Rate The Sims: Community Edition | Assetto Corsa Competizione

[Paul Jeffrey]

We are looking to crown the 'RaceDepartment Community Favourite' racing game - get your votes in now for our next game on the list... Assetto Corsa Competizione!

Our dear RaceDepartment community. You folks are the most mighty fans of sim racing, often displaying an immense amount of understanding and depth of knowledge when it comes to our favourite hobby.

With sim racing and eSports in such a wonderful boom period of late. Gamers looking to have some fun with their virtual racing machines have never before had such a wide and robust variety of software to enjoy.

Now occasionally I've been in a position to rate new racing titles that have come my way, and almost every time I've received a wide variety of folks agreeing, or strongly disagreeing with my own opinions.

Opinions are great, but sometimes the opinion of one person, with their own likes and dislikes taken into account, can often give a bit of a skewed picture (intentional or not) to the greater cause in which said person is trying to explain.

As such, rather than doing one myself, and in the spirit of engaging some interesting community discussion, I thought it could be fun to let our own community rate each of the key sim racing / racing games available today.

As always with these things, please do try and respect each other and their opinions, and let's try to see if we can give a fun, but fair shake of the stick to each of the games included in this poll.

For transparency, I'm going to be featuring the following racing games over the next weeks:

• Assetto Corsa
• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Automobilista (AMS)
• DiRT 2.0
• F1 2019
• GT Sport
• GRID
• iRacing
• NASCAR Heat 4
• PCARS 2
• RaceRoom Racing Experience
• rFactor 2
• WRC 8

I'm going to launch the article each Monday evening, and keep the poll running for a full week until the next new article is pushed live. So get your votes in quick!

Once I've completed the full list of games, I'll publish a final results feature, and we can award the winning developer the lofty title of 'RaceDepartment Community Favourite'!

Have fun, stay sensible and let the voting commence!

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[PickABetterUsername01]

Thank you @Kafir for explaining how we should vote, also interesting to know who is delusional and what is fine, we highly value your opinion on what is correct and what is not. Again thank you, that post should be a sticky. Some of us might feel a little bad about them self since we are delusional, insane or ridiculous, but the truth had to be told, not every one is courageous enough on the internet to tell it how it is, very refreshing.

You are welcome.

 

[Edison5do]

I Love this Sim, I ditched 3 in favor of 1 screen to play with better eye candy. Sure it has flaws, the Multiplayer (which I barely touched in 80+ hours) is not perfect, but in what it does, it is better than the rest.

 

[BP]

It's a 6 for me, 6.5 If they gave half points. Has the potential to be as high as a 9, but couple things hold it back in my eyes.

The FFB and physics feel very believable (especially after the new tyre model they added recently), some of the best I've felt in fact, as it very well should be considering it's only one car class they're focusing on...although in fairness, I'd imagine if a physics engine and tyre model is truly worth its weight in gold, then it shouldn't matter how many types of cars are implemented, as long as they take time to do it right. It's definitely the best single series sim on the market, but I wouldn't say it definitely has the best feeling GT3 cars of all, as some of RF2's recent offerings are extremely good as well...plus RF2 has the mod factor, so there's that.

The main problem to me is that it still doesn't feel finished...don't understand why this has become the norm. VR and Triples implementation is shaky at best, the multiplayer system leaves me wanting compared to what it was built up as before release, and career mode...well...what career mode? Several other issues that I won't go into...but overall I think it needed at least another 6 months in EA before giving the green light for launch. Last version I played was 1.0.7 for full disclosure.

EDIT: Why can't we rate ETS2 in the future?

Agreed, as the poll does say "rate the sim" and ATS has historically near double the active players of AC1. That's nothing compared to ETS2 numbers, which are much higher than all the racing sims combined. Maybe it wouldn't be a fair fight if it was in the poll?

 

[Lokopixo]

Near perfect, but being an AC simracer, I miss varied content and mods, but eh, that's normal since it's a Blancpain-focused sim.
I just hope AC2 is in Kuno's mind.
(not soon for sure)

 

[The Flying Hun]

Thanks for cheering me up

I cheer you up. You can run VR well in ACC with lower specs like mine:

i7 8700K 6x3.7 GHz, Asus ROG Strix Z370-F, 32 GB RAM 3000, Asus Strix GTX-1080TI OC (430.86), SSD Samsung 960 Evo 250 GB, HD WD Black 2TB, PSU BeQuiet! Dark Power P11 750W, CPU fan Noctua NH-D 15S, monitor 1920x1080, Fanatec CSL Elite for PS4&PC, Fanatec CSP v3, Oculus Rift

Smooth frames with all cars on track and weather on. You can use even more expensive specs of course, but they are not essential from here on. My options are at moderate and high levels, I do not feel that I miss out something there. The latest of the latest and the most expensive of the expensive hardware is not needed - but still is "just good enough" for some people nevertheless.

