Is everything just faster?

I just got online and knocked out 2 full seconds off my laptime in Brazil with the viper, did the update make driving easier?

 

Yep more grip and much easier to drive it seems!

 

The big question is will it close the gap to the aliens? Or maybe it will increase it.

 

Damn, that's a shame. I was liking that driving wasn't easy in the game and made me want to "Do better". The constant wussification of the world has made gaming, well, boring.

 

It’s not about wussification necessarily but perhaps a move towards greater realism in that difficult to drive is not realistic apparently.

 

I think it will just mean a different type of challenge. whatever level of difficulty it is the challenge will always be trying to find the extra time and pushing your own limits. Maybe you will now have to adapt where and how you push.

 

It's a good easier for my liking and it feels Awesome driving

Well done and Thanks to PD!

 

I always tho

My " real " basic old 1999 WRX daily drive was easier to get around in than the super cars in the game. Increasing difficulty via poor handling does not make a SIM more realistic...............IMHO.

 

Glad to know I'm not crazy. I tested for a short time and it felt so much more natural at the limit. I really need to go to bed but this update is very interesting...

 

Looking forward to getting on GTS when my wife goes to bed. I better check that the update has downloaded onto my machine!

 

It is easy to say the game is easier when you are not chasing alien times. I really want to try is and find out for myself.

 

Now you can download the top 10 ghosts and race against them properly. Just in case you didn't know

 

I view alien times as the reference. No matter how good i feel my lap time is they go to prove there is always more to be found. I feel great if i can within 3-5 seconds. For me they are motivation.

 

To be honest I'll agree that games in general are becoming easier in order to appease new gamers or pull more casual gamers into games previously only played by enthusiasts. But, I still think that driving in this game should stay challenging. I would argue and say that driving in Project Cars 2 is a lot more challenging than here, but that's because PC2 is targeted more towards steering wheel set-ups rather than controller.
I hope PD keeps this game challenging enough for people like us who want more of a challenge.

 

Its hard to believe sometimes. 3-4 sec off top 10 is a very very good lap for me

 

Good to hear, so, with TCS off, are the cars more manageable putting power down, or in a slight skid?
Did the update fix the 'exponential' throttle map?

 

Yeah, I struggled with a 2:05 time on Panorama with the F-Type before and now I got a 2:04 without a problem. However, I seem to lose slight control of the back-end going uphill, which has never happened before. Gonna do some more laps on other tracks to try to come to some conclusion.

 

AC has the best physics of any sim I've played, and the cars in that are definitely "easier" to drive than they were in GTsport. It's not so much down to the actual handling physics (weight transfer, downforce all that jazz) but down to the tyre model. The tyre models even for racing tyres were not good in GTsport before this up date.
People really need to stop thinking difficult equals realistic.
The Stig (Ben Collins) said if driving was as difficult in real life as it was in sims he'd have been dead a long time ago.
My lap times in the same cars in AC are a lot quicker than they are in GTsport, no one ever accused AC of being easy.

 

Wow this update really killed any difficulty at all, I mean I golded most of the missions and all of the driving school already.
But I just went and tried Stage 8-4 as I hadn't tried it yet and I beat the gold time by a whole 10 seconds and I could have gone a whole heck of a lot faster if I knew the track better.

 

Its not only the "physics" that make the difference.You need to put FFB in there too.
When you have a good combination of those and physics are really good,its "easier" to drive a car (if you know what you are doing).

 

exactly my thoughts

 

I think you guys might have missed my point. What I was trying to say it is easy to think a car is easy to drive until you realise you are driving it slow and when you start trying to drive it fast and realise it is hard to drive fast. It always humours me when slow guys say something is too easy to drive, well driving a real car slow is also easy, now try driving fast without crashing and tell me how hard that is. When they realise they are slow and start to try to go fast the next complaint you hear is that "at the limit" the cars are not realistic.

So I like to take what people say with a large dose of salt.

 

That was exactly the point I was trying to make so I obviously didn't explain myself well enough That however easy you think it is there is always time to make and it is only by seeing what is possible through the aliens times that you realise how much more you have to find.

