Is Assetto Corsa too easy?

[JesperGB]

When looking at the technology preview i am in bit of a doubt of the realism in Assetto Corsa. I have been driving some cars on track, and in fast cars you have to wait for the car to point straight ahead before pushing the throttle. In the tech demo i can press the throttle to the floor real early - and the car won't spin out at all. It's actually quite difficult to really loose the car.

But then again i never tried the lotus elise in real life, so maybe it has better grip than the car i tried in real life (opel speedster turbo - 0-100 km/t in 4 secs). When driving the opel speedster then i had to be VERY careful in the corners - and that's what i don't see in Assetto.

What do you think?

NB! i am aware of that the final version can be totally different.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

My thoughts are. It is very close to real. and it is great.

 

[Stelios]

So after playing the early release for about 43 hours I have to say that yes it is too easy. I spend most of my time in the road cars because they feel the most challenging to drive. When it comes to the BMW GT2 I can just mash the gas, turn the wheel crazily and have no fear of spinning out or crashing nine times out of ten. With the exception of the Zonda the fast cars we have so far are kinda boring to drive, and that really should not be the case! I hope that in the future they will tighten the sim up so that the degree between having grip and losing grip are more extreme. The static view of the cockpit certainly adds to the blandness as your head is not subject to any forces and feels like it is bolted to the frame. There is also no need to pay attention to what you are doing, or slightly correct the cars while driving down straights. In my irl car I always have to pay attention and make minor corrections as I drive, but not in AC. Alot of things feel odd, but hopefully they will correct this stuff as time goes on.

Since this thread was created for the Tech Preview, what are other peoples thoughts now that we are playing the early release?

My opinion on this is that the GT2 cars are made for lapping consistently that is why they are so planted (and maybe boring, to some). It has also huge downforce compared to its horsepower.

In the end of the day, who am i to judge AC development team's work ?

 

[DennS]

So after playing the early release for about 43 hours I have to say that yes it is too easy. I spend most of my time in the road cars because they feel the most challenging to drive. When it comes to the BMW GT2 I can just mash the gas, turn the wheel crazily and have no fear of spinning out or crashing nine times out of ten. With the exception of the Zonda the fast cars we have so far are kinda boring to drive, and that really should not be the case! I hope that in the future they will tighten the sim up so that the degree between having grip and losing grip are more extreme. The static view of the cockpit certainly adds to the blandness as your head is not subject to any forces and feels like it is bolted to the frame. There is also no need to pay attention to what you are doing, or slightly correct the cars while driving down straights. In my irl car I always have to pay attention and make minor corrections as I drive, but not in AC. Alot of things feel odd, but hopefully they will correct this stuff as time goes on.

Since this thread was created for the Tech Preview, what are other peoples thoughts now that we are playing the early release?

To be honest I couldn't disagree more... Those cars have relative low HP (due to the regulations) and massive downforce and are on supersofts as default (P4/5 even worse tbh, to quote a driver "you have to be stupid to spin with our car"). In case of the P4/5 the car is made for the 24h race at the Nürburing (Nordschleife) which means it should be "easy" to drive and not try to kill you in every of the 170 corners...

I hate to say it because it sounds so lame but how fast are you? Try to do low 1:42s at Imola with the M3 GT2 (without cutting) because that is far from "easy"... Or try the P4/5 on super hard tyres at Mugello, there is no grip at all if you can't keep or loose the temps in the tyres...

PS.: The Zonda has like 40% more HP than those GT cars...

 

[GamerMuscle]

The static view of the cockpit certainly adds to the blandness as your head is not subject to any forces and feels like it is bolted to the frame.

43 Hours and you have not discovered the "lock to horizon" tick box ?

I'm waiting for multi-player and what set-ups end up being the fastest before deciding if the race cars are to bland

What I have really enjoyed with AC so far is the depth at the limit rather than hitting a wall of grip there seems to be far more subtle things going on with AC far more subtle ways to squeeze time out of the cars.

I think It has to be approached with a separate mentality than what is established with Gmotor based games.

 

[Qazdar Karim]

Just think about those endurance racers ... with 4 hours stints without mistakes ! do you think it's possible with a car that spins all around the place

 

[Tim Ling]

I'm sorry, but isn't AC about racing? Surely the fun & challenge comes from dicing with other drivers? To me, the cars feel real, they respond how I expect a car to respond, including if I try to over drive it. Wait until the AI & multiplayer are in the game

 

[Joco Gorenc]

Easy to go slow, but hard to go fast. Just how it should be.

 

[Ben Lee]

I have to have lock horizon turned on. With it turned off the way the car bobs around (to me) looks and feels really unnatural.

 

[UOPshadow]

Well I think some peeps are used to drive "simulated" cars which are as heavy as a sheet of paper. I for myself think that spinning a car at 20 mph is gamey, but the same gamers which accept these obvious shortcomings accuse AC of having too much grip. In most sims of the last years it is very difficult to drive "save" at low speeds and somehow everybody thinks this is a "really good simulation". I never thought like that.

