Rate The Sims: Community Edition | Assetto Corsa

[Paul Jeffrey]

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

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!

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[Zoltan76]

AC was great in it's day and still getting awesome new content all the time...... But the physics of this game feel extremely outdated and is the reason I haven't played much in the last year or so.

AC's physics works best with custom LUT file.
It makes such a HUGE difference when using proper settings as it was a different game.
Using a good custom LUT file makes the steering and FFB much stiffer and direct.

 

[j_troc_71]

It has them as a mod, are we not rating the vanilla game and work done by the devs?

that's a great question actually. Should non developer content be factored into the rating? Without SOL, CM and 10,000 mods AC is like a 4 for me. Including all mods etc its like a 8 or 9.

 

[Jason Mullin]

My interpretation of rating something a 10 means it’s perfect, there’s no room for improvement.
Assetto Corsa + mods is a 7 for me.
It is great value for money with a lot of quality mods available.
Looking at the Pauls sim list for the upcoming weeks, I see two 8’s and one very strong 9.
Of course our opinions here are fun to read, but all about as subjective as someones FFB preferences.
Interesting thread I look forward to all the results.

 

[Ghoults]

Even after the official development stopped the game just keeps getting better. Kunos did not get everything right with ac. No game is perfect. But more importantly they got very very few things wrong and even then there are workarounds for some of those issues. The game truly excels as modding platform totally blowing all other modding platforms out of the water. Totally. And it just keeps getting better.

Most of the things the game got wrong is some of the physics stuff and some other weird stuff. The game could and should have wider support for various things in the car. The tire model had the single point tire model with its obvious getting stuck to kerbs issue that was blatantly ignored until they were forced to fix it in acc. Some of the stuff omitted from physics is pretty bizzarre. Solid axles with no camber and toe. Wings can be only mounted to body which means every single seater lacks correct aerodynamic lift created by its own tires which creates wrong suspension loads and ride heights. The suspension geometry issues. And generally the physics are very forgiving. A direction towards the physics took somewhat early on. Although unintentionally I honestly think. Kicking out mods of their forums was just totally dumb and they could not even get their lies to match up about it. And the developer acts like a total child occasionally.

But so much is right. The modding capabilities are almost endless. Modded cars, tracks, weather, rain, sound mods, excellent modding tools, excellent documentation, ui mods... the list just goes on and on. The feature lists are shorter than some of its competitors but everything that is there is easily accessible and understandable. And it is hassle free, works out of the box all the time, every time. Even with its faults I gave it a 9 because all of the flaws can be somewhat avoided or worked around. Solid axles can be massaged to get rid of some of the issues, I don't drive open wheelers, I avoid mugello which has the corner where the tires always get stuck on kerbing and I put the dev on ignore list. Easy solutions.

The game runs fine, no steering lag, high fps, no other fps issues, no bugs, rarely if ever crashes and great active community. I'd say amazing community. I give the game a 9. Only some of the missing physics stuff and the missing rain (specifically transitions from dry to rain) drops it down from 10. I don't think 10 would be perfect but it would be something which does everything good enough so that the faults which all games have become just differences and not missing features.

 

[Atticvs]

Wow, good initiative!

Soo, if we say the perfect sim (lap, etc.) simply doesn't exists, and the closest anything comes is rFactor 2 (physics) and iRacing (matchmaking and not much worse physics) at, say, 9, then Assetto Corsa can slot in at... 7?

Competizione and Automobilista also beat it on physics and tyre model (although the AC tyre model is VERY good), which AC may compensate for its simply insane variety of content, both cars and tracks.

I don't know - there is something in every sim that I love, that makes it stand above the rest. rF2 has the best physics, iR has the best multiplayer, AMS has the best force feedback (maybe), AC has the most content...

Ok, let's try this again:

rFactor 2 - Vehicle dynamics 9, tyre model 8, force feedback 7, cars 6, tracks 7, multiplayer 7, 'extras' (rain, DTN, dynamic groove, etc.) 8
iRacing - Vehicle dynamics 7, tyre model 7, force feedback 7, cars 8, tracks 9, multiplayer 9, extras 6
Automobilista - Vehicle dynamics 8, tyre model 8, force feedback 9, cars 6, tracks 6, multiplayer 4, extras 6
Assetto Corsa Competizione - Vehicle dynamics 6, tyre model 9, force feedback 7, cars 4, tracks 6, multiplayer 6, extras 9
Assetto Corsa - Vehicle dynamics 5, tyre model 8, force feedback 6, cars 9, tracks 8, multiplayer 9, extras 4
RaceRoom - Vehicle dynamics 4, tyre model 5, force feedback 6, cars 7, tracks 5, multiplayer 8, extras 4

That gives

iRacing - 7.6
rFactor 2 - 7.5
Automobilista - 7.1
Assetto Corsa Competizione - 7.1
Assetto Corsa - 7.0
RaceRoom - 5.6

For cars, that's mostly just quantity (car physics covered elsewhere), for tracks, it's quantity and accuracy.

