Spent two or three hours on DriveClub tonight. It looks amazing, end of.
As for the bad reviews, I suspect they were contrived deliberately. The general discontent appears to centre around poor AI, being rammed off the road and being punished for leaving the track or colliding with other cars.
Well what they don't tell you is that it doesn't affect the results at all, only your level up score and that in itself is really smart. As you play the game you have a score at the top of the screen. This goes up for everything you do well (drifting, high speed, cornering accuracy. overtaking etc.) and down for everything you don't do well (bumping other vehicles too heavily, bumping the scenery to hard). You only get penalised for cutting corners too heavily on the track races (as you would in real life). So if you drive like a dick, you will level up really slowly. If you don't drive like a dick you can finish 10th every race and still level up and unlock cars really quickly. It does everything they said it would do to appease casual gamers.
But here's the really unjust thing about the reviews. If you learn how to balance brake and accelorator and most importantly when to turn in, you won't get rammed, bumped or penalised. It is the perfect blend of simulation and arcade in my opinion. Again, as the developers proclaimed it would be.
The comments about poor AI are also utter nonsense and are based around being "rammed" and "shunted". As I just explained, it's deliberate not poor AI. If for example you ram them, they sometimes retaliate if you don't put clear air between yoursf and them. And the clever thing about the penalty system, is that when you have rammed somebody too hard or cut a corner by too much, the penalty flashes on the screen and your engine sounds like it is misfiring for 2-3 seconds. This is enough to let the effected player take his place back. But if he is right up your jacksie when it misfires, he will sometimes shunt you from behind. Tough luck, what goes around comes around! It is also clever in that you are penalised for being hit by other cars if you are deemed to be "all over the show". If you swerve across the track so that hitting you is unavoidable, you get penalised, not the person you cut up. Now I will admit that every so often you do feel like you didn't cut the corner very much and still got penalised, but it seems to depend on whether or not you gain any track advantage from your little excursion. But remember, all of this has very little effect on your race, only the speed on which you level up
The AI itself is superb and better than in any other racing game I have ever played. I have found myself preferring the circuits, as the racing is like high adrenaline touring car or club racing. If you've ever played TOCA Touring Cars and enjoyed the pack racing, this blows it out of the water with physics and visuals. But what it really needs is playing with friends, something none of the reviewers (nor me until the UK servers are up and running, tomorrow hopefully) can comment on.
I'm not comparing with Forza or anything else, but the decision to go with huge texture detail was the right one. It of course isn't photo realistic. But it is so well done, that when you are immersed in the race, every now and then you could be forgiven for feeling like you rely are at Knockhill.
DriveClub has balanced sim and arcade beautifully in my opinion and I reckon a dcent wheel and pedals is the least the game deserves. Check out the free version when it arrives.
Pages in this thread: 
Print Thread
deleted
