Rate The Sims: Community Edition | Assetto Corsa Competizione

[Paul Jeffrey]

We are looking to crown the 'RaceDepartment Community Favourite' racing game - get your votes in now for our next game on the list... Assetto Corsa Competizione!

Our dear RaceDepartment community. You folks are the most mighty fans of sim racing, often displaying an immense amount of understanding and depth of knowledge when it comes to our favourite hobby.

With sim racing and eSports in such a wonderful boom period of late. Gamers looking to have some fun with their virtual racing machines have never before had such a wide and robust variety of software to enjoy.

Now occasionally I've been in a position to rate new racing titles that have come my way, and almost every time I've received a wide variety of folks agreeing, or strongly disagreeing with my own opinions.

Opinions are great, but sometimes the opinion of one person, with their own likes and dislikes taken into account, can often give a bit of a skewed picture (intentional or not) to the greater cause in which said person is trying to explain.

As such, rather than doing one myself, and in the spirit of engaging some interesting community discussion, I thought it could be fun to let our own community rate each of the key sim racing / racing games available today.

As always with these things, please do try and respect each other and their opinions, and let's try to see if we can give a fun, but fair shake of the stick to each of the games included in this poll.

For transparency, I'm going to be featuring the following racing games over the next weeks:

• Assetto Corsa
• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Automobilista (AMS)
• DiRT 2.0
• F1 2019
• GT Sport
• GRID
• iRacing
• NASCAR Heat 4
• PCARS 2
• RaceRoom Racing Experience
• rFactor 2
• WRC 8

I'm going to launch the article each Monday evening, and keep the poll running for a full week until the next new article is pushed live. So get your votes in quick!

Once I've completed the full list of games, I'll publish a final results feature, and we can award the winning developer the lofty title of 'RaceDepartment Community Favourite'!

Have fun, stay sensible and let the voting commence!

Like what we do at RaceDepartment? Follow us on Social Media!

 

 

[Cheesenium]

I gave ACC a 4. Still did not like it at all.

My main issues are:
- The content is lacking. At least offer something more than solely GT 3 with options to run 911 or huracan cup. The track list is also very lacking.
- The UI is god awful for a racing game. It gives a very low budget and lack of attention vibe.
- the optimization still is terrible. Even on single screen while it look really really bad at times with the pop in of UE4. UE4 isn’t suitable for racing games.
- AI isn’t very good too, it can be annoying to race with as they drive like autonomous vehicles.
- the nagging safety rating is annoying. There is no way to turn it off and I really do not care about my safety rating. Can’t they let me drive the car without nagging that I am too slow because I’m learning to drive a car? I give zero crap with MP and esports so it will be nice if it stop nagging me.

the physics is great with great attention to detail. However the restriction on content because it’s a Blacpain game really hurt the game for me. I love AC for it’s vintage cars, road cars and so on, all of them but GT3 are gone from this game. With a heavily reduced car list.

if this is AC 2, I’ll probably be much happier with the game. Content is the biggest problem for me.

 

[jacyhv]

mod-edit: english please

 

[DrRob]

I gave it a good 8 with potential for a higher rating in the future.

With ACC around I do not fire up AC or R3E anymore. I was focussed on GT3 in the other two sims as well and ACC has the edge over the others regarding GFX, physics, FFB, AI.

ACC was advertised as a pure Blancpain GT game from the start. So glad they didn't took the 1000 cars / 1000 tracks route. You can really feel that a lot of work has gone into each and every track and car.

Biggest potential for me ("low hanging fruits"):
Immersion. Bring the game to life. Little things like more movement in the pits incl. pitstop, grit / gritwalk scenario on race start, commentators, match original Blancpain coverage, etc. More frills in general.
Focus on championship and career to closely simulate the real championship.

Others seem to have optimization and performance issues with triples / VR. Personally I do not use either of those. But I do see the point they make, that this could have been better.

Bring on 2019 season, IGTC and possibly European GT4 and the other Blancpain GT3 championships over time! I'll be happy to buy them all.

 

[Koen Verlinde]

9 out of 10 for me.

Mostly because some features are missing, either by design (no full Spa grid possible) or being worked on, or just no priority to Kunos. But understanding the sheer complexity of these GT3 cars and letting them perform marginally better every time as you learn how to race them. Wow.

Add to that the graphics, sound and general atmosphere and I think it's a pretty brilliant sim.

