PC1 Sim Discussion Monday - PCARS 1

[Paul Jeffrey]

Monday morning blues? No worries, let's talk Project CARS 1!

Next up for the 'Sim Discussion Monday' feature of articles is the very first release from Slightly Mad Studios - Project CARS 1.

Now the intention of these articles is to talk about a particular sim with like minded individuals, discuss how to get the most from the game in terms of performance and satisfaction, share you wheel or game settings, discuss particular likes and dislikes and generally just chat about anything and everything related to the title.

I appreciate discussion about PCARS can often get a little... tasty, so I ask you to please don't get into a silly flame war or throw around trolling comments. We are (mostly) adults here, let us remember that before we type and keep up the generally good behaviour we display in the various comments sections throughout the site.

With Project CARS 2 on its way in a couple of weeks, this should be a nice opportunity to have a look back at the first game after the benefit of time and experience has helped shape our opinions.

Mondays boring? Nope, Mondays be like...

 

[Spilskinanka]

When I played it I still used a controller, this was before I decided to get a bit more into sim racing. So I don't really have anything to say about the FFB, it did look nice though.

But racing at Rouen les Essarts and the (fictional) Bannochbrae was very fun, those tracks were great. Bannochbrae especially is ten times better than AC's awful Highlands tracks.

 

[Fat Rich]

Didn't like the physics, felt like there was some kind of stability control that corrected the car even though I had all that stuff turned off.... a couple of cars felt good (the ones that had real racing drivers giving feedback to the devs) but the rest I hated. Very odd over the limit.

Thought the AI was dreadful, they'd run me off the road if I was alongside, overtake on the grass because it had so much grip, and generally cause all kinds of consternation and monkeyhouse.

Track accuracy was disappointing compared to other sims.... all sorts of camber and bumps where they shouldn't be, trackside objects in the wrong place. Other sims have non-laserscanned tracks and get them pretty accurate, why not SMS?

Lack of triple screen support I could have lived with, except the menus meant I was constantly moving the mouse 3 metres to the left to select options, then mouse 3 metres to the right to click OK. Even the loading splash screen was slap bang in the middle of the bezels... it's like they were trolling us

Was also looking forward to historic Spa, the McLaren M8F and a couple of other bits of content but they weren't in the game and couldn't even be purchased in DLC.

I bought the game after being assured by the pCars community and SMS that none of this stuff was wrong with the game and it was actually brilliant, but they lied. Worse, when I said I wasn't happy with the game and asked for advice, they turned insulting. This makes me extremely wary of pCars2 even though SMS seemed to have addressed most of the games shortcomings.

On the plus side, they did a great job with the weather graphics, decent race options and a good selection of cars and tracks, but because of physics, AI and track accuracy I abandoned the game.

(Edit: good VR support too )

 

[Lino Carreira]

PCARS gets me pissed... all sims/games have flaws...huge ones, yet in the end of the day i evaluate them for the feeling they give me while driving / Racing... PCARS looks quite good, has some stuff i wish other games had and yet...i cant do one complete race of five laps on it without wanting to kick my Wheel... pisses me off how much they managed to fail in such a nice piece of software... some cars are bearable others are a complete joke ... looking to other cars and the way they blend into the imagery of the track and overall atmosphere its the most visually stunning of them all... it has so much of good stuff as it has of hideous stuff in it.... am curious about Pcars 2, i did pre order it just to have that Civic Type R, im an Honda fanboy and have an FK2 myself... so i had to do it

Really hope they prove me wrong but i think that refinements over Pcars wont cut it , really really hope im wrong

 

[Deleted member 241736]

I swapped from pc1 to AC because of that unmoddable code years ago. Now it seems to be that pc2 also is a closed game and you feel like a 14y old boy who's is only allowed to play this game.
Pc2 doesn't allowed you to skin more than one car or set your grid as you want. Pretty stupid

 

[TylerDurden4321]

I started playing the game on Xbox One because many Forza friends were getting it there too.
The FFB was pretty bad, I turned the Seat-of-Pants FFB value way up and regular FFB way down then the grip felt less ON/OFF and more progressive, but it also made the FFB feel more like a last gen console racer.

Put like 70 hours into the career on XB1 and mostly raced with the AI way too low because driving against them head to head usually turns into a **** show - not all that fun. A Forza-like Rivals system would have benefited the console version a lot, with messages that informed you about your friend times.
Months later I spent about 20 hours were spent on putting values from the Jack Spade files into the XB1 edition. As you can't just download and copy FFB-files on console, you had to input the values for every car by hand.


A year later I upgraded my GPU on PC and bought pCARS again (I'm an idiot for giving SMS money for a game I didn't even really like twice, right?!!). This time I downloaded the JackSpade files and... yeah... when you have a direct comparison with the FFB and handling of other PC sims like Automobilista, Assetto Corsa, the JackSpade files totally can't redeem pCARS1, since it's either still mostly SoP FFB or - with "classic" FFB - you can't gloss over how bad and wrong about 70% of the cars feel.

