a couple of AI in the last sector of the lap so needed to come into the pits…. Therein lies the problem.. the hard, white tyres were still there blocking the pit entrance!! WTF!! So it seems in their infinite wisdom they have taken away the option to do anything meaningful at probably the best and most iconic track on their roster. I am totally bemused!!
Have I missed something as I can’t find anything on the forums mentioning this. Is there some hidden pathway to the pits that I have not unlocked, do I need to stand on my head with my pants around my ankles before the way into the pit lane or garage is revealed to me as I am sure they wouldn’t really handicap this track in such a ridiculous fashion :/ If they have then it’s totally bonkers especially seeing as the track was there in full in pCars 1.
Time will tell whether they can reclaim any of the ground lost over the release of this game but with SimBins GTR3 due for release possibly around the end of Q1 2018 they may have missed their chance to push themselves to the fore of the sim genre for console. Right now I am not sure where they fall amongst the current batch of racing titles but I am still hopeful that once the patch hits that it will make enough improvements to get things back on track and bring people back to the game and start racing it in the way in which it should have been raced from the start.
There I’m done lol
