GR Racing Thread - now under new (F1) management

I don't know how popular an annualized sim would be anyway. Don't these games take a while after launch to continue tweaking, and then for a lot of them the modding scene is hugely important to the players, and doubt they'd be eager to have everything wiped clean every 12 months.

Sorry for the double post. F1 2021 arrived yesterday and after letting it download the Series X for most of the day, I played around for a couple of hours last night, just doing a short practice, quali and race (25% distance) at Silverstone.

I'm not the best person to be getting impressions off, as the only other F1 game I've played in the last decade was 2019, and that was a quick play through of a season with everything set to the shortest time possible, but there was definitely a nice jump in the visuals, which I don't think I've really seen mentioned much in the 2021 coverage. Sure, it's not really using the Series X to anywhere near full capacity, but it looks very nice. The second biggest stand out was the crashes do look spectacular. I had a pretty big pile up in my race, and checking Reddit, there were a lot of videos of similar scenes. You almost wonder if they've done it on purpose to show off the new damage model and will be patching to tone it down in the coming weeks as I hardly remember seeing any crashes in 2019. Finally, I set it to whatever the medium option was for difficulty, and then turned off almost all the assists, but left the AI at whatever the game had decided was medium, and it's way too easy. I was nowhere near perfect during quali but got pole by a clear 4 seconds. So yeah, if you're even remotely experienced with the games, crank that AI right up.

You could easily spend hundreds of hours in the game if you want to. Part of me kind of wants to do a season using full race distance, but that's probably a hundred hours without even taking qualifications and practice sessions into account. I also want to play through the new story mode, and would really like to do multiple seasons of My Team.

Have you watched Drive to Survive on Netflix? Braking Point seems very much in that style so I’d be interested to hear how alike they are. I didn’t really get on with the My Team career in the 2020 game, just prefer the standard career. I really hope the 2022 game isn’t on PS4/Xbox One family of consoles as I always feel with the cross gen games they could do a lot more. Cheers for the first impressions though, I’ll just be waiting for a decent sale before getting it.

I have watched DTS yeah. I'll probably be diving into Breaking Point over the weekend (and I'll certainly be picking Racing Point/Aston Martin!). I thought some of the trailers for it looked a bit cheesy. Every other shot felt like it was the two team mates crashing into each other, and the crashes just looked so odd. I think I saw a review mention that there are 'cinematic on track scenes' that look worse than actual in game stuff.

With EA now in charge, I'm sure we'll see it still on PS4/Xbox One, but hopefully it's like the FIFA Legacy edition, and it's just reskinning this game for those platforms, so it doesn't effect the next-gen version.

It’ll be interesting to see how the F1 series develops under EA as they’ve said they’re not planning on making too many changes to how they’re made currently. A legacy edition would be a good idea but not sure it’d translate well at all to a racing title where how the cars handle and feel are one of the selling points unlike football where well, it’s just football so team and kit updates are a viable option. When I get it I’ll be doing the braking point and then diving into a F2/F1 career mode, with Aston Martin naturally, midfield teams are the best way to enjoy the Codemasters F1 game’s especially with how the upgrades have worked the past few years.

Publisher Electronic Arts and developer Codemasters have announced GRID Legends for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It will launch in 2022.

“GRID Legends combines everything our players love and adds more exhilarating race features, including our new epic story mode,” said GRID Legends director Chris Smith in a press release. “We’re giving players more variety and choice, whether that’s creating their ultimate races using our race creator or bringing back the community-requested Drift mode. This is just the start of the journey, and we can’t wait to reveal more in the coming months.”

I wish they would stop trying to shoehorn stories into racing games; they have always been super contrived and "greetings fellow kids" in execution.

It's a complete turn off for me (hello context) and I won't buy a racing game with that shite in, full stop. It's bad enough with stuff like Dirt 5's dudebro in game podcast, but at least you can mute that. To have the narrative of a race defined by a story isn't what I want - I want to be fighting against certain cars (admittedly, if they're named then it helps to get more pissed off and determined to beat them, see flatout games for an example) and have my own race dictate my outcome. I need X points, so I need to finish 2 places ahead of the yellow car, and so on.

All began with TOCA Race Driver on PS2 back in 2002, did it not? In which case Codemasters would have been pushing this story stuff on and off now for almost 2 decades despite it always being average at best.