I'm kinda ok with my current pCARS FFB with JackSpade-classic and self-tuned Scoop Reduction and Scoop Knee values for my Thrustmaster + minor Soft Clipping, but it took me a lot of time trying stuff out, talking to others and even some soul-searching about FFB-philosophies (no SoP = more real) to get there.


I may have bought the game twice and spent 90€ on it, but I'm at least happy to say that I didn't buy any DLC for it on any platform, which I usually don't have any issues with.
But still, if pCARS2 feels better and the cars behave like they should under braking (my biggest issue with the physics calculation in pCARS1), I'll be ok with giving SMS money for pCARS2, there are worse companies out there that get my money every day. Shame though that SMS doesn't seem to have the confidence to put out a demo, but thank god for Steam refunds, right? ;D
If it's truly great, I'll even buy DLC this time, I'm not the one to hold grudges if someone learns from his mistakes and moving in a direction that might fully redeem himself.

 

[Mr Latte]

I still have the "Project Scars"

For me they let the community down by not being honest enough and biting off more than they could chew with greed in seeking content over quality and multiplatform sales.

Likely helped to sell a lot of original Nvidia Titans though.

Hoping P Cars 2 isnt so flawed but will be a very nice way to experience VR

 

[Eric Rowland]

Hoping PC2 will be what PC1was supposed to be

I have confidence it will be. Obviously they were in a situation where they had to release the product in an unfinished state and were playing catch up. Lessons learned, we hope, as the title needs to over perform to right the ship. I would not want to be in their shoes if it doesn't.

 

[MarkR]

pcars remains an enigma or a racing game, it can produce some good racing and in VR but there are so many issues with the game it causes frustration.

The launch was awful, surely one of the worst, no track limits, career progress deleted by using UDP or in game saves. After a few weeks the PC version was stable and FFB fiddling for each individual car aside I enjoyed some good 2hr of Le Mans style races with a good day night and weather cycle. Open online lobbies were the usual mess and peer to peer meant those 1-3 seconds screen delays when players joined or left the room. Some of the race cars worked OK but the road cars were pretty much all terrible. I'd say over time the PC version raised itself from a 5/10 to a reasonable 7/10 game.

The Xbox One version though that suffered even more problems and many of them remain unresolved today. The random problems with the official TX458 wheels either losing all feedback or making feedback 100% without warning. The peer to peer connection delays meant online play was with a group a friends only. Even them the issues getting everyone in the same lobby and working meant we ended up calling it project lobbies as we spent more time there than racing. On the rare occasions when all these problems could be overcome and choosing the right cars there was decent racing game a notch above Forza in terms of car handling for wheel users (the pad implementation was a joke though for a game released on consoles). The pcars weather system is certainly better than Forza's fixed static puddles. The dynamic time of day/weather is still the stand out feature for pcars on console and only recently bettered by F1 2017.

To this day I think SMS over reached, too many ideas not enough clarity about what game it was trying to be. It didn't please the sim fans but at the same time wasn't as accessible as something like Forza (especially with all the wheel ffb issues). From the footage I've seen I think SMS have sensibly taken half a step toward Forza and are going after more of the accessible racing game market - sensible given the likely sales figures. The VR looks excellent so they have my preorder money on Steam based on that alone. The Xbox One version will wait on the shelf until the players start reporting their findings (still no actual footage of this working on Xbox as far as I am aware) and Digital Foundry report the facts about how it plays. We'll know soon enough.

 

[Deleted member 217114]

It was the first circuit sim for me. Had lots of fun doing to career, got in love with the caterham. Then I did stop for a while cause Dirt Rally was poking at me again. (Got 1200+ hours at that game). Later I got the chance to play AC, rF2 and Raceroom and AMS alpha/beta and I noticed pCars was just crap actually. :O Will never get those 70+ hours back

 

[Neils on Wheels]

It seems a bit moot to discuss it with pc2 around the corner but at the very least it probably got a few people into more realistic sims.

 

[MikieC]

GFX nice, FFB fiddling a catastrophe (even with Jack Spade files it was mediocre at best). I’ll give PCars 2 a try and see what has been improved.

I aggree 100%. I really gave it a LOOONG time trying to dial in the FFB. I tried everythig, and i really, finally got things pretty good, and there were just 1-2 random bugs messing up the FFB and wheel in general that would appear 5-10 min in to a race most of the time, that just made game un playable.

There was SO much potential, end result was disappointing unfortunately. I give WMD props for a valient effort, Knowing the huge expectations we sim racers put on developers. I figure the FFB model was very complex and probably unfixable. I am excited to see Pcars 2, and expect the glaring bugs to be minimal.