Also it helps that I'm not a part of the VR and Triple Screen market.

EDIT: Why can't we rate ETS2 in the future?

 

[mrbungle83]

I love it, it's the most rewarding sim I have ever played I'd love for more games that were focused on one discipline, you feel like you really get to know the cars the graphics are beautiful in VR.

Negs are the Same and it still has a way to go, it's beyond difficult to fun at reasonable FPS in VR (worse since 1.0.8)

AI can steamroller you from behind and seem insanely fast in some corners and waaay to slow in others. It's a pain in the Sss at tracks like Spa where you have to hold back in anticipation of AI going so slow through eau rouge or worse still Blanchimont where they are so slow you have to lift so much that if you don't anticipate you'll end up in a spin or crash. That being said if you put ai at 100% and run qualifying the front runners are a bit faster but if you aren't on it they will arse end you in the middle sector.

Still buggy, sometimes the FFB completely throws a wobbler after a pitstop, on a race win in VR you will be transported underground with a jingle, is there supposed to be a podium? Seriously its like congratulations feel free to throw up on yourself and if you look up you'll realise that you died during the race and unfortunately you were a bit mean on RD so it's HELL!!

still every time I turn on my PC and pick a game it's ACC, I definitely will start to miss other cars soon but as it stands it's very engaging.

 

[manu68]

I gave it a 6 because I love the concept and risks taken by kunos team.

But as all kunos production, it seems that nothing is and will never been finished.
See netkar, then netkar pro which is brilliant but can not be played anymore ondine, then assetto corsa which live through the mods.

All seems like every kunos game is a draft from genious making experiment for the next one.

I love kunos game, and will purchase all game from Day 1, but as customer we deserve finished product(i dont speak of early release), and sorry but ACC is not.

The game is brilliant, best graphics overall, superb tracks and effects, more than enough content to explore for the next 10 years, but again not close to be finish.

If it is an online dedicated sim, then remove career and AI, and make a real great online system based on the best example already available, like SRS or of course iracing.

If it is an offline game take account of the offline players, like myself.
I went on lobby on last sunday afternoon , france, and there was about 10 players online, and 99% of servers empty.
I made two career races offline and i had lot of fun except the known things like pitstop, ai behaviour in zolder chicane, ...

Please finish the game for offline racing, with robust GUI, flexible saving system, easy loader save preset system, safety car (30% of race time in every real race) ....etc.....

A finished commercial product is not only physics and graphics

I gave it a 6, with a 20 of ten potential !

 

[Dethrone1427]

7/10

Massively excited for the game, did lots of single races, finally received the finish article, fired up the single player championship, found it to be utter shite, not played it since.

It's a shame, it runs well on my rig. Great FFB, brilliant audio, severely let down by some small key (for me) features.

 

[randomcallsign]

6 for me. As a driving GT3 sim is great. Step out of that, where it requires other functionalities, it becomes apparent it's missing a lot.

 

[Gelly916]

I give it a 6/10. Huge fan of regular AC but ACC has been fairly disappointing to me. It's just not optimized well enough. I have a strong PC and struggle to hold 90 fps in VR.

I'm hoping that in a year there will be more tracks added, and maybe even different classes such as GT4 and what not. I'm also hoping that the optimization improves drastically.

I think the greatest fault of the game is not having an organized competitive multiplayer, something along the likes of SRS or iracing. That is a huge miss in my eyes from Kunos. As I've progressed in my sim racing career (LOL), I've noticed that I have been shying away from private leagues in favor of competitive multiplayer.

AC took a long time to get where it is today, and I'm hoping ACC improves in the same manner. The game has a great base to work off of. Great physics, FFB, graphics, time/weather, ECT. Hopefully ACC will be an 8/10 in a year from now.

 

[2stains]

6

 

[o Tiger Feet o]

-1 for not saving your fastest laps. Why?
-1 for the long list of bugs (which are slowly but surely being sorted)

 

[E304LIFE]

The most realistic experience I've had so far. 10/10

 

[F_B]

Phew, I find it hard to rate a sim which is quite new and still in its infancy compared to for example Raceroom or AC which are out for a couple of years and had time to develop to something more complete. However if Kunos keeps simulating complete racing series with all the details and rules I see a bright future for ACC. At the moment only GT3 racing just isn’t ticking my boxes.

 

[2stains]

The most realistic experience I've had so far. 10/10

So no room for improvement?