 

[Momperface]

drives great and prob the best feeling gt cars about, but as a game it's awful and one of the worst about and a completely unfinished buggy mess with a terrible career mode and generic boring multiplayer

4/10

 

[eg01st]

Thank you @Kafir for explaining how we should vote, also interesting to know who is delusional and what is fine, we highly value your opinion on what is correct and what is not. Again thank you, that post should be a sticky. Some of us might feel a little bad about them self since we are delusional, insane or ridiculous, but the truth had to be told, not every one is courageous enough on the internet to tell it how it is, very refreshing.

If this is sarcasm, then you are very skilled. A solid 10.

 

[hotak]

I cheer you up. You can run VR well in ACC with lower specs like mine:

i7 8700K 6x3.7 GHz, Asus ROG Strix Z370-F, 32 GB RAM 3000, Asus Strix GTX-1080TI OC (430.86), SSD Samsung 960 Evo 250 GB, HD WD Black 2TB, PSU BeQuiet! Dark Power P11 750W, CPU fan Noctua NH-D 15S, monitor 1920x1080, Fanatec CSL Elite for PS4&PC, Fanatec CSP v3, Oculus Rift

Smooth frames with all cars on track and weather on. You can use even more expensive specs of course, but they are not essential from here on. My options are at moderate and high levels, I do not feel that I miss out something there. The latest of the latest and the most expensive of the expensive hardware is not needed - but still is "just good enough" for some people nevertheless.

Those specs are already quite good, i got an AMD R5 2600X and an nVidia 980Ti and it doesn't run as smooth in VR as pCars2 or rFactor2 even on min settings

 

[Leynad777]

I cheer you up. You can run VR well in ACC with lower specs like mine:

i7 8700K 6x3.7 GHz, Asus ROG Strix Z370-F, 32 GB RAM 3000, Asus Strix GTX-1080TI OC (430.86), SSD Samsung 960 Evo 250 GB, HD WD Black 2TB, PSU BeQuiet! Dark Power P11 750W, CPU fan Noctua NH-D 15S, monitor 1920x1080, Fanatec CSL Elite for PS4&PC, Fanatec CSP v3, Oculus Rift

Smooth frames with all cars on track and weather on. You can use even more expensive specs of course, but they are not essential from here on. My options are at moderate and high levels, I do not feel that I miss out something there. The latest of the latest and the most expensive of the expensive hardware is not needed - but still is "just good enough" for some people nevertheless.

I only read about satisfied VR-users when they are using the Oculus Rift, so probably the Oculus-implementation is better optimized compare to SteamVR. I switched my former 1080 against a 2080 and couldn't see any improvement in ACC with my Odyssey at that time, so the optimization of this title is really bad and framerates are worse today than with 0.7.2 in Early Access. There are enough titles like Kartkraft and non-racing VR-titles based on UE4 that proof UE4 and VR isn't an issue.

Also lowering graphics-settings not improving framerates enough other than pixel-density and mirror-quality, which i find a bit odd.

 

[David Wright]

Agreed, as the poll does say "rate the sim" and ATS has historically near double the active players of AC1. That's nothing compared to ETS2 numbers, which are much higher than all the racing sims combined. Maybe it wouldn't be a fair fight if it was in the poll?

Although the poll is claimed to be about the community favourite - I have no idea how RD intend to determine this. In theory you should only vote if you own the game. What if there is a game which just 10 people own but they all love it and vote it 10/10. Just because it has the highest score doesn't make it the most popular game. Perhaps the game with the most votes even if they are low scores should be crowned the communities favourite game. Or perhaps we could just look at steamcharts or steamdb and save a lot of time.

 

[guidofoc]

To me the biggest flaw of ACC is not technical. It's very simple: you cannot make a single-series e-sports title and then do no e-sports events. Yes the SRO series, there was that. One single thing that was only partially on-line, had like 1 event per month and now is over. Stop. The current Special events are all single player stuff whose results do not end up into a big permanent leaderboard. So, the rating system is just theoretically useful for "matchmaking" but ends up being incomplete as it does not produce a leaderboard. As I repeated I think a million times on the official forum, having a rating system is just half the job done if there is no 'reason' for racing. In AC, Sim Racing System showed that there was a way to do things that worked fairly well. The RSR leaderboards, also, were a great incentive to drive faster. You need to have rating + esports events/leaderboards/mini-leagues etc to make the thing work. It doesn't need to be iRacing but there must be something.

