A gree that some cars in pCARS 2 drive really well and others are awful no matter if they are fettled or you’ve downloaded the WR ghost set-ups.
I have a love/hate relationship with all SMS releases. NFS: Shift was solid after several patches. The Unofficial Community mod (PC only), did wonders to make the game into GTR 2.5.
NFS: Shift Unleashed was an improved version of the first game with even more official licences and was far less buggy. Again the Unofficial Community Mod fixed a lot of the issues SMS couldn’t fix and tyre ‘polish’ mod took Unleashed from quasi-realism to GTR 2.8.
pCARS is a mess albeit a very pretty mess. An interesting funding idea, viral marketing and some frankly outrageous claims by WMD members and the dev team meant pCARS was to be the sim of all sims. At release the game was a mixed bag; controls always felt off and the physics left me wondering if my wheel and pedals were broken. Many issues were left unresolved (with no unofficial fixes) as SMS moved on.
pCARS 2 is everything pCARS should have been!
The dev’s admitted they had missed controller code in the original game that caused some odd vehicle behaviour. That said, pCARS 2 has some sublime cars & others (e.g. most of the road cars) that are very odd feeling to drive. The tyres can feel awsome in one car and class and terrible across many others. There is no doubt SMS tried to move on from existing tyre models but I’m not sure if they were successful in doing so.
No more DLC will be released and only serious bugs will be fixed which means the crazy track cut penalties won’t be fixed as well as the list of outstanding issues found on the official forums. It’s still a solid experience even with these niggles.
Also the in-game weather when set to real no longer works as SMS’s openweather API key has expired! There is a fix by Mr Belowski (he of Crew Chief fame) on the Race Department forum but this shouldn’t be left to a user to fix.
pCARS 2 can be sublime in the right conditions; you just got to work to find them!