 

[LeSunTzu]

GT3 only with all those assists and a few tracks became quickly boring. I still don't know if the driver swap actually works, I haven't seen any race in teams in the leagues I know.

 

[Ben Lee]

On paper, this should have been my ideal sim. I love the GT3 “scene”, but I feel that there were certain compromises made with the UE4 engine that have so far been insurmountable.
(I rated it 5 out of 10).

My bullet points at a glance;

- Poor AA methods
- Poor performance
- Menu GPU usage 100%
- Poor FFB implementation / method
- Menu system isn’t great, online browser is poor.
- Not enough player session info

+ Good sounds
+ Online netcode seems quite solid
+ Rating system is a good idea and fairly well done
+ Weather looks great
+ Day / Night cycle is great

For me ACC is a very mixed bag, however I will sum it all up really with a lot of it having to do with Unreal Engine shortcomings. Poor AA, poor performance, menu gpu usage stuck at 100%, all of which as I understand it are standard “features” of Unreal Engine 4. The online browser is unbelievably poor. Why can’t you sort server results or arrange by ping or have a favourites menu, or a “recently used” server tab?

I could honestly live with all that if the FFB was better than it is, but its not, and its so far removed from the AC FFB that I just can’t get on with it, despite many attempts to tweak it, it just feels fundamentally flawed in the sense of what I am seeking from FFB in terms of providing information on what the car is doing. AC just provides so much more information back through the wheel, the FFB in ACC just feels numb and subdued.

Another minor thing, why is there so little player session info when for example in practise and qualifying? Is it so taboo to know how long the race distance is? I know it’s mentioned on the online browser, but often I forget when I have done some practise and quali. Am I setting the car up for a 10 lap or 25 lap race? Those kind of things make a big difference to what I would do to set the car up.

The one area where I can’t really say anything negative is that the sounds are very good, the online netcode seems solid and the rating system in terms of an idea, is solid, but probably needs slightly better execution. The day and night cycle is good but has this odd “stepped” darkening when the sun goes down and I honestly thought that would be patched, but its still “a thing”. The weather is very good, rain is super convincing and looks pretty lush.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

8/10 for me. What it still misses particularly for me to be a 10/10:
1) AI doesn't know when to give up the position in chicanes so particularly T1 at Monza and the chicanes at Zolder can sometimes be a frustrating experience.
2) Thunderstorms have no place in a racing game and they happen way too often and for too long in Dynamic weather, reason why I never use the feature.
3) AI still a bit too fast in wet conditions vs dry. Other reason why I use scripted weather vs dynamic.
4) For what I've read in the official forum, the save game feature still has some bugs.
5) Not enough tracks to be a 10/10. IGTC is a good start and hopefully we'll get Blancpain Asia/America along the way.
Otherwise a fantastic game and the one I spend the most time in.

thx for writing my post mr portnoy, no complaint from me
i vote the same for much of the same reasons

 

[eg01st]

GT3 only with all those assists and a few tracks became quickly boring. I still don't know if the driver swap actually works, I haven't seen any race in teams in the leagues I know.

By assists you mean clutch and limiter during rolling start? I turn TC completely off on every sim, and in ACC I leave ABS to 1 or 2. TC off makes GT3 way more interesting, but most annoying thing is starting driving with that clutch system. UI shows that it's pressed but it does nothing.

 

[LeSunTzu]

By assists you mean clutch and limiter during rolling start? I turn TC completely off on every sim, and in ACC I leave ABS to 1 or 2. TC off makes GT3 way more interesting, but most annoying thing is starting driving with that clutch system. UI shows that it's pressed but it does nothing.

Turn TC or ABS off and you are off the pace. Same if you don't select the optimal engine mode. So after two dozens races with that you play with a normal car in another sim and all of the sudden driving becomes a pleasure again.
In this respect my experience with ACC is somewhat the opposite of AC: now there is a full race simulation with weather and all but the pure driving pleasure is gone.

 

[EsxPaul]

but most annoying thing is starting driving with that clutch system. UI shows that it's pressed but it does nothing.

I found that part confusing too but I think that's down to some cars having an automatically controlled clutch when moving away from standstill and others not.

For example I know the R8 is auto. I drive that a lot and have got used to the auto clutch being there. Jumped into the Bentley and immediately stall it upon selecting 1st gear because I've forgotten that has a manual clutch

I need to make a list to remind myself which cars do what once I've gotten over my case of lazyitis.