Victor Mildew wrote:I want to be fighting against certain cars (admittedly, if they're named then it helps to get more pissed off and determined to beat them, see flatout games for an example)

Jack Benton and Sofia Martinez :evil:

Ravenwest were the big bad in the original grid and you hardly saw them, but when you did they were tough as nails, which made the story organically, not through cutscenes. As with the previous grid, I may pick this up when the ultimate edition is about £7 on cdkeys.com or somewhere like that, but possibly not even then.

Thankfully these story aspects, while a the main marketing aspect of the games haven’t become the main mode. I buy racing games just to go racing, not for a huge, in depth story mode.

I will be playing/trying braking point whenever F1 2021 goes on sale though :shifty:

Now it's cooled off a bit I've been spending some evenings on my pc playing some racing games.

Played a fair bit of Dirt 2.0, it's bastard hard, but unmatched currently with how utterly on the edge you feel when going full pelt through a forest or something. Just dancing on the pedals hoping to god you don't bin it!

Been time trailing a lot on ACC, it's very very consistent.

Will be going back to iracing too, as this requires long sessions that I just couldn't stand in the heat.

including our new epic story mode

Why? Who asks for these story modes? Why put so much development time and effort into something that I imagine most serious racing fans don't care about?

I found the press Q&A's, pretend agents and chief mechanics as your best mate bullshit in the F1 series as cringe as the dude bro stuff from Dirt.

Forza Motorsport 7 being delisted September 15th, on massive discount sale until then

Worth picking this up before it becomes literally impossible to do so, at least on PC with all the extras?

Yeah I'd say so, the does a games are pretty good fun, and not too difficult in a Gran turismo way, so you don't need to be some sim pro or have unwavering concentration to enjoy them.

I spent the evening time trailing on dirt rally 2. Bumper cam in the top spec cars going full pelt for 7 miles is something :dread:

I know it’ll be to do with licensing (well I assume it is, why else would it be delisted?) but Microsoft delisting Forza Motorsport 7 means you won’t actually be able to buy a Forza Motorsport game on their digital store till FM8 comes out at some point, hopefully in the near future. I’m just going to wait out for that one personally.

Trelliz wrote:Forza Motorsport 7 being delisted September 15th, on massive discount sale until then

Worth picking this up before it becomes literally impossible to do so, at least on PC with all the extras?

Cheers for the heads-up Trelliz. Not fussed about the DLC so I grabbed the standard version. £7.49

I don't own any of the mainline Forza titles so for under £8 why not grab this while I can.

Had a good session on iracing yesterday. I picked a practice session, which is really a single make track day, 45 minute open session. Managed to get second place on the timesheet by the end of the session, which I was pretty happy with, as the person in first had quite a high licence rating. Had a few scruffy low speed spins early on, but settled in to a nice groove and was able to lap retty consistently for most of it. The thing I really like about it, is that becuase it's all official with real people only, you have the feeling of a real event - people move out of your way on fast laps, obey flag rules, pit to find space for themselves with fresh tyres, things like that.

Finally lost my patience with Dirt 4; the random generated tracks are a interesting idea but as a result they are completely unmemorable and uninteresting to drive. Got up to the final of the main career rally mode and they just up the difficulty by having every stage at night/in the rain which is ridiculous; I got really bored of crashing on yet another identikit route in Australia in the middle of the night and just didn't care anymore, especially not to stick around to do more of the same in the historic rallying stuff all over again.

EDIT: Tried Dirt Rally 2 and realised I am no way hardcore enough for that, so will come crawling back to dirt 4 which seems to be as far as I can go in terms of serious rally business.

Dirt rally 2 is pretty hard-core, but you can always turn damage off etc if you like. When you're in the zone, it's amazing. When you strawberry float up, it's really annoying!

Another good session on iracing this evening. Still hanging about in the practice sessions as I feel I need to be on top of the tracks and cars I have before I take on races. Slowly getting more pace now, and this time I managed to get 2nd on the time sheet. Here's the lap I did it with, and although it looks boring, I assure you at several points in the slow corners, I nearly lost it (this car spins badly when down shifting at low speed so I found it better to stay in 3rd). This lap was great because I intentionally got close to this quick guy in front, just close enough to get a small tow all around but not close enough to be a distraction. You can see me clawing back time here and there all along (the times are in the bottom left, and my overall position is bottom right).

Edit: excuse the shitty frame rate. I was playing at 144fps, it captured at 60, the when I trimmed the video it cut it down to sub 30 I think

GR Racing Thread - now under new (F1) management

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