Personally I think AC is spot on with its philosophy: easy to go slow and hard to go fast. It's the first simulation which really "got me". Other sims I pull through and learn their implemented system of "simulation", but with AC I just drive and get faster. This is actually FUN, compared to the work I have to invest in other simgames.

I dunno how Kunos has made it but with AC I actually feel the weight of the car and because of that I can drive very precise. Even with my own setups (the default setups are usually crap) I couldn't get the same feeling out of the FFB of rFactor 2. If AC is too easy, it's too easy because you finally you get all the information you have to have in the first place. With other sims you get an artificial feeling how the car behaves after lots of laps, with AC youre time to comprehend the car is so much shorter because everythings behaves like it should. Yo just tap into the knowledge from driving real cars in your brain, as it should be.

It's incredible.

 

[betterstranger]

I think that some are mistaking this:

with this:

 

[Dave Robinson]

I like others think that AC is more realistic than most of the other sims out there. You feel the weight of the car some much more in AC and it feels that it is connected to the road. I was never more impressed during my first few laps with AC even after I had read all the hype during the build up to release.
AC once Multiplayer is released will dominate the online market IMO.

 

[Requiem84]

Let's not forget the role of the default setups. They are pretty conservative and mildly understeery.

If you decrease the Zonda rearwing, it becomes a beast that wants to kill you everywhere.

Try some more aggressive setups with the M3 and P4/5, and you'll get a look at their dark side .

 

[DewCrew88]

Easy to go slow, but hard to go fast. Just how it should be.

100% spot on

If you arent on edge or backwards occasionally turning quali laps you arent driving nearly hard enough.

 

[Marian Zelenka]

Default setups are even playable with keyboard.

 

[Austin Ogonoski]

"Is Assetto Corsa too easy?"

It's only easy until someone goes three seconds faster than you in the same setup, and you have no idea how they did it.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

Personally I think AC is spot on with its philosophy: easy to go slow and hard to go fast.

The problem with this statement is that it pretty much applies to every arcade racing game as well. For example, as I've been racing near top level in FSR for several seasons I thought I would quickly get quite close to the top in a game such as TrackMania, but the last bit of time turned out very difficult to find (because the base handling model is so easy, you have to take big risks during the lap and perfect out the driving lines). My point is that I don't think you can measure easy or hard by saying that it's difficult to drive fast, because that more or less applies for all games.

 

[UOPshadow]

Please don't muddle up a philsophy with game design intention. TrackMania doesn't want to be a sim, so sure the philosphy applies, but it doesn't lead to the same results.

And in context I related it to Sims where cars spin out at 20 mph, there it's harder to go slow than to go fast.

 

[Austin Ogonoski]

Those big balls of rubber on all four corners of the car called "tires" provide a lot more grip than you'd think.

Here's a video of me taking my buddy's go-kart around a few trails by my old place.

Notice how, even on dirt in a cold climate, I still have grip more often than not, running with a pair of slicks that really haven't been broken in as much as we'd like them to be. Most instances of oversteer are corrected with a simple flick of the wheel in the opposite direction. I'd hate to try that same car/track combo with iRacing physics.

I would imagine on a purpose built race car, with several hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on R&D and Tech, that they wouldn't be THAT difficult to drive.

In fact, here's footage of a GT3 team letting an automotive journalist hoon around their $500,000 pride and joy. In the wet. And he doesn't seem to have a problem with it.

Also, if the game is "too grippy" or "too easy," you probably aren't going fast enough. At 3-5 seconds off pace, ANY car will feel good. It's what happens when you're actually PUSHING that makes all the difference. At the limit, AC is still predictable, you just have a much smaller margin for error and IMO it's just as unforgiving as rFactor and LFS, a testament to the accuracy of those two titles despite the obvious age.

 

[Ho3n3r]

Haha. Too easy?

Well, that's a relative term. It might be easy for people that have driven sims or real life cars at good speed, but it ain't easy for normal people. Nobody ever said cars are difficult to drive in real life. They're just difficult to drive fast enough to be in the top 0.1% of fastest drivers.

Do you really think they'd give racing cars that can cause you to crash at any given corner for no reason? This is not the way the cars are set up. There is still a balance between easy driving and speed in these cars in real life - and for you, it may feel too easy, but this is reality.

 

[Benjamin Hellmann]

To be honest I couldn't disagree more... Those cars have relative low HP (due to the regulations) and massive downforce and are on supersofts as default (P4/5 even worse tbh, to quote a driver "you have to be stupid to spin with our car"). In case of the P4/5 the car is made for the 24h race at the Nürburing (Nordschleife) which means it should be "easy" to drive and not try to kill you in every of the 170 corners...

I hate to say it because it sounds so lame but how fast are you? Try to do low 1:42s at Imola with the M3 GT2 (without cutting) because that is far from "easy"... Or try the P4/5 on super hard tyres at Mugello, there is no grip at all if you can't keep or loose the temps in the tyres...

PS.: The Zonda has like 40% more HP than those GT cars...

is 1:42s at imola a realistic time?