PC2 Rate the Sims: Community Edition | Project CARS 2

[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... Project CARS 2!

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
• Wreckfest

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!

 

[aka2k]

Much better than PCars 1, but it's just okay at the best.

 

[nangu]

I bought Pcars2 on discount after Reiza announced they will be releasing AMS2 on the madness engine.

I was exceptical with this franchise because all the marketing fuss around PC1 which ended delivering a full of bugs game.

After some testing and FFB tweaking, I can say this game has several areas on which it's very good, and others which don't, but at the end I enjoyed it. It's a game on which you can get some fun driving a car. I don't know if the physics are a mathematical representation of reality or not, but some cars feels very good.

+ The best VR experience I ever had in a racing game.
+ Graphics are very good, tracks are alive, track atmosphere is well done.
+ Dynamic track, weather.
+ Career gameplay is good

+/- FFB needs tweaks, and even with tweaks in some cars it feels way off
+/- Some cars feels really good, some cars feels really bad.
+/- AI is good on some track/car combos, but always feels as if it's affraid to make the minimal scratch to the player. Drives too erratic also.

- Even if you select Authentic electronic aids, you can't fully deactivate stability control for cars which in real life you can. On those cars you need to deactivate all aids, which is not authentic, so a bit confusing.
- You can't save mid race. In a game which tries to simulate endurance races, mid race save is a must imho.

A 7/10 to me.

 

[Dave Thayer]

I like PC 2 and gave it a 8 rating. It is a fun game with using mainly VR and the graphics is very good. It is one of my top 4-5 single player racing games. I just wished PC 2 had more tracks to have fun on. I did do a little online league racing, but now days I dont have the time to devote to leagues.

 

[Patrik Marek]

if the modding was easier to do, this might have been a 10 from me
for me it has the perfect combination of
deep enough career mode ( although F1 series from codemasters does it better)
great selection of cars and especially tracks
great visuals
great sound
unmatched weather/FX

it's definitely up there with other great sims like AC, which again why not perfect in every single aspect is great overall package

RF2 might be - based on some -the best physics out there, but it's a very poor game. I mean, if you are using it as a training tool then I could see why gaming elements are not important for you, but I use game/sims to escape reality and have fun after work, so maybe I'm just looking for different things that you are , and that's fine

 

[randomcallsign]

Gave it a 7. What it has good, is really good. But the inconsistency of content quality is really a killer.

 

[Slapped]

I gave it a 9 simply because of the fantastic VR implementation, something that's becoming increasingly important these days, for me at least.

Take the VR away though and it scores a 7-8.

There are two main issues that I have with PC2 and the first is that the FFB is, well, vague. You can set it heavy or light, but it doesn't really communicate too much about what the car is doing. Even though some of the custom FFB profiles that some enterprising souls have cooked up go some way to alleviating this I've come to the conclusion that there's only so much that turd polishing can achieve.

The second issue may be a cause of the first issue, and that is that the physics just seem off to me. I've noticed that a lot of cars, at least with stock tunes, develop an oscillation, quite strong in some instances, which IMO means some part of the physics engine isn't dealing with dampening correctly. This, in my mind, would never happen IRL, especially with the road cars as you'd likely be killing your customers.

Neither of these issues are game breaking however, and let's be honest, no sim is perfect and PC2 gives an otherwise great driving and racing experience.

 

[Gelly916]

***If pcars2 had the physics and force feedback of RF2, it'd be the BEST sim on the market.***

Pcars2 does so much right. Awesome tracks, and probably the best car selection out of any sim. Everything from Group C, extensive GT3, GT4, GTE, and even my beloved Group 5 is all there. It's F-ing awesome! The weather, time cycle, adaptive track, and graphics are great. The "game" has extensive tuning. The game also runs very well in VR. Practically all the pieces are there but Pcars2 (and 1) misses on the most important parts of a Sim in my opinion -

Pcars has CRAP physics and force feedback. The sound is also not my favorite but I'll cut them some slack because of everything else done really good. But God damn, those physics are terrible, and has lead to my friend and I referring to what should be Pcars' official slogan - "Black Ice Simulator"

I installed Pcars the other day just to see if it felt ant better with my Fanatec DD2. Nope, still felt like crap. Deleted it off my hard drive shortly after.

 

[The_Grass]

Variation, Vr if you step out of the car and standing next to the track on vintage Lemans straight, that. 's Great, it is a Great game. If it is raibing you can almost smell the track, it is more an experience and all the Different classes. The other games are most of the time 1 class and more expensid to buy

 

[Cheesenium]

Gave it 8. pcars 2 is still a massive improvement over the original. I love the amount of tracks and also the driving physics that felt more dynamic than most games. The way this game tire reacts with the environment feels more realistic and gradual. The feeling of driving a car at the limit is fantastic too.

The issue for me is the bugs and polish for the most part. They nearly got the formula right.

 

[mantasisg]

Game good. Physics bad. Cars handle real not. Says it is sim, it is not a sim. If it had as amazing graphics as GTS it would be 6, but it is 4.

 

[ermo]

I voted 7.

When PC2 works and you manage to 'gel' with a car and track combo, it can be a pretty great experience; especially if you know how to dial in the FFB -- which unfortunately a lot of people don't for some reason.

However, I was debating whether to vote 6 because of the bugs, but decided that it would be a smidgen too harsh. So a solid 8 or even 9 when you hit the sweet spot, but pulled down to 6 or 5 when you hit one of the rough areas or downright bugs.

