PowerGamer takes a look at the troubled build up and release of highly anticipated racing game Project CARS and the community reaction.
I have a rather fond history with racing games, ranging back from my first console game EVER in the original Gran Turismo. For me, the Playstation lynchpin very much pioneered the genre with a blend of realistic driving and an engaging metagame.
Project CARS has flown slightly under the radar into its release on the 7th of May and whilst initial critical reaction has been good there’s more to the game than meets the eye. Slightly Mad Studios has a decent pedigree of racing game development. Before setting out on their own with a self published slate, the British based development house worked on the Shift titles in the Need for Speed series to good acclaim before working on a more critically received effort in the form of Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends.
With their newest game, Slightly Mad Studios has ridden the wave of community involved development and crowd funding to find the financial backing for their game, similar to Amplitude Studio’s Games2Gether scheme which has been used to great effect on their Endless series of games. In CARS case, Slightly Mad Studios have offered a number of different Tool Kits, ranging from Junior to Senior Manager, granting a variety of different benefits ranging from a discount on the final product to VIP treatment at Track Days and a free copy of the game.
The game has been hyped to hell by the traditional gaming media, gushing over a selection of carefully selected screenshots and footage without providing any sufficient scrutiny with regards to how the game ACTUALLY plays. Luke Plunkett of Kotaku posted a multitude of articles touching on the same topic which, par for the Gawker course, features typically patronizing commentary.
YES LUKE, WE GET IT, IT’S REAL PURTY.
Disenchanted with the lack of objective coverage within the specific genre of driving games and the gaming media at large, a couple of gamers created PretendRaceCars.net at the beginning of the year. They are particularly scathing in their treatment of Project CARS, but not without good reason.
In addition to highlighting the laughable hype efforts of Kotaku as shown above, PRC have also exposed censorship on the Slightly Mad Studio forums, where as far back as the end of January paying customers were having their concerns ignored and belittled by a development team seemingly more interested in lining their own pockets whilst cutting widely requested features.
James of PRC writes:
“The complaints about the current state of Project CARS are very simple: the game was initially marketed and presented as a hardcore racing sim…Recent changes made to Project CARS, such as the numbification of the game’s rather detailed damage model, are not sitting well with the community…
…Users have begun questioning why the game’s comprehensive damage model has been almost entirely removed, as well as basic features required in a racing simulator, like DNF’s, caution flags, and AI that slows down to avoid incidents. SMS developers are now claiming basic features like these, pretty damn essential for a game of this caliber, will be included in “post-release patches.”
As seems inevitable in the current gaming industry, when a crowdfunded campaign or community effort begins to show cracks, there is always a authority figure of some kind who shows up to show utter contempt for those “entitled gamers”, case in point, Dina Karam of Mighty No. 9. In this case, the Slightly Mad Studios Head of Studio, Ian Bell, showed up with some choice words, telling one of the community members to “give it a bloody rest” and palming off a well thought out post by banning a user who raised valid concerns. These individuals were not trolls either, they were people who cared deeply about experiencing the best game possible.
Don’t worry though, Project CARS 2 is already on the horizon, despite some gamers enjoying the “Mark Webber experience” after launch.
“…the pCARS brand which has proven to be so very effective…” – Ian Bell, April 22nd, secretly a Sith Emperor.
Slightly Mad Studios have had to tread carefully to avoid exposing flaws in the development of the console versions of their game, especially the PS4 version, which has experienced extensive issues with graphical artefacts including a “unique approach to per object motion blur”. If a unique approach includes the possibility that my eyes are f***ed I don’t think I’m very keen on it. Instead of fixing the issues outright, SMS made a statement saying that “It’s not a bug. It’s a side effect of the way we do AA on PS4, and is arguably a good thing…if customer feedback demands it, we have a plan to add a UI slider in a future update, which will enable you to tune out the ghosting.”
The PC situation is not much better. AMD graphics cards are getting slaughtered in the performance stakes, with AMD’s top of the line Radeon R9 290X being beaten out by the lowly GTX 660 Ti in certain scenarios. This is being attributed to driver issues with AMD, but it begs the question of why this was not picked up in pre release testing, especially for a game which had such extensive community involvement (were they all kitted up with Geforce cards?)
For many users, driving with a gamepad is a frustrating experience, despite the strong market for driving wheels for use in games such as this, the humble gamepad is still going to be one of the most popular input devices, with users comparing it unfavourably to Italian based effort Assetto Corsa.
“I was expecting perfection”
Where does the community for Project CARS go from here? They’ve already been heavily stung, and as we’ve seen with other community based crowdfunding efforts as soon as the edges begin to fray and tensions begin to rise the development team are incapable of taking any degree of flack, instead directing it onto their user base.
Modding capabilites are generally a standard feature of simulation games and the like, but modding on Project CARS was ruled out at an early stage on a vote by the community, due to the belief that “…pCARS has reached a graphical level and is so complex in its physics that a normal mod team can’t keep up the quality that SMS can deliver…“. Despite this belief that all content would seemingly be required to be worked on by SMS, work on cars was outsourced to a team by the name of MAK Corp who commented on their work on a post made on their Facebook page.
With technical complaints piling up and a hefty slate of DLC already on the horizon, Project CARS looks to be a stereotypical modern effort, a great idea undermined by extensive nickel and diming funded by a community which is becoming increasingly undermined by the vanity and arrogance of a development team which simply doesn’t give a toss.
Something’s got to give, let’s just hope by the time that pCARS fans start picking up their pitchforks they aren’t being written off as a hate mob.