 

[randomcallsign]

Although the poll is claimed to be about the community favourite - I have no idea how RD intend to determine this. In theory you should only vote if you own the game. What if there is a game which just 10 people own but they all love it and vote it 10/10. Just because it has the highest score doesn't make it the most popular game. Perhaps the game with the most votes even if they are low scores should be crowned the communities favourite game. Or perhaps we could just look at steamcharts or steamdb and save a lot of time.

Maybe they are shorting it from "racing sim". However, Id like to see the poll as a bonus, because it is indeed a very popular title.

 

[PickABetterUsername01]

To me the biggest flaw of ACC is not technical. It's very simple: you cannot make a single-series e-sports title and then do no e-sports events. Yes the SRO series, there was that. One single thing that was only partially on-line, had like 1 event per month and now is over. Stop. The current Special events are all single player stuff whose results do not end up into a big permanent leaderboard. As I repeated I think a million times on the official forum, having a great rating system is just half the job done if there is no 'reason' for racing. In AC, Sim Racing System showed that there was a way to do things that worked fairly well. The RSR leaderboards, also, were a great incentive to drive faster. You need to have rating + esports events/leaderboards/mini-leagues etc to make the thing work. It doesn't need to be iRacing but there must be something.

Esports is pointless if there's barely a community. First they need to fix the game, then, once more people is playing and there's actual competition inside the game(with a redesigned multiplayer structure), you can start focusing on esports.

 

[Jason Mullin]

All the 9 or 10 are delusional. A 9 or 10 game is a near perfect product, and anyone saying ACC is near perfect is insane or are just voting for those numbers to artificially improve the score. I would understand an 8 for someone that really likes ACC, but beyond that it's ridiculous for a product that isn't even finished. I would say the same for a score of 1~2, which is for games beyond broken, so anything between 3~8 is somewhat fine.

I’m an old guy and don’t know how many sims I have yet to see before my time comes.
You young guys may have 40+ more years of sim evolution awaiting you. So my vote stands for 2019 Kunos got 90% of what I want inside this box.
I can’t vote when I’m dead so back off and let me have my 9.
Good day.

 

[guidofoc]

Esports is pointless if there's barely a community. First they need to fix the game, then, once more people is playing and there's actual competition inside the game(with a redesigned multiplayer structure), you can start focusing on esports.

?? Esports means exactly that they need to redesign multiplayer.

 

[PickABetterUsername01]

?? Esports means exactly that they need to redesigning multiplayer.

What you mean? Esports is high level competition with the best players in a game, it's a show for people to watch. Our everyday multiplayer matches/races is a different thing, a complete different experience as well. I don't know if you thought multiplayer is the same as esport.

Esport is the result of game bringing a lot of competition within it's own multiplayer, should not be the other way around(which is what they tried to do with ACC), nobody is going to care about esport if there's barely any decent race within the game itself.

 

[Xenozoid]

e3sport is a simulation of money with money,in that ,it may be a win but not for everyone..
my 2 cents soon they will be racing with dlc vs CO2 racing,get that when you need to fly to do the same as the pro...lol if is is not a simulation bring it micro transaction with drm,and lets go F1

 

[Zoltan76]

https://www.facebook.com/305504559475869/posts/3707332049293086/?substory_index=0&sfnsn=mo

 

[Deleted member 197115]

ACC has excellent VR for me, I am sorry, you are experiencing something different. UE4 is demanding in VR, but it also look amazing.

#@45fps

 

[nangu]

6 for me.

+ Very good physics (in my opinion of course)
+ Decent FFB
+ Sound is very good.
+ Very nice looking in monitor mode
+ Focus only on one series. GT4 as a pre series would be great tough.

+/- AI is sometimes frustrating and infuriating
+/- The SA rating system is bad calibrated in single player because the somekind flawed AI
+/- UE4 choice. I understand why it was choosen and seemed a good call at first, but it proven to be very hard on performance in a genre where performance is a must.
+/- VR is playable on my system, but the image quality is not good at all, too blurry.

- It's unfinished in a lot of aspects a simracing title needs to be ok from the start
- Career mode is a joke. If you made a one series game, career needs to be made right.
- AI difficulty is not balanced on all tracks in championship mode.
- I expected a better MP structure, not the same lobby thing as before.
- Still has bugs and quality of life problems a title in released state should not have.
- Performance optimization in general, and VR in particular.
- Proper triple screen support is a must in a simracing game.