First impressions PC2

  • Thread starter jonyvf
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The first car which I drove when the day one patch completed its installation was the A45 AMG. This was the car that gave me the biggest headache in PC1, as it would behave like a boat on marbles when handled with a controller.

My word, when SMS promised to repair the controller driving model, they definitely delivered. Jerkiness and haphazard steering which plagued the A45 AMG are completely absent. I then went to thrash out a couple of laps at CotA in the Touring Car variant, and already I felt more satisfied than what I ever felt in PC1. I know what I'm driving in Career mode...:D
 
Brainhulk
I'm playing on a pc with a g27. I set it to raw. How come I can't feel any road bumps, kerbs, or rumble strips?

And I maxed all the ffb sliders, did I forget anything else?
Click to expand...
Immersive will give you more feedback. You may want to try the Jack Spade settings. While I liked the default Immersive I've switched to Custom with the Jack Space standard/medium file - improved the FFB even more, VERY good! Of course your mileage may vary as I'm using a belt driven wheel (TM TX).
 
Bought digital version and downloaded. Have spent the past 2 days waiting for a patch to download.

The only thing I've been able to do is drive a McLaren on Long Beach. So far, this absolutely SUCKS.

-Awful understeer, more than I've ever experienced in any game or real car.

-Unbelievably over sensitive steering on the controller stick. Maybe better with a wheel???

-I turned on the driving line option. Is there for some corners but not others. And it's not accurate anyway.

Really wish I bought a hard copy. I'd have returned it already. Someday maybe the patch will download and I can try other cars and tracks. Not sure if my experience will improve though.
 
Can't say it's really my first impression now since I've been playing since day one ( couldn't get the grin off my face thrashing the Audi R8 LMS round Bathurst on day one) but just started career this afternoon and thrashing the Ginetta Junior round a very wet Knockhill was more fun than you can shake a stick at ...... I love this game :cheers:
 
Having now had plenty of time with the game over the weekend, I want to offer a few more thoughts on the game.
  • The Open wheel cars (Formula Rookie, Formula C) are very difficult in the corners. I keep tuning and tuning, but I struggle with mid turn over steer. I'm guessing its my driving style, but it feels very different to the previous game.
  • Qualifying. If I set a time i am happy with and retire to my pit box, I cant find a way to Fast Forward a session. If I skip to the end of the session the AI gain ~5sec on me. and leave my competitive time at the bottom of the time sheets.
  • Vastly improved Interface for Career though, which is great.
  • Having to save the set up changes - every time. And the names of the set ups are never consistent.

Game in general is still good fun. I find the cars to still be a bit more of a handful than they once were. But it's a good challenge.
I've been really enjoying the RX side of things. As a bit of fun i put the Kart one of the Dirt Fish courses. Its lots of fun. Just a shame the shifter karts have gone missing cos those would have been a blast! Same with some of the lower powered Caterhams.
 
ObiWan11
Bought digital version and downloaded. Have spent the past 2 days waiting for a patch to download.

The only thing I've been able to do is drive a McLaren on Long Beach. So far, this absolutely SUCKS.

-Awful understeer, more than I've ever experienced in any game or real car.

-Unbelievably over sensitive steering on the controller stick. Maybe better with a wheel???

-I turned on the driving line option. Is there for some corners but not others. And it's not accurate anyway.

Really wish I bought a hard copy. I'd have returned it already. Someday maybe the patch will download and I can try other cars and tracks. Not sure if my experience will improve though.
Click to expand...

Try these settings on this video, they seem to work for quite a few people as they slow the inputs down and give a smoother drive. The default settings are quite sensitive although some seem to like it's quick inputs. It is great you can tweak them to your liking, but try these first then maybe adjust around them.

Take the Rally x lite or the little Audi A1 out first to get used to them on TT. Also put all the aids on full to practice with a controller and then slowly adjust them. It will just take a little time. I have now found a great settings and it is fantastic.




One little thing, if you are on photo mode on a replay and come out it seems to freeze the replay if you click the button next to pause (left rewind) you can use triggers to carry on but it does seem to be a little bug there.

