My thoughts after a couple hours so far
- When joining a ranked race, you can register, but then have to wait for qualy to start, what the hell? No practice, not even by myself?
- Social races are dumb, defeats the purpose of it being social by having 10mins of qualifying. I only had time for a single race in between server restarts, and spent 10mins in the MX-5 perfecting my time, only to get yeeted in the first lap causing my engine to blow up and I was stuck in the middle of the track, getting DQ'd.
- Social vs Ranked seems poorly thought out, they should all be ranked, but varying lengths, if someone wants to do something social, let them create a lobby, also seems like there are too many race classes going on at once, Forza made this mistake, even GT7 with it's massive fan-base knows to keep things succinct to funnel the player base into wide matchmaking pools.
- It's basically a requirement to turn damage off in single player due to the AI being too aggressive
- Damage from door banging is too much, it should really just be superficial, with the aggressive AI you can barely get a lap in before your car can't point straight anymore.
- I actually quite enjoyed the physics in some of the cars that others have found bad, it feels like I can catch oversteer before it snaps, and even though the collision physics feel off, it feels like I can have a bit of door banging without getting spun, just a shame about the abovementioned damage model.
- Default views are fine, but I would like to be able to change the position of the bonnet/roof cam's, one is too high and one is too low for my tastes.
- Needs an option to disable the steering wheel in cockpit view
- Graphics are an obvious mixed bag, I managed to get mine running mostly over 60fps, but the time of day cycle is really jarring, sunset feels very strange. I'd also like some more control on graphics settings, I don't particularly care for the lush grass, would rather disable it and get those render cycles back.
- The game needs a radar, with the way the AI is I had so many instances where an AI was side by side and just rams me on straights like I don't exist, plus some of them get yeeted and you have no idea if they are still there or not.
- telemetry looks like it doesn't have any signals for other car positions, which I guess means a 3rd party radar will be impossible.
Overall, I went in with low expectations, but as others have pointed out, it's even worse than I feared, with all the talk of the dev's on discord warning folks away from grey market key site's, plus the price increase in the last few weeks (when they obviously knew the game was not up to snuff), it makes me happy I got the game at a steep discount on cdkeys instead of the insane price on steam.
I'm going to focus a bit on the modding aspects, I'll spend my racing time elsewhere in the meantime while I wait for the MP experience to improve, which is a huge shame, I was hoping this game would provide a decent service for those in less populated timezones, but I guess back to GT7 I go until then.
How are you finding the handling on controller on PS5? Anything to adjust out the box.