Yippee! come on PC2!!!!

 

[Nevini]

I really tried to like the game, however no matter how much I tried FFB was poor. Once I bought a rift I stopped playing as the cars never felt connected to the road. This is despite going back several times , trying different settings and 3 wheels! I will buy pc2 from steam, try the game and refund within 2 hours. If the game is any good I will buy from Amazon at a cheaper price.

 

[St3fan]

PCars IMO is not necessarily a bad game per se, but:
it is more fun to drive other more sim titles (AC, RF2, AMS, etc), and
it is more fun to play other more arcade titles (FH3, The Crew, etc).
And I just prefer spending more time in other games.

 

[The Iron Wolf]

I liked project Cars, it's a good game. I especially like that I was able to get good framerate in it, which suggests a lot of work put into optimizations. Favorite features:
- how well it runs and looks even in VR
- weather/day night transition
- good content (but nothing from real series)

But there are alternatives that provide some of the above things and beat pCars in the following:
- no any real world series (and no moddability to overcome that)
- no flat spots
- no engine stall
- no flags, no safety car
- Problems with collisions - cars running through each other
- car to car collisions are very forgiving, almost like game encourages poor driving

Since there are alternatives with shorter list of limitations, I am not looking forward to pCars2 either (as it seems to provide similar feature set to what was in pCars), but will be checking feature set of upcoming games for sure. But all in all - despite long list of missing things I like it - good game.

 

[Case_]

I would love to like PCars. But most of the time I spent with the game I spent trying to get some feeling out of the force feedback. Didn't really succeed, even with various recommended tweaks and/or tweak files. I always feel very disconnected from the car, unable to tell what the car is actually doing - I always feel like I'm driving a hovercraft, not a car.
Graphics can be nice at times, but at times can also feel very...I don't know, cartoonish, maybe? Not a fan of how certain tracks look. Nordschleife in particular, one of my favorite tracks, just looks and feels off and is also lacking the reference points I'm used to using there.
I'm also not a fan of the audio - it's not that it's completely bad, but it'd be much better I think if it wasn't so distorted and loud all the time.

I'm interested in how PCars 2 will turn out, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[gamer19]

Next up for the 'Sim Discussion Monday' feature of articles is the very first release from Slightly Mad Studios - Project CARS 1...

What do you mean "first" ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slightly_Mad_Studios
There's Bike Bash out there.
@PaulH
47 is still too big FOV. I use, I think, 42 for cockpit view. I know for sure it's 42 in Assetto. Think it's the same in PC. And that's probably still too high. But that mostly depending of your monitor size, of course.
@Xela1
PC allows you to install much more than one skin. With some handy tool though, out-google it. I have whole F1 season skins installed, can't remember from which year now but it work flawlessly.

 

[Leonardo Chaves]

Let's not, it's crap plain and simple.

 

[M-Bimmer]

Platform:
Played it on PS4 and this was the first and only "proper" racing game (until Assetto corsa was released a year later). Bought a Second PS4 along with T300rs for Pcars1...guess this reveals how much i liked it

Confession:
I must admit that i had so much fun online...
of course i met some psychopath rammers along the way (but with some reverse psychology things started to go well with some).

History:
I played it for nearly 7-8 staright months and call me crazy but i only played with the RUF RGT-8 for like 3 or 4 months. Fast farward to February 2016 (around when the last DLC was released) and the game was literally unplayable; it was the first & only game to constantly crash on the PS4. If all went (no crash) then the sound was messed up so i ended up in a black hole (crash/sound issue and/or vice versa)....no surprise that this dedicated PS4 has been gathering dust since then .

Pros:
- Night driving
- Rain
- Tyres temperature
- wet tyres
- Track & cars selections
- Private lobbies
- some DLCs were quite good

Cons:
- B u g g y
- Rammers
- Got broken with every patch released
- No road feeling
- Single player
- Unplayable on first PS4s released (2013/early 2014 hardware)

Mercedes AMG GT3 2016 by M-Bimmer, on Flickr

 

[randMracer]

General consensus seems the same;
Graphics good, Dynamic weather good, VR good, FFB bad.

My experience first time playing on the PC and it was pretty cool, until.......
Alright now that I got the hang of this car and track, let's fine tune the FFB. Three hours later....still doesn't feel right and WTF is scoop knee? Spend more hours looking for definitions about their FFB settings. Go to SMS forum and get burned at the stake for asking about FFB. Found Spade's tweak files and thinking to myself, it's that bad that a third party has to create tweak files just to make the FFB tolerable?

Ok I'm tired of this car and track. Time to try another car....what? FFB is default? Places fingers in mouth and pulls imaginary trigger.

 

[billymitchell]

I wonder if pCars 1 (updated with FFB mods) will be better than Forza Motorsport 7...