I’m not a fan of Cross Country races as it it, but this year it’s such a pain racing in them. It seems like the theme for this year’s CC races was something along the lines of ‘big jumps whenever possible, wherever possible’.
Cool in theory? Translates pretty terribly in practise. The jumps feel so random when you’re travelling flat out. The slightest bit out of line with the ramp, or contact with another driver (which happens virtually all the time), and you’ll go flying off in some dodgy angle. Oh, and to make things even worse, Playground Games seem to like putting checkpoints right at the bottom of the jumps, exacerbating every non-perpendicular jump.
Offline isn’t much better. The drivatars will hit the ramp perfectly flat out every time it seems. I spent so long trying to beat unbeatable AI on the Quarry circuit CC race- that ridiculous jump at the end has a bumpy entry making a perfect jump so hard at high speed, and unless you hit the angle juuuuust right, you’ll go flying off into the quarry wall on the corner just after the jump. And of course they’ve put 2 sets of checkpoints right at the buttom.
Every car seems to react differently to each jump too. Sometimes my car will inexplicably land on it’s front, other times it’ll lead back and butcher the landing no matter what. But you can be sure that the AI’s Renault Clio or Austin Healey will land it spot on every time.
Dirt races are great, cross country races were bearable in FH3, but this year they’re just so OTT. Some of the courses feel like we’re on a bouncy castle.
About the only times I rolled or got spun out by the jumps in FH4 was when I was doing the races in the utterly unsuitable Peel P50, and even then it was infrequent. Puddles and fences were more of a problem in that car. In FH3 it was a different story as jumps often resulted in nosing up or down, and spinning out if it was one of the little paved hops in the mining area. The only tip I can give you other than try to hit the jumps square is to let off the gas before you land. If this were FH3 I might also say that if you find a jump causes you to nose up, tap the brakes as you’re coming off of it.
You also can’t play the cross country races with realistic damage on, because the big jumps damage the car. Your top speed and handling go to crap after the first one, even if you land it properly.
I’m not a fan of the jumptastic cross country races either. They weren’t fun in FH2 or FH3 and they still aren’t fun in FH4. Same reasons as mentioned above, it’s very difficult to properly line up many of the jumps between the bouncy terrain and the terrible AI drivers pushing you around. Many of the jumps if not lined up perfectly (like the one in the quarry) will completely ruin your race. Rewind is the only thing that makes these races playable for me.
Can’t wait for the route creator to make some proper cross-country races that don’t involve unnecessary jumps.
Yup, not a fan of the races where you cannot have simulation damage turned on and that’s all the cross country races with massive jumps.
Will also echo that steering wheel use can be very rough on these races.
Side comment that the dirt racing series has LOTs of long straights on sealed roads. So much so that you are mostly better off building or bringing a car that is suited for tarmac and top speed rather than grip on dirt.
Also both road racing long form races (Goliath and Colossus) have water sections for some reason?!?
I too am looking forward to the route creator to make race routes that are more suited to racing with Sim damage on or otherwise match the cars that will be racing on them.
Let me phrase it like this… if you do a big jump and you race on “unbeatable” and you are a teeny, tiny bit off with your landing or flight or whatever, you will rewind or lose the race. So yeah, it is mega annoying
I play on pro/unbeatable for road racing, and I used to have to set the drivatars to highly skilled for anything that has off-road in it when I’m playing offline. The drivatars are tanks in off-road races, especially if there’s a giant pool of water you have to cross along with a lot of the big jumps like you said.
There’s really only two times I can play on unbeatable in cross country races without falling victim to awkwardly placed jumps and drivatars that basically cheat:
When I basically just say screw it and be a [Mod Edit] with notoriously monstrous cars like the Lancia 037 or the Hoonigan Focus RS RX. Change the diff settings, bump stiffness and the height of the cars and the game becomes a joke. It sucks because I like variation and I think those two cars just dominate their classes, imo. (Usually set the ride height of cars 1-4 clicks below the maximum depending on high the vehicle is)
Is when I spend literal hours tuning a car for cross country specific races. The gearing being the biggest culprit as to why these jumps are impossible to recover from if you mess up the angle. Trying to do cross country in S1/S2 is just madness, AWD is necessary 9 times out of 10 unless you purposefully gimp yourself by messing with your diff acceleration for a RWD car. Ride height is such a big issue when it comes to landing these stupid jumps it’s ridiculous. The diff turn in under braking or acceleration + a bottomed out car after landing takes a long time to fix with a tune, and a lot of time spent driving the car. Slightly annoying but thank god for Adderall.
I also didn’t buy this game to race against drivatars in offline mode, so they don’t really bother me if they’re OP. A 15% CR hit for lowering the difficulty isn’t anything to really gripe about to be honest. But I do feel your pain.
But when I actually think about it, you should be forced to use the best cars with the best tunes in order to compete on unbeatable.