Are Racing Simulators trending towards Arcade these days?

[MarcG]

n.b. I originally wrote this a couple of weeks ago purely off the back of the sudden rise of eSports in the Sim world, since then the conversation has raged on in various places so I thought I'd bring it here;

Are todays Sims trying too hard to appease the Celebrity/Casual/Newbie Racers? I ask off the back of yesterdays (ACC) SRO Event when the First Lap had "Ghost/No Collision Cars", in 'The Race' (RF2) the Damage is extremely Low with No Fuel/Tire wear to worry about. Generally speaking ACC also has "No Collision" on Warm Up laps...Why?, iRacing & RaceRoom the same in Pit Lane*...Why? Is it all "just for the show"? Or just because drivers are too stupid and can't be trusted to avoid each other? (* Pit Lane Ghost cars for when there are not enough Pit Bays is OK, anything less is a crime!)

Now I get that Sims have always had Driver Aids of some description since forever, be it Invulnerability, Auto-Clutch, Proximity Sensors, TC/ABS for Cars that don't have it in Real Life and that sort of thing. But this recent trend to make things even more Arcade is alarmingly worrying to me, not to mention it looks incredibly poor on the broadcasts and doesn't give an overall great impression IMO.

How are Sim Racers supposed to learn the very fundamental basics of Sim Racecraft if they can happily drive through opponents? (Regardless of whether they are real life drivers looking for a bit of fun on the side or newcomers to the genre). Take 'The Race' and SRO Events, the drivers have had Practice and in some cases a Practice Race before the event, so why have No Collisions on Lap 1? no proper Damage? They may as well of been racing Mario Kart!

It's quite frankly bizarre and to be very blunt about it I think it's setting a terrible precedent; Simulations are supposed to be just that, a Simulation of the Real Thing. By all means have newbie Events/Servers with some Driver Aids, but this path we're walking down towards babysitting the Celebs whilst trying to attract an audience is a dangerous one to take and before long the term "Simcade" will become the Norm.

I get that there's been an increased presence around Sims in recent weeks what with the Virus **** going on, and that in these dark times someone always wins and in this case Games in general have done very well. For Sims it's all about maintaining that interest when the World gets back to normal, but why must we do it by these "Special Features" and I'm not just talking about recent inclusions, but Sims generally trending towards a cotton-wool approach to looking after their Racers. We're here to pretend we're real life drivers, if we want to grab a gamepad and go fly over jumps in a Ferrari we have other games for that, ACC/RF2/RR/iRacing/AMS2 etc are not the places for this overkill of "Safety & Arcade" IMO.

I mean why bother going to the lengths of having incredibly complex Tire Models, Data Sheets of 10,000 characters for one piece of Aero Physics, detailed Track Dynamics & Weather Systems when you can throw it all away to cater for people who can't avoid each other on Lap 1? Why have Top Ranking Events without Tire Wear, no Fuel Usage so there's no Brain to be used for Strategic purposes? - Why are trying to "Protect" Sim Racers when they're driving....Why we moving towards Arcade?

 

[Benutzername]

I don't know.

One of the most requested wishes every year in the early F1 games from codemasters has always been stuff like formation lap, safety car, ...
And thats from a title directed at casual gamers / simcade.

In real sims features like that are wanted, too. Its a shame that its lacking in some titles - a reason, why GTR2 for example is still remembered fondly.

But: Now i is implemented and they areng using it in the big events. I dont get it. For me it is clear, that simracers and even casual gamers would like to have stuff like that in a realistic fashion.

I can only imagine, that some real racers who attend arent taking it seriously and therefore it was decided that ghosting is needed - to avoid chaos on television.


But even that is devoid of logic. If you cant take damage, you take more risks. I remember the first virtual gp in bahrain...

 

[BrightCandle]

Having watched quite a few races with these professional racing drivers I can see why they are turning damage and collisions off. The seem utterly incapable of avoiding hitting each other to the point where they use it to gain an advantage. Their behaviour, if used in iRacing, would get most of them bans from the service. Their behaviour has been so disgraceful and yet televised so the organisers (and the drivers) have had little choice but to put in place measures to stop them losing sponsorship and ruining the races while bringing themselves and their sponsors into disrepute.

