Post your first impressions

[Bob Luneski]

How about people posting some of their first impressions of rFactor 2? What do you like? What don't you like? What are the coolest new features?

 

[Wayne Morgan]

im a plonker ran the game first time and the online section wasnt highlighted

so thought it was coming later then run the game ofter reading some post and there it was

first thoughts impressed love the ffb

 

[Mark Birney]

Even with all this debate about bugs and quirks, the game will without a doubt be adopted as the successor to rF1, and bugs will be fixed, and mods will flood in. It's all a question of time. But you will be getting more for your money if you buy now. I am confident that ISI will make good on their reputation.

No need to put the game in the bin (or "garbage disposal" to you Yanks) on the day of release.

Chillax

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

I am complaining a LOT of the bad optimized game, however, I'm also using 7.1 headset, and my GOD (and I'm an atheist!) what a sound!

 

[Bob Luneski]

Ok, my first impression.

Installation & Licensing process - Painless
Mod Management System - Brilliant. Huge advance over previous system (or lack thereof)
Interface - Interfaces are always a personal sort of thing, but it is a great deal more polished than rF1
FFB - This was the big downfall for me with rF1 and at least in the first few laps of use it is greatly improved!!!!!!!!
Graphics, physics, & gameplay - too few laps to comment

Seems a little slow loading stuff, but then this is a Beta and not fully performance optimized.

Overall: Most of my big beefs with rF1 seem to have been addressed, very encouraging.....

 

[Dale Green]

Hope you don't mind me stealing your layout, Bob!

I'll say up front, I know this is a beta and I'm willing to ride out the initial period of issues. First impressions after 6 laps in a Megane:

Installation & Licensing process - 10/10 Easy-peasy

Mod Management System - 8/10 I see the potential. It's like rFC's 1-click install. Interestingly, the 60's F1 mod installed but doesn't show in the Manager or in-game. I found the error message in a text file... a corrupted download maybe. I'll retry the download but until I found the TXT file I didn't know why the install failed.

Interface - 7/10 The rFactor DNA is obvious but I prefer something a bit cleaner.

FF, physics and gameplay - ?/10 Can't rate because the frame rate is low and the graphics are distracting (see below) but the drying line after a rain shower is epic.

Graphics - 5/10. Keep in mind this is an out-of-the box review but the game doesn't look great on my system (i920, 12GB RAM, 2 x GTX 275 896 MB - triple monitor 5040x1050). Something telling is that only 350 MB or so of the 896 MB my cards have is in use. I'm not seeing anything like the eyecandy from the preview videos. The framerate was horrible... undrivable until I read the KnownIssues.txt file. I have a very old Logitech Wingman Formula Force wheel.

Controllers
===========
-Some older force feedback drivers cannot handle rFactor2's high-fidelity update rate and in fact make the simulation fall out-of-realtime (you'll notice if things get jerky and slow and the purple bar on the CPU Time graph goes to 100%). There are two possible fixes: 1) get updated drivers from your hardware manufacturer (recommended), or 2) open up controller.ini and set "Skip Updates" to a non-zero value. Note that the presets for new Thrustmaster wheels include the second fix in case users haven't updated their drivers. Again, we recommend updating the drivers and setting "Skip Updates" back to 0.

It's drivable now but the graphics aren't so hot. I may need to do some tuning.

 

[Corey Slade]

First Impressions...

Give it time before rage quitting

 

[Jamie Shorting]

rF2 has tonnes of potential and so far I'm loving it. No FPS issues here at all. It's a beta and not everything is plugged in but like I said it has tonnes of potential. Rain at spa as been a blast!! I really like how in some spots its raining and other spots the sun is poking out and the track is dry. Really cool!

 

[Bob Luneski]

Second impression:

Very poor multi-monitor performance @ 5760x1080(at least on my system i5-2500K, ATI 6950). Low frame rates, stuttering, performance widely variable depending on car and track combo. Almost un-drivable at times. Evidently a very common issue as there are several threads and a lot of similar reports in the ISI rF2 forum. Despite the issues I can see they are modeling some very cool things and some impressive visual effects are available.

New impression: Somewhat dampened but still positive. I have confidence they'll figure out the multi-monitor issues during the beta development process.

 

[Tobias Nyström]

I only had time to play for an hour yesterday, but my impressions where positive.

Performance where better than expected on my system. (1920x1080)
The FFB was awsome!
Graphics is ok.
Mod management is very nice
Interface is nice, exept for setting of controllers and garage, which could be better.


the main thing for me is the feeling of driving, and now rFactor2 is on the same level as iRacing and netKar!

 

[Noel Spence]

i will wait until it improves for me up first it fell a bit short of gsc , so i will wait until they get it to gsc standards before i play it again, which i think they probably will , one thing the graphics were pretty nice

 

[Ben Tusting]

For me is just rFactor 1.5

I'm dissapointed with it, really expected something much better

My hopes for Assetto Corsa now.

