Rennsport: Always-Online? & Everything-In-One | Discord Q & A (Part 2)

All this sounds like they're aiming straight at the (semi-)professional esports drivers, not at anyone else. But that's a niche iRacing owns for many, many years now. Let's hope for the Rennsport devs they'll find enough players for their concept and can keep them over the years.

From what i've seen and heard so far this isn't my type of sim at all. I'm playing racing sims because i enjoy driving, not for the competition. Also i like to play a lot of other stuff (not just racing related), so i don't want to tether myself to a subscription AND dlc at the same time.

The game sounds even more unappealing. DLc and subs, on top of forced esports.

And the way the interview is written made the game sound even worse. Has anyone asked for a tldr version of an interview? Seriously?

I have a feeling Rennsport is gonna be "the people's sim" in the future, just like Automobilista 2 is, in the present day.

The publishers/ teams behind it seem very opened, truthful and down to earth (kind of like SMS , Konus or S397 but above all like Reiza, Reiza where the devs help you and reply to you on Discord any time you have a question or a suggestion).

May as well hand them a shovel now seem to be digging the grave

Another Irenting system. Nope, not for me, it is the reason I stopped with Iracing

azaralamouri said:

The publishers/ teams behind it seem very opened, truthful and down to earth (kind of like SMS

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Just like Mr. Bell, exactly.

It's true that we still need to know what it's really about, in terms of driving, handling, sensations, netcode, physics etc.... And it may be all very good (or not) but just knowing that it will be subscription plus DLC's completely lowers my expectations, I've never paid for iRacing and I won't pay for this one either.

No Vr.... ok... so they do not understand how this nowadays works.
Creating new sim(?) and not implement VR just from beginning is for me a complete fail.
Additional to this their strange subscription model is a complete no go.
I do not regret anything because i didnt had any expectations to this.

On a serious note, does point 44 really say we'd have to pay a sub to be able to buy dlc ? Pay to pay is definitely a ground breaking / hilarious business model.

I remember seeing a really successful movie about this kind of business model, IIRC it was called The Producers.

Still very early so we can't come to any type of solid conclusion.

My main hope is that they get VR running smoothly and looking as good or better than current sims.
And more importantly, being able to run on low/medium spec PCs too.

ACC was unusable for me in VR (G2 3070TI) and even though this will use unreal 5 , a little thought in my head thinks this might still be a bit like ACC and require a minimum 3080ti

I believe as long as the Sub model is better than iracing this sim will be popular and all of those who say they won't buy now will most likey get it.

Thanks for this Julian, good writeup

My suspicion is ACC level of VR performance, basically non-existent. Hopefully that proves to be wrong.

Enagee said:

Still very early so we can't come to any type of solid conclusion.

My main hope is that they get VR running smoothly and looking as good or better than current sims.
And more importantly, being able to run on low/medium spec PCs too.

ACC was unusable for me in VR (G2 3070TI) and even though this will use unreal 5 , a little thought in my head thinks this might still be a bit like ACC and require a minimum 3080ti

I believe as long as the Sub model is better than iracing this sim will be popular and all of those who say they won't buy now will most likey get it.

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I gave up already. If you look at it objectively then you can conclude that it's not going to happen. Exactly because of what testdriver77 says here:

testdriver77 said:

No Vr.... ok... so they do not understand how this nowadays works.
Creating new sim(?) and not implement VR just from beginning is for me a complete fail.
Additional to this their strange subscription model is a complete no go.
I do not regret anything because i didnt had any expectations to this.

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It's a missed opportunity indeed. They don't have the basics right so the end product will fail for sure.

Raging Beard said:

My suspicion is ACC level of VR performance, basically non-existent. Hopefully that proves to be wrong.

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I suspect even worse from what I've seen in the video's. Major pop-in blur/even way more then ACC on flatscreen. Kunos really tried to make the best of it and now with the 4090 I I even got ACC running at 90fps/hz and looking better then on pancake(I thought that this would be impossible but it isn't), but this with an insane amount of tweaks, absolutely insane. So I expect the worst for Rennsport.

stickdeath1980 said:

May as well hand them a shovel now seem to be digging the grave

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Everyone complains about iRacing's outdated graphics and "i skating". Maybe this will be a suitable alternative.

Rally Canuck said:

Everyone complains about iRacing's outdated graphics and "i skating". Maybe this will be a suitable alternative.

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Exactly. This game isn't really my cup of tea (not into esports or GT3 cars, myself) but I don't understand the negativity from many people here. A moddable title in 2022 with popular tracks, the most popular class of cars, built-in tools to facilitate esports stuff like broadcasting, years of dev support? A pricing model similar to iRacing, the most popular (by far) title in the hardcore sim racing space? And another player in the sim racing space to offer a different, potentially enjoyable take on how a car feels to drive in sim?