These professional drivers have zero respect for their competitors and for the driving code when there is no chance of someone actually getting hurt. They have consistently shown utterly appalling races and the sim racers are mostly now excluded from the events. Their appropriation of sim racing has brought a wave of new racers into the sport most of which also don't behave well at all, copying the behaviour of their favourite celebrity. It's introduced a lot of people to the sport but it's been bad for and is a major threat. People ruining races by breaking the rules. The only way forward is to ban these poorly behaved drivers completely and move forward with those willing to comply with the driver's code including the professionals.

Yes, some of the games have skipped on certain racing rules and such like pit ghosting but I think the problem here but we have sims where that is not the case and its mostly used to paper over missing rule implementations as a simplification for development. But I think there is a real threat here from pro drivers that the longer they stick around and the longer they continue to ruin races and need ever more assists the more the industry will pander to them because they bring an audience and its to our hobbies detriment.

 

[Ruttman98]

Back in the days when racing was real (and news was as well), celebrities would actually race wheel to wheel in identically prepped Dodge Neon ACRs, Toyota Celicas, and other low-po, low traction vehicles. Local TV and radio personalities might take on Hollywood "B" stars, athletes on street circuits like Long Beach.

AND, as might be expected, there was vehicular carnage.

 

[Ruttman98]

I agree with the original poster that televised sim races should be as real as possible.

Sim rscing needs more cred!

 

[Ghoults]

I think it is easy to make these kind of statements and come to the wrong conclusion simply based on your personal misunderstandings of what is going on. Seeing motives where there are none and seeing patterns where there are none. Imagining some wild machinations happening when at most you are looking at small special case and extrapolating it wrongly to the bigger audience. Or making wide ranging conclusions on all sims based what is the latest released game on the market and comparing it to its previous incarnation and trying to find a pattern and then assigning motives and machinations to that perceived change. "Sims are becoming games!".

Certain other game on the other hand is slightly moving back towards realism with the unofficial physics updates after being made easier by the official developer. I don't think there never was a real goal to make it easier either. It just happened gradually. So it is also easy to come to wrong conclusion by trying to see patterns of intended behaviours and motives that in reality are just things slowly moving forward which is not always more difficult. Or there not being any kind of motivation to make the game move to any direction. Sometimes realism makes a game harder, sometimes easier without there being any goal of making it anything but more realistic. And sometimes even those attempts do not produce the desired result.

I don't agree with the idea that providing options makes a game less sim. By making the game more frustrating to use (game x) doesn't make it more or less of a simulator. Usability is important regardless of how the game drives and different people need different options and settings just to make their own equipment work. There are valid reasons for seemingly arcadish options like ghost racing and the poorly working netcode is one. I'd rather drive through ghost car than be taken out by invisible one.

Another way of drawing wrong conclusions is to take some forum thread or e-sport event and spin it into some kind of statement that applies to a majority of sim racers. Just to virtue signal your own elitism of playing the right sims the right way. "Only sim peasants turn option C on, not me". Just because some people agree or disagree about ghost racing or some event turns damage down does not mean the world is collapsing and all games from now will be gran turismos and mario karts. Just because sims can be easier to setup and provide a more smoother learning curve instead of vertical cliff that does not mean that the physics needs to be dumbed down. Making the game easier to set up is the only way the sims can grow. We are currently living in weird timeline. Real life drivers who have never driven a sim are suddenly doing it in front of tens of thousand eye balls with minimal practice. Is turning damage off really that much of a sin and the downfall of simracing?

 

[MarcG]

It's nothing to do with elitism, it's to do with the blatant fact that more Arcade "features" are coming into Sims, regardless of the recent crop of real life driver pandering.

 

[Mr Deap]

Sim are games, if the purpose if for esport conquest. To go fast is about arcade technique, because simulator has flaw & people exploit them. In the end it's a videogame competition where people hide their tricks & all the physic flaw in order to win effortless. Garbage sport.

A true simulator is about using it for real life purpose. So the level of realism is not that important as long as it reduce the learning curve & gives placebo.

 

[Kyuubeey]

Sim are games, if the purpose if for esport conquest. To go fast is about arcade technique, because simulator has flaw & people exploit them. In the end it's a videogame competition where people hide their tricks & all the physic flaw in order to win effortless. Garbage sport.

A true simulator is about using it for real life purpose. So the level of realism is not that important as long as it reduce the learning curve & gives placebo.

Please stop posting.

 

[Mr Deap]

Please stop posting.

Simracing always have been wrong, why pushing the simracer supremacy toward the genre? So as technology progress, it become more & more arcade?