Well they might have released it as a 1.5 rFactor, but it's down to us 'paying' gamers/beta users to make it rFactor2.

 

[Alexander Boroday]

Seems that guys from ISI developed this game like such way:
Physics - 4 month and 2 devs
Interface - Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V
Mod managment - 3 hours with 1 dev who was thinking like - "let's just make some interface for those Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V way of instalation of the mods"
Graphics and performance optimization - Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V + 2 students who will work only on their enthusiasm but unfortunately they don't understand nothing in C++, etc. 2 month of development, and after that student reached age of 21 and get taste of some alchogol...
Drying line after rain shower - 5 years and the whole team of devs...

 

[Ivo Simons]

Remember to compare rFactor 2 with rFactor 1 when it came out with default cars and not with the latest released mods for rFactor.

 

[Brian Hodgins]

Well, my first impression is they have a long way to go. Hopefully they will polish it it up considerably before the official release. I have gotten used to buying half-finished products though, it seems to be the standard model these days.

 

[Ihab Abbas]

So I have to pay first to make it work after the installation or there is 30 min free?

 

[Stuart Rinck]

I have a fairly beefy system, triple monitor does not work well with this beta. I am very dissapointed that there seems to be no special attention paid to setting up triple monitors, as in iRacing and LFS. I did like the overall feel of the beta once I switched to single monitor. Graphics not looking near good enough to tax my system as they do.
One thing that really annoyed, dissapointe me was looking in my rear view mirror and seeing a BLOB behind me, I guess that was supposed to be another racer behind me, OMG, what an awful looking sim!!!
"Game"play: OK
Graphics: poor
FFB: seems good

 

[Ivo Simons]

The demo version like you are used to from rFactor 1 is available when the beta is done. Arround 6 months from here.

 

[Marco Bijl]

First impressions....
Well, I already said in the game chat that my wife is NOT going to like this game. I hope she can remember who I am after a few weeks, since I suspect she won;t be seeing much of me

So yes, I like it. I am not comparing the game to anything. Just looking at it as a new product. And I like what I see. Sure, graphics are below what they need to be at this point, and there are some bugs in the game. But thats to be expected with a beta release. I have high confidence in ISI in regards of processing the feedback from the beta users, and implementing changes and updates.

Driving the game is awesome. I am already in love with the Megane and historic formula cars. The megane is just like driving your real car (at least thats how I feel it), and the historicals are just crazy. Driving Monaco with them results in about 5 - 10% full throlttle, and the rest of the time it simply is NOT possible. Also, the braking is awesome. I just overbraked a few times to get the flat spot on the tire, which looks nice, but is also affecting the driving a lot. Very nice work on the physics there.

I have not been able to do a long run to see tire wear overall, and I understood it is not fully implemented as well at this time, but the potential is very prommising.

So I am positive about it. It needs some "getting used to", but thats with all new games and software. I am confident I will start to like it even more after a few days of playing. All in all, Thumbs up for me to ISI!

 

[Mitt Wilson]

It is ok fo Beta- But there is Alot of Bugs and Work to be done- Possibly 5-10 Updates in the future.... Now-the gameplay for me as of right now is 6.5/10 (rightnow) there are bugs and features that I hope get fixed and added, the Biggest addon I can see is the Wheel settings In Game- there is a Overall FFB Setting,,,and thats it.? The Addition of the sloped sensi graphs is beautiful gives a New and Informative view on how the pedals work in reference to pressures +1.
As far as the ingame options to change the Steering wheel "feel" you better freshen up on your .ini file configurations- you will be in there for a while.
Alright FPS- I was really shocked with how my 2 cpus (e700 2.53 ghz) worked at roughly 70 % with everything on high, no way the reflections and the girls of Manaco flashing me was going to happen (15-10) fps... My most stable set was High settings, Reflects/Crowds OFF, 2X AA, 9700 GT Video Card set to Performance- for Multi. player yeah Settings are LOW everywhere.
Last but Not least is the Mod Manager- That little thing is great but Literally a pain in th butt (right now) It will locate games then install them but come to find out didnt install the game then you try go find the game again and it wont find it... yeah ...But the overall design of "1" file YEAH 1 File is IMO the Best Feature of RF2- Now hopefully modders keep it that way.
Final Note: Beta version gets a 8/10 rating im expecting a 9/10 heading to final release, It will hard to give it a 10 due to the fact The Sounds are far behind gtr3....IMO
Happy Racing!! Mitt

 

[Luke Weston]

It looks like a great start to me, its very clearly a beta version. Biggest disappointment is the performance on my PC:

i7 2700k overclocked to 4.8Ghz
16GB DDR3 1600Mhz
Radeon HD6950 (reflashed as a 6970)

I can run anything on full settings at 60FPS apart from this beta which drops to around 40FPS when there's more than a couple of cars in view. That's a noticeable drop in performance and makes playing more difficult, right at the time you don't need it! Reducing the GFX settings and AA seems to have little to no impact on this FPS drop. Plenty of room for optimization I guess