Watching the latest monthly with Chris Esaki using the steering wheel and mid-race describing it as a “safety lap” showed that even the game developers find it difficult, looking a little flustered afterwards too.
Rather than just turn on all the assists, would it be possible to make slightly easier versions of tracks, including real world tracks? Also making harder versions for the hard core who may want even more of a challenge?
It’s possibly an easy route to effectively more tracks/environments and it comes under improving accessibility, and may appeal to more casual gamers.
When racing some real world tracks I notice it’s only a few of the much harder corners where I end up skidding off into the barriers, mainly as I don’t slow down in time, but what if designers changed the track about a bit, to make it easier, or faster even? Altering the harder sections to make them easier, maybe make some chicanes less intense with less of a curve?
It would surely reduce frustration for beginners, who can increase the track design difficulty up to the real track layout and even beyond as they become better at the game. When looking at achievements for so many different racing games there seems to be a lot of players who don’t make it to reaching even some fairly basic ones, which suggests maybe racing games are too hard. This might help to automatically start users who pick their ‘first timer/beginner/amateur/semi-pro/pro/alien’ etc level before first play stay involved with the game for longer.
Some car types might even favour faster or more technical versions of tracks even if they aren’t quite the full real world track, which may extend the fun and length of time people spend with the game trying different modes or challenging online races on them.
Yeah it’s the less good drivers I’m talking about, I reckon even oval circuits could be made easier with the right track design enabling it - steeper banking, possibly even to the point at the side where you could just about drive on the barriers without bouncing off them/damaging your car on the outside, and making the insides of corners allow for bigger cuts.
Obviously some would consider it arcade gaming, but a lot of the Horizon players or younger/less experienced players might appreciate it while learning without being in a fully automatic mode.
For the hardcore simmers, make even more adverse gradients where they wouldn’t want them at the most difficult corkscrew turns, narrower tracks, extra tight chicanes etc.
Naturally I’d simply prefer more tracks personally, but the surroundings for the ones already in the game will already be there, this should just be some extra tweaking for a different experience for different players.
I am all for increasing accessibility, and have argued for it in previous posts already.
But as others have replied, track layouts do not change based on driver skill levels. That is what the already included assist are for; to help players become more comfortable driving and as they grow in skill they can then remove assists they no longer want/need.
No one should feel bad about using assists as they learn how to drive. And certain sections of tracks that one may find difficult can be thought of as a challenge. Those corners are part of the process of growing one’s skills.
I would agree that we need as many varied layouts of the circuits we will have in the game if only to prevent boredom. But those alternate layouts are merely to add variety not not to make any particular track more or less difficult.
Nardo Ring in Italy, Milbrook Proving Ground in England. Probably some others, but these two have lanes where if you maintain a set speed, the vehicle steers itself.
I don’t think many if any real racing cars have the accessibility assists available in-game, that’s my point, this isn’t real and anything is possible to stop putting first time players off by making things too hard. When looking at the figures for how few gamers bother with sims compared to the number of gamers there are maybe this is why? Might not be, but it could be worth a shot to try and create a more fun racing game, without the ridiculousness of the modern, default, open-world racing games of today.
Track layouts in the real world do change, so why not in-game, they will already in this game with the historical variants. This is effectively the same idea, but in the interest of say making the hardest parts of a track easier, or bypassing them altogether.
Ultimately, if they create a track editor we could try and make tracks based off of the existing ones if they allow that, or create a clone, and change things to make it say easier/faster, or more technical/slower/harder.
Ovals being made easier was an example, just stating what we wouldn’t really expect, could be done in the name of accessibility to reach a greater audience, which could then generate much more funding for more of everything else…
I guess it could be time consuming, I’m not really sure what flexibility there is after a laser scan, but it looks like UE5 based-games could do such design alterations on the fly, so there’s always hope from the competition, and other future engines if Forza and Microsoft ignore the opportunity.
This seems like it would be an enormous undertaking for relatively little ROI. They would have to adjust the 3D modeling, the texturing, re-train the AI on the new layout, and do whatever other game/penalty system/time calibration is required to deliver a functional track. We already have a massive variety of assists, including a driving line that indicates exactly when to brake and turn.
I wouldn’t want developer resources allocated to this, personally. It’s a huge request for something that can be achieved through existing in-game features.
Just jumping in to say this is silly and pointless and there’s so many actual bugs that still need to be fixed. It’s already been said by others why it’s silly and it’s (almost) a sim so how much handholding do you need, really?