Hi Chris.
I am a tester (but I didn't sign up and I don't have to give out positive information
)
I will disagree though with your statement referring to assessing the physics via video, as I don't think that's remotely possible. You really need to test them yourself and you really know that to be honest.
I have tested the various builds, some are good, some are bad and I have said so. But I really do think this sim will be just that on the PC, a sim. The difficulty levels can be adjusted and I am sure with full on sim mode selected, the racing will be very challenging.
Many people seem to think that a sim must be difficult to drive or it's not a sim, well I don't go for that chain of thought. Having driven cars on trackdays at various British circuits, I can honestly say, they don't lose traction as easily as some of our sims do when all aids have been switched off. But I digress......Pcars can be just as hard, I know I have tested it. And at the ragged edge with out aids, its feels pretty good in
some cars at this time. The FFB is still bad though and hopefully they are working on that aspect a bit more without users having to tweak this and adjust that too much.
For a start, PCars will have a proper career mode for offline play, full weather changing in real time, pitstops, and a massive variety of car types.
The damage moddeling is far superior to AC's too. (Lets face it, AC's damage modelling is worse than we had back the Papyrus Indy500 days). At the moment some of the cars drive really well and are just as challenging as the same type in AC, if not more so with proper damage moddelling and weather effects to take effect.
I am the last person to just glorify the game (just look at some of my posts in the Pcars section) but I will say that it is not
as simcade as you say in most respects and perhaps really simulates motorsport a tadge better than AC at this present time. So that in itself makes it slightly more of a sim racer. I look forward to the finished result and can't wait to try it out properly with finished physics and FFB models.
regards
Andy