After some more time with the controller, I totally agree with this. There is a profound difference between the physics for wheel, controller, and keyboard.
Keyboard is extremely simplified, it’s an arcade game when played this way.
Controller is simplified relative to a wheel, but much more complex than keyboard. We might term it “simcade”, in that it requires a higher rate of providing inputs than a keyboard and you have to do more things that relate to how a car is driven in real life. But it’s still assisted, with the game interpreting your inputs more as a high level instruction that it does on your behalf, rather than you directly controlling the car. You see this most easily with drifting, where it seems to use the steering inputs to mean that you want to increase or decrease the angle you’re drifting at, rather than relating to directly controlling the front wheels of the car. So the player tells the game “give me more angle”, and the game takes care of the hard work of what has to be done to achieve that. That’s not to say that the controller is OP relative to a wheel for lap times. You simply cannot steer as accurately as you can with a wheel, and the game does a reasonable job of making the assists about the right strength to cancel this out. It IS OP for drifting, though, compared to a wheel.
The wheel is the most complex, and when using a wheel, I feel the game can be broadly regarded as a sim. I have played other games that are generally regarded as sims, such as AC and ACC, and I cannot discern any major difference in how cars drive with a wheel in these games. If anything, I feel that all these games actually have fake difficulty compared to driving a real car, though I’ve never driven anything like a GT3 race car, for example, to know what that is like in real life. I have driven a Honda Civic Type R, and raced a go kart, and both those are very easy to drive in real life, it’s very easy to feel when you’re on the limit of grip in the real world because the unevenness of the road surface causes the car to start alternating between small losses of traction, and gripping. With experience you learn to relate this to the speed you’re going at, and the g-force you can feel. You don’t get any of this in a game, so it really needs to provide some assists to compensate for being unable to feel these things, and I think sims often don’t really get this right.
I feel that the keyboard is over-assisted, in that I think if people practice a lot with it and become instinctive in mapping what their brain wants to achieve to what their fingers need to do, it might well be OP, as it provides a level of stability over bumpy terrain that is totally different to what you have with even a controller. There are no inputs the player can realistically provide with a controller or wheel to achieve the same stability. When I use a controller, I use it a lot like a keyboard anyway, tapping the stick in a binary fashion to module steering. I think if someone made a binary controller that presents as a keyboard, so the stick movements just send keypresses, it would be totally OP, as you’d have the super-assisted keyboard physics combined with the intuitive mapping of finger and thumb movements that you get with a controller. Even more OP would be a wheel and pedal set that has binary function and presents as a keyboard, as you’d get the benefit of moving throttle and brake use to the feet.
The controller gets the balance between input device awkwardness and level of assist approximately right. I tried it with the Jaguar I-PACE monthly rivals, and I think I did shave a bit off my wheel time, and the car is a LOT easier to drive with a controller than it is with a wheel, but ultimately it didn’t result in me doing a much faster time. I’d expect the car to drive in real life much more like it drives with a controller rather than the wheel behaviour where it constantly tries to cause a fatal accident. With a controller, you can make it slide a bit, but it’s a mild slide that only scrubs a little speed off, and it’s easy to bring the car back. With a wheel it’s extremely hard to steer the right amount to find the limit of grip, and very easy to cause a major slide that will scrub a lot of speed off, and it’s very hard to bring the car back from it, it’s much slower to get back to full traction. It isn’t ultimately slower, because obviously my best lap with the wheel was one where I successfully avoided doing that at any point, but the difficulty of achieving that is much greater.
Overall, I feel that the 3 input methods are so different in the physics used that the leaderboards should show what each person used, and allow filtering by input method.
Incidentally, johniwanna streams on the Forza Twitch each Wednesday to try the game’s new car out in rivals. The stream’s title includes #wheelandpedalweds, but he uses a controller. I asked him why he wasn’t using a wheel, and he said he’s just much faster with a controller.