I still can't seem to get audio of engineer/spotter working through my headphones, all audio to headphones on PS4 is greyed out due to AV/HDMi. The only thing I can think of is that is going through my AV Receiver and a setting is blocking the signal somehow. Any Ideas? I could just use the TV sound but prefer to use my headphone on the AV for better sound.
 
I was surprised my Core i7-860 was able to handle pCARS 2 really well. And this was a processor from EIGHT years ago!

I think multi-threading on pCARS 2 is much more optimized. (But maybe the smaller grid sizes were a factor to, because there's a 32-car cap compared to, say, 50+ on Le Mans or the fake Suzuka...)
 
ObiWan11
The only thing I've been able to do is drive a McLaren on Long Beach. So far, this absolutely SUCKS.

-Awful understeer, more than I've ever experienced in any game or real car.
Click to expand...
Be sure to get some heat into the tyres first, and don't drive it like a race car. It's a road car, with road tyres, it won't corner like a race car.
 
My first impression is that I have quite a learning curve to sort, or maybe the controller optimization just isn't there. The game is very content-heavy which is great and there's so much to do, so hopefully learning how to drive fast on my controller won't be too frustrating.

For reference, I did some practice at Daytona yesterday for my Twitch, and ran a 1'48.160 in the Audi GT3, barely topping the time sheet with AI at 70% difficulty.

I have seen quite a few bugs and glitches but they haven't impeded what I was doing for the most part, and will hopefully stay that way.
 
Overall now that I’ve got my controller settings at a point I’m fairly happy with I’m enjoying it. I’d describe the game as inconsistent and quirky but good. Lots of great features such as the dynamic time and weather, most cars feel great to drive/have good sound effects, love the immersion when it’s all working right, but I’ve struggled to get into a smooth online race thusfar and the bugs that exist in the game take away from it a bit. AI have some teething issues. Online menus/UI on PS4 feels like it could be improved. The sheer amount of options you can adjust is impressive to tailor the game to how you want it (I particularly appreciate having all the cockpit camera adjustment abilities).

Foundations are good, just needs some refining, hopefully should get better as patches come along and hopefully too many don’t jump ship to FM7/GTSport before the first patch comes.
 
My first impressions in a video :);



Honestly I think this game has a fantastic fun essence about it. Yes there might be better feeling racers, maybe better racers with certain features but at the moment I'm seriously having a lot of fun and some clean racing! It really is making my night every night at the moment!

Livetrack 3.0 is the game changer for the genre and not just the game! It's a new benchmark for sure!
 
Andy404
Having now had plenty of time with the game over the weekend, I want to offer a few more thoughts on the game.
  • The Open wheel cars (Formula Rookie, Formula C) are very difficult in the corners. I keep tuning and tuning, but I struggle with mid turn over steer. I'm guessing its my driving style, but it feels very different to the previous game.
Click to expand...
Just thought i'd reply to myself on this one. I found the culprit. The engine braking setting was influencing how my car was behaving way too much. Had tweak it and now the cars are a lot more driveable. No more lift off over-steer
 
So reading the cliffnotes,

FFB is still a massive pain in the backside to get it to feel anywhere near accurate,
with a thousand different settings that no-one understands. For a casual gamer with maybe 1/2 an hour a day to play, it's not worth my cash.
where other games (Dirt Rally, GT) just feel "right" or close to it, out of the box,
add a few tweaks to suit your style and you're away.
 
I don't think it's a case of getting the FFB to feel accurate.
Just about everyone has their own idea of what good FFB is and SMS cannot cater to them all.

Speaking for myself, I tried all 3 options at first.
I chose the one I like the most and then tweaked it with the few sliders provided.

It was all a piece of cake and I'm very happy with my FFB.
 
Impressed with the game on standard PS4. Sure, the graphics are somewhat downscaled compared to the PC version but that's understandable when they've added so much to the game. The hardware is getting quite old after all.

BUT online feels like a mess at the moment. I'm struggling to find any lobbies with no trolls/bad drivers. The first few days my rating went up to E1530 but is now down to U1490 because of constantly getting hit at the start of races or when lapping other cars. It's infuriating being taken out by a player you're about to lap! Hopefully the bad eggs soon will be filtered out by the ranking system.