Part of this is just feeling, so feel free to rate differently. (I don't think I'm that far in general, but I may well be off by 1-2pts per category for every sim.) Also, if we add more categories (e.g. damage model, graphics, pricing), we might come to different conclusions still.

Anyway, I gave a 7/10 here.

 

[Deleted member 241736]

9/10 ( 10 isn‘t RL)
Best balance between physics-graphics-hardware. Still love it (much)

 

[Will Mazeo]

I think all my ratings will vary from 4 to 5 for all sims lol

 

[Bozz.gee]

AC will still continue to be my favourite sim, with all the great new mods constantly breathing new life in the sim... However I seek a real Endurance Racer with true multi class racing and I am yet to find what I am looking for in terms of licensing, flexibility of game play/customization... I think I am looking for PCars2 licensing with the flexibility of AC + Content Manager

 

[Bozz.gee]

AC (Rated 8) 1081 hours and counting and will still continue to be my favourite sim, with all the great new mods constantly breathing new life in the sim... However I seek a real Endurance Racer with true multi class racing and I am yet to find what I am looking for in terms of licensing, flexibility of game play/customization... I think I am looking for PCars2 licensing with the flexibility of AC + Content Manager

 

[turbo86]

Um.....GRID? Why....? If you include GRID then you have to include pretty much every crappy NFS game as well.

 

[O Sanchez]

I like Assetto Corsa with Oculus, Content Manager, Mod Sol, Crew Chief and SRS.
Yeah!!

 

[aantonioo]

clearly a 12 out of 10

 

[BeliacosGR]

Played it since first release! 3.631 hours till now and still keep going! Racing in champiships,racing alone or just drive it for pleasure! Great Sim and a big passion for me.

 

[Loregan]

9/10 on my side
6 for original content
+1 for VR support
+ 2 for Ilja and Peter's outstanding work

 

[ShredatorFIN]

A valid question, but to rule out mods from consideration is to rule out ACs biggest strength.

I'd suggest that Kunos physics and FFB are still the biggest strength. Lots of sims support modding, but the reason ACs modding scene is so massive, is that the physics base is solid and worth modding.

With custom shaders patch, SOL and content manager, honestly for me it beats ACC. ACC wins in sound but I rather play AC than ACC. ACC is too specific for me in the end. And too heavy on system (VR sucks too, compared to AC VR)

 

[Cote Dazur]

10, not because it is perfect, because it is not, but because as a package it is way above anything else that we have access to today.
I enjoy other SIM and racing game, but I still spend more time in AC than in all the other put together. Do I wish some features from the other SIM I like would also be in AC, yes, but they might, as it seems that Ilja and his crew have endless solutions for all that is not perfect yet.

are we not rating the vanilla game

Rate the Vanilla game if it is what you are playing, I am playing the unleashed version with all the toppings, so this is what I am rating.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

My interpretation of rating something a 10 means it’s perfect, there’s no room for improvement.
Assetto Corsa + mods is a 7 for me.
It is great value for money with a lot of quality mods available.
Looking at the Pauls sim list for the upcoming weeks, I see two 8’s and one very strong 9.
Of course our opinions here are fun to read, but all about as subjective as someones FFB preferences.
Interesting thread I look forward to all the results.

There is no perfect sim out there, so 10 should be the highest rated sim out of the existing bunch.
At least that was my thinking rating it.

 

[Stereo]

It's the only sim on the list of ratings that I still actually play so I think that speaks for itself, it's missing a fair number of features but the rest of the sims are missing the same and more.

As far as physics goes, I trust AC's accuracy and range more than the other ones I've tried, they just plain didn't feel as much like cars. Or in one case, had so many ffb sliders that it makes me assume there is no correct setting that produces realistic feedback on all the content. My basic approach is to never do per-car settings, if a sim can't make a single controller config work on all its cars then I'm not going to do better.

 

[j_troc_71]

I'll be checking back for the P CARS 2 poll, for sure. The comment section should be epic!

I'm sure that will go as well as the "is acc dead video"

 

[Jason Mullin]

I'm sure that will go as well as the "is acc dead video"

ACC is dead? Well why didn't anyone let me know cause that and rFactor are the only two installed on this PC.
It was quite lively racing it last night...