By comparing my times to the aliens it has forced me to push myself into using fewer assists (now i only have ABS on default) and to learn to modulate the throttle and to use trail braking for example. It is this quest to find as much time as possible and improve my style that is satisfying.

 

The only thing that closes the gap to aliens is a shorter track or an increase in skill level. Tire grip levels will make no difference given the same effort.

 

good I'm enjoying trying to push myself.

I am probably going to get shot down but I am not overly concerned about how realistic or otherwise the game phsyics model is. As long as cars aren't flying or driving sideways then I am OK with it. I just care if it is challenging me to improve and if I am enjoying it. And so far I am loving it.

 

I was driving around in the Shelby Cobra at the Streets of Willow this morning and that thing was a real handful on hard sports tires.

My largest gripe with the driving in this game is that it was incredibly hard to powerslide in road cars compared to previous entries. I hope they fixed that in this update.

Edit: I just read they reworked sports tires to increase grip.

Also, who remembers back in the day when GT5's racing tires turned any car into an ultra-grip machine that drove on rails?

 

Increase. (I say this because the likelihood of them crashing to far reduced. The ragged edge is now smooth as silk).

They broke the game IMHO. I set a 8:53 in the corvette GR3 road car at Nurb 24 over the weekend. Today, I thought the grip was WAY different so I tried it. I was (I'm guessing) 5 seconds ahead by half a lap. I crashed, spun, corrected myself (at the hairpin before the climb up the hill on the back section), and got underway before the ghost caught me. I caught the ghost again before the right hander at the bottom of the hill before the first carousel. That's INSANE.

This is why we can't have nice things. The hamfisted gripe and then the game gets altered to be an arcade game again. What's the point? Where did the skill go? Now it's just hammer the brakes and hammer the throttle. This just encourages bad driving. If it were a very, very, very slight change, then I wouldn't mind so much but this change makes it a completely different game (again my opinion).

Also, great work on the car balance (NOT). The Scirocco on Lago Maggiore is 2 seconds faster than most other cars in my garage. I qualified my Scirocco at a 2:05:5. My previous best qualifying was with the Viper at a 2:09:5 (ya, I could have done better). I raced with the Genesis and the Lexus and ran high 2:07's low 2:08's

Terrible, terrible, terrible change.

 

Absolutely, it's the whole thing put together. Driving a real car there's a whole slew of sensations that (mostly) help, which are impossible for us to get from a sim (assuming we can't afford kick-ass motion rigs). But even so, driving on the limit takes experience and skill levels which most people don't have.

I think it's disengenuous to say anything like "... if driving was as difficult in real life as it was in sims ... ", since most sims are a doddle to drive at 95% pace. And frankly that's irrelevant to driving as close to 100% as possible.

I don't want to get into arguing over that, rather to think on what sims do to compensate for the lack of feedback. For example PCars tries to cram extra information into the wheel's FFB, while GT smooths out the physics with unseen aids. Neither is 'realistic', and very different approaches, but I think the intent is the same - to make it more likely you could match a real racers pace.

Of course bugs and flaws get in the way as well, but that's another matter, and often different from car to car as well.

Before the update I took the 458 road car out for a spin with default setup and tires... it was tricky-ish, but it was a hoot to drift and I'm not one for drifting!

 

So, I went and finished the Nurb lap.

Corvette GR3 Road Car, RS tires, from a standing start. Saturday I ran an 8:53.6 and I was trying to be as smooth as I could. I think I could have gone faster...maybe a second or so. Now, same car, same set up (EXACTLY), from a standing start, I ran a scruffy 8:46.3.

I was flat in corners that used to require balance!!!

It reminded me of driving cheater cars in GT6. The fun is gone. It's just GT6 again. This change goes WAY WAY WAY too far.

Time will tell, but before, I started races in the A/S group knowing there was a good chance that someone in front of me would crash all the while focusing on that crasher not being me! Now, you really need to be playing with your feet to screw up (no offense to those players playing with their feet on the regular).

Update from several days later: Fine, the sky isn't falling, but even though I agree that the braking and acceleration needed some tweaks, I still lament the loss of the balancing act mid corner.

 

You're running race soft tyres. Grp3 & 4 on line is race hard.