Partly to blame is the rose -tinted view we take of studios, believing they exist only to make the best simulation possible when the reality is that as businesses their priority will always be investors and shareholders. As any other business, 397 exists to make money first and foremost.
If they were to deal with the many offline/AI issues for already paid up users like us, what do they get? Perhaps some future dlc sales? We blindly buy that anyway even though we know it will probably be useless offline. (Cote d' Azur - purchased winter '19, finally made useable spring '21...shouldn't complain I s'pose...)
Judging by the direction, it's probably more lucrative to sell licences for e sports events and appeal to new customers via that route than it is to pander to our wants or actually get the thing to fulfil it's potential. Never let a good simulation get in the way of making money it seems. Not unique to 397.
Tbh i'm finding sim racing a bit dull at the moment. Despite the massive pc hardware advances of recent years, all of the development is in motion rigs, ever more expensive wheels or graphics etc. It seems that Rf2 was "peak" complexity, with more recent sims, for example, opting for empirical tyre models rather than go to the expense of developing a physical model. And yes, afaik current physical models are flawed and technically difficult to implement but of the two, it is the newer technology. By now we should be shredding tyres in real time, but it is easier and cheaper to keep dialing numbers into a formula that has probably been around since the dawn of sim racing.
Having been around since Chequered Flag on the ZX Spectrum it's been a fun ride, watching the complexity of driving games increase as the hardware got stronger but I feel that the ride is over. The last few years have brought nothing new to the table, no one is pushing for ever more nerdy levels of detail anymore. In my opinion ISI were the last to truly break new ground. (Sorry if i'm discounting iRacing here but i never got past the comedy payment model.) It seems complexity costs money in this era of just-enough simulation...
If they were to deal with the many offline/AI issues for already paid up users like us, what do they get? Perhaps some future dlc sales? We blindly buy that anyway even though we know it will probably be useless offline. (Cote d' Azur - purchased winter '19, finally made useable spring '21...shouldn't complain I s'pose...)
Judging by the direction, it's probably more lucrative to sell licences for e sports events and appeal to new customers via that route than it is to pander to our wants or actually get the thing to fulfil it's potential. Never let a good simulation get in the way of making money it seems. Not unique to 397.
Tbh i'm finding sim racing a bit dull at the moment. Despite the massive pc hardware advances of recent years, all of the development is in motion rigs, ever more expensive wheels or graphics etc. It seems that Rf2 was "peak" complexity, with more recent sims, for example, opting for empirical tyre models rather than go to the expense of developing a physical model. And yes, afaik current physical models are flawed and technically difficult to implement but of the two, it is the newer technology. By now we should be shredding tyres in real time, but it is easier and cheaper to keep dialing numbers into a formula that has probably been around since the dawn of sim racing.
Having been around since Chequered Flag on the ZX Spectrum it's been a fun ride, watching the complexity of driving games increase as the hardware got stronger but I feel that the ride is over. The last few years have brought nothing new to the table, no one is pushing for ever more nerdy levels of detail anymore. In my opinion ISI were the last to truly break new ground. (Sorry if i'm discounting iRacing here but i never got past the comedy payment model.) It seems complexity costs money in this era of just-enough simulation...
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