Maybe the cars will feel like crap. Maybe the track modelling is poor. Maybe the game will unfinished or have half-baked features. We'll only know once it comes out. But until then... there's plenty of reasons to think Rennsport has potential and is not too far out of step with other games in sim racing right now. Perhaps the devs will get it wrong... but perhaps they won't!

Amanda said:

So just like RaceRoom, a forced "always-online" DRM where you can't play if you don't have an internet connection? If so, no thank you. In the Steam era, it's amazing how some devs really think aggressive DRM is the answer. Assetto Corsa, Automobilista 1-2, ACC, rFactor 1-2, all work fine without an internet connection.

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And all of them except RR are available on shady websites because they get cracked day 1 because Steam su***

27. Is creating an in-game team possible, e.g. one team owns a lot of cars and gives them out to drivers for series?
Morris Hebecker: Yes, you can just manage a team as well.

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they mean a guy can buy lot of cars and make his own team and let his cars to drive by other drivers?
that weirdly brought me up to crazy idea that lot of people wont like xD
but imagine a simulation when u pay subscription and then buy cars (as iracing and soon rensport) but thing is u crash your car and must pay real money to have it repaired lol
i mean for reasons why iracing is best for mp cause ppl pay money to play it so they take it more serious. now imagine sim where every crash or damage makes u pay for it with real money, that would be most fair mp gameplay, also no more aliens who crash a lot while making crazy physics braking setups or drive during championships too much confident cause they no risking them own lifes as real racers do. imagine that

I just bought a couple more years on iracing with their black friday special... So based on that I can't really condemn them on using this model.

We are well away from the models of buy a game and thats it, now its all just base content and DLC over and over. Even RF2 at first tried to charge you for online - except that was to just let you join online, they didnt even give you any competition structure or servers.

They will have a free base so you cant complain too much if you have to buy some content on top.

What interests me more is how much will the size of the market accept this model from more than one sim. I use multiple sims but for the others its buy once and use it for some different things when I am not using iracing. Will I subscribe to two services to pay yearly and DLC on top? Not sure that I will TBH.

The comments were interesting and some felt as if it was me talking, but I have some tweaks:

A- The business model:
Rennsport devs should sit and discuss what made iRacing print money for continious 15 years and copy it. My Iracer friends are 1- too invested financially (hardware or software- wise) to let go, they even paid money for settings. 2- Probably they're in the US where people can afford V8's while we're here driving around with our VW Golf's? And probably Rennsport should think about the Chinese market where the economy and the power are going to be in the near future?
Long story short: I don't think iRacing is the best sim, and I think it reached its limitations more than a decade ago, but from an economical standpoint, Rennsport should analyse whatever made iRacing successful in making people pay loads of money for years, and copy it, I hate to say that, but I want to give an honest advice.
The last example I have is: the pc tech in my country: where, no matter how much more performance for the same money AMD offers, our market only offers Intel and Nvidia laptops. Like, there are no laptops shown in the major stores with AMD inside, zero. So it's not always about what makes sense to you, it's about what makes some popular.

B- VR performance:
History repeats itself, right. I have two examples:
Konus is (according to me) one of the smartest and most successful actors of modern sim racing. They had a difficulty of Unreal Engine 4 almost impossible to perform in VR. And tell me how is the situation now when you fast forward 4 years?
Reiza is (according to me) one of the most hard working studios in sim racing. They keep changing things until they become near perfect. They released AMS2 but the physics had special arcadish feeling due to the Madness engine. How is the physics and the driving feel now when you fast forward until today and after a thousands updates?
Long story short: It's all about the engine. And after that, history teaches us that the improvements are usually sadly very marginal.

C- Personally I tend not to vote to make Rennsport copy features that I like from other sims. Why not be opened minded and accept variety. Let them bring something different. We might like it. Why the negativity so early? I actually had some wishes that aren't in other sims when there has been AMS2 wishlist that I'll copy and paste them in a Rennsport thread or forum or Discord, (for example ideas about seeing your wheel as mixed reality in VR, seat FFB or pedals FFB). It's a new sim and only your imagination is the limit to what you can ask for. Then it's up to the devs to be able to make your dreams come true or not.
Long story short: No need for negativity now although I know 99& of what we wish for doesn't come true. I'll be happy however this sim ends up being. And I'll use what suits me of its features to my advantage. Example if it ends up to be expensive and annoying to rent, I can rent it in the months where I am on vacation and have time to race everyday, or if I can buy all the past and future content at once for a huge discount example 50$ instead of 500$ (say like Raceroom but plus future content), I'll do it... etc