I've seen it mentioned before but they REALLY need to fix the stutter when someone joins/leaves the server. This bug has caused me to crash multiple times already.

I really hope SMS take these issues seriously because otherwise the game is solid!
 
Love/Hate relationship continues...

PCars released this game way too early. Too many bugs. For average speed DSL, it plain out sucks. It's constantly choppy, and seemingly full of connection issues. Could be NAT issues for me, but PCars 1 wasn't like that for me. Graphicly, it better and worse. I would say there are more details, but they are captured in lower resolution. Physics seems really well done, I specifically like the rain physics, but there are lots of little surprise physics to catch you out and leave you saying, WTF! For example, there are puddles in the rain.

I hate the menus. Poorly setup and completely infuriating at times. I've been stuck in "Waiting" states after entering a lobby far more than any other game. To mute someone I literally have wait for the session to end or turn on a Dualshock to navigate the player menu and mute 'em. And even worse the control options are completely different for muting people at different times. The penalties are a great idea, but can screw you... as the person getting slammed. I've got a penalty from a person driving backwards and unless I stopped, and turned around, chased him down, I couldn't avoid a drive thru.
 
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Short summary of my experience so far:
  • The physics are very close to the real deal; I haven't completely sorted out the game's strengths/weaknesses yet but it's very impressive. I need to spend more time with some of the tire compounds, but the roadcar tire model seems good. Watching the way cars bobble and sway on their suspensions is the best new eye candy. :)
  • The analog stick steering is certainly evolved from the first PCARS, for better and worse. It's still "PC sim style" and not quite as helpful as it could be, but it retains its flexibility to suit different playstyles and the countersteer boost is a lot smarter, which was the biggest thing PCARS1 needed.
  • Rallycross was an invaluable addition to the game for me, I love the tracks, and they're extra fun in cars that weren't strictly intended for them, like the 2002 Turbo.
  • It's hard not to bounce around trying different cars and tracks! :)
 
Robbks
So reading the cliffnotes,

FFB is still a massive pain in the backside to get it to feel anywhere near accurate,
with a thousand different settings that no-one understands. For a casual gamer with maybe 1/2 an hour a day to play, it's not worth my cash.
where other games (Dirt Rally, GT) just feel "right" or close to it, out of the box,
add a few tweaks to suit your style and you're away.
Click to expand...

Our FFB is all fed from physics. Every car will feed differently to the user and a lot of users don't expect that. But 'massive pain' I don't think so. There are three easy presets that 95% of the users find already good enough for them. Games that abstract the FFB and use canned effects will 'homogenise' the feel for each car giving something generally pleasing easily but that's entirely inaccurate.
 
Like some things: better graphics especially in replay, larger "better" car count, some menu options are better, more variety of settings.
Dislike: So far after a few days of casual play not overall impressed, meaning have not experience that wow factor. Really disappointed in the default driving views on PS4, in PC1 they were really great (hopefully settings and seat adjustments make better). Since of speed seems less compared to PC1. So far on the limited tracks that I have done, environment, sun shinning (glare) etc do not seem as good as PC1. The physics (I am sure) after more time, getting decent car settings and more tuning of settings in general I am sure will be better than PC1. Oh yea really disappointed in the A.I. crashes at the start of the race and into the first turn, got rear ended and punted bad on some standing starts. Also seen A.I. send other A.I. cars flipping upside down in the air. The crashed were bad in PC1 also, just not as bad. Shake my head how some of these things are not fixed by the middle stages of development. Do not like the smaller car icons on car selection either and the livery choices are in general not that appealing. Still overall "once you find decent wheel or controller" settings the game is still perhaps better then any other race games for the overall combination of what the game consist of. Track select is really great, although at least at entry level my preference is the medium length tracks.
 
Also to anyone....I would recommend just enjoy the game at you own pace and settings. This is way different then GT series and Forza series. I like that there are a many options to enjoy project cars at your own pace and skill level.
 

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