My biggest issue (apart from the various bugs that were at first strenuously denied but later quietly fixed) is that I could never trust that the UI (the 'view') would actually be in sync with the internal state of the MADNESS engine (the 'model'). You could turn something off and the UI would show that it was off, yet it would still be turned on behind the scenes and you never quite knew when it would happen. This was particularly vexing when you thought you had turned off assists, yet they were in fact still active behind the scenes.

I will also say that although PC2 has independent triple screen projection, it seems to suffer from quite a bit of shadow flickering on the hardware I've used it with, which is fairly distracting.

In summary, the title was released too soon and development was stopped before the title was fully polished to its potential. I really hope that AMS2 will get a chance to show everyone what the MADNESS engine is capable of when being fettled to the nth degree with great care and dedication, not to mention having full source code access.

I've yet to try Christiaan's FFB files, but if I ever re-install PC2, that's first on my list.


A few comments:

Setup can be changed like no other sim I have seen (What the hell are spools and why can I adjust it?)

A spool is a 100% locked differential. The TL;DR is that it gives great traction on corner exit with excellent reliability and low weight at the cost of being more difficult to handle on corner entry.

And yes, the code in the MADNESS engine that allows you to model various types of gearboxes and various types of differentials is pretty slick and gives an enormous amount of flexibility from the programmer's and vehicle dynamicist's point of view.

It's mind blowing to me that the same team that codes a racing title to accumulate mud on the track when it's raining and someone goes off track, could be the same team that allows you to shift every car without the clutch.

From what I saw, during the pre-release period and in the first couple of patches, shifting gears in manual transmission cars without the clutch required careful rev-matching and was tailored to each type of transmission.

However, after loud and persistent complaints on the official forum, Ian Bell apparently felt it necessary to step in and tell his team to scrap all the careful programming so as to make the transmissions be more lenient with operator abuse (or incompetence) for the sake of accessibility.

I guess that decision backfired ever so slightly in the eyes of sim-racers.

AI is not dynamic

This is factually incorrect.

Quite a lot of work went into programming the AI subsystem, which uses a ray-casting technique to scan for and avoid obstacles and then makes its decisions dynamically based on proximity and various other parameters like the racing line.

The racing line is made of up nodes describing a path, which is manually adjusted for each track. Tighter corners get more nodes to ensure a smoother flow. So you could say that this part is pre-programmed, although I think "hand-tuned" would be a more fair turn of phrase.

Your point about the AI tyre model being simplified is correct however. AFAIK it's a CPU efficient brush model.

 

[Ami_M3]

I read the reviews and avoided it until Reiza announced AMS2. Bought it shortly after to see what MADNESS engine is about.
So far I put 16 hours into it. I really want to like PC2, but I have to force myself to play it. Christiaan's Pure FFB helped tremendously with the poor FFB, but it's still a hit and miss for me. Some cars feel very good, some are terrible. As mentioned by others GFX is nice, but sound which is more important to me, sadly is mediocre at best, and worst of all the sims I play.
PC2 has some nice features, gameplay is good, it is well optimized, but when it comes down to what really counts it falls a little short. Perhaps if the team put more focus on the quality instead of quantity it could be awesome.
There is a potential though in the title (shame it is not in development anymore), and masters at Reiza hopefully can turn this engine into something great.

As is, it gets 6 from me.

 

[Deleted member 205301]

Well, tested it 11hours, then uninstall it, and never came back.
It's not horrible, but it's far from what I'm looking for, especially the grip system, wich seems to be a "general grip"... (yeah, you can drift with a cliocup...a fwd...ridiculous grip system, sounds like a pre-programmed one...)
So, I won't bash it, but it's really not my kind of racing game. (gave him a 4)
@++

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

never owned it, so will pass on this vote. i earned some money investing in the first pcars, when it was still called C.A.R.S., so fond memories there (actually never played that one either, lol).

 

[stickdeath1980]

well

 

[Momperface]

are codemaster stupid?

 

[Damage Inc]

gave it an 8, like the first so much potential and hit a lot of those marks, but also has it's fair share of misses for a multitude of reasons (see ermo's post above). The Madness engine is incredibly detailed and is FULLY sim, SMS just made decisions with a bias towards gameplay over full on sim difficulty.

Not the perfect sim it could have been (on paper) but nowhere near as bad as many think.

Personally I would have been happier if SMS had gone the route of the other sim devs and constantly supported/updated the sim(s). That to me is a much better customer satisfaction focused business model. But a varied market place is good.

 

[Majuh]

It's not horrible, but it's far from what I'm looking for, especially the grip system, wich seems to be a "general grip"... (yeah, you can drift with a cliocup...a fwd...ridiculous grip system, sounds like a pre-programmed one...)

Of course it's possible to drift with FWD race cars since they have a lot of lift-off oversteer. The Renault Clio Cup in Project CARS 2 feels realistic to me, it's very similar to the FWD cars in RaceRoom Racing Experience.

 

[eg01st]

Just when I started sim racing I had all games downloaded from torrents to try. PC2 looked the best but soon I realised that AC is the real ****, bought it with all content, and deleted pirated versions. And also forgot about PC2. I looked at it again in Steam sales, but looks like community does not hold it in high regard. FFB and good (as possible) physics are top priority after all.

Or is it worth picking up now when sale comes?

 

[saxxon66]

This is a showcase game for VR YouTuber but in reality iRacing and AC do a much better job in VR.
Overall it was a hit and miss for car selection, I liked the Rally Cross one but the AI was way off.
I rate it a 7, because physics telemetry output was quite good and smooth.