Many people still don't know GT has helpers like Forza Horizon. How it is possible? They think car drives almost on its own? Hard to say.
If you take a car up to 60mph in an airport parking lot, introduce oversteer, and then lift your hands, the steering wheel will spin around instead of just snapping to straight ahead. Is the car driving almost on its own? No. It's
self-aligning torque.
The countersteer function in
Project CARS 3 is inarguably more realistic than raw steering snapping to a zero value every time the analog stick is released. The exact details of its implementation could be different, better, or worse, but the basic phenomenon is not "casual". It's
real.
On the other hand, we're also talking about videogames, here. 1:1 control is not typically how you control anything with a gamepad in videogames. Videogame controls are most often
interpretive -- you press a button, and the game interprets it as an intention to jump; you pull a trigger button, and the game interprets it as both an intention to pull the trigger of your gun
and to operate its bolt-action handle to ready the next round; you tilt the analog stick, and the game interprets it as an intention to climb a ladder.
Videogames are not all
QWOP or
Manual Samuel, and for good reason.
In sims, the comparison to R/C cars I've made before is valid enough, but maybe people aren't looking for an experience like driving a really massive RC car -- maybe they want an experience like when they're driving a
regular car, or using a FFB wheel.
If I tap the analog stick to the right for an instant, I most likely
do not intend to snap the steering rack all the way to the right for an instant, even if that's what an R/C car would try to do, because I'm not driving a virtual R/C car; I'm driving a virtual full-size car. Tapping the stick is a gesture to be interpreted, much like double-tapping to initiate a sprint or dodge roll in an action game. What I most often mean by tapping the stick is this: "I need to make a small course correction, and
I do not have a lot of time to finesse it."
Racing and driving at speed are primarily a matter of picking a line, monitoring your trajectory and rotation, monitoring where your wheels are, managing weight transfer, engine RPM and gear, turbo pressure, etc. You don't really spend a lot of thought on exactly how much you want to turn the wheel. It does not take much thought to know that you most often don't want to slam the steering all the way to the end of the rack. There are more important things to be focusing on.
The art of race driving is on a higher level, and I believe a sim should do what it can to keep you in that mental space -- not thinking about fiddly steering.
Therefore, it is appropriate for a racing sim -- at any level of realism -- to be able to interpret a player's input and use common sense to determine that the player probably only desires a certain amount of steering, even if the analog stick is tilted all the way. In short, it's simply not as challenging to avoid excessive inputs with a FFB wheel or in a real car as it is with 1:1 analog stick control. A sim should not demand players to rise to that unrealistic challenge. It's artificial.
Once again, it does not hurt for a sim to offer 1:1 steering as a choice. Programming-wise, I can tell you it is utterly trivial. Input -> Output. But expecting the game to interpret steering, like videogames interpret so many other things, is not "casual", and it is not an "assist" per se. If it is inadequate at the task, it is open to criticism.
(yeah, I’m late to the party)
Both Gran Turismo and Forza are more stable than a PCARS game as a result of their handling physics and the "help" they provide purely on the physics level, not only differences in steering control.
