Hands-On: Project CARS 2 Could Be The Best VR Racing Sim Ever

How do you improve upon something that the developers themselves already set out to establish as “the ultimate driver journey” when it released in 2015? That’s what Project CARS from Slightly Mad Studios was supposed to be, an ultimate driving game that delivered on all fronts. For the most part, you could argue it delivered, although some lingering bugs are still unsolved, it doesn’t feature any snow, and misses some of the core components that genre fans have grown to love in the nearly two years since its release.

Now with Project CARS 2, the direct sequel to the original hyper-realistic racing simulator, Slightly Mad Studios (and publisher Bandai Namco) wants to set the bar even higher. After going hands-on with the game at a private press only preview event, I can confirm that expectations are high and goals are lofty. If everything falls into place, Project CARS 2 could very well end up being the best and most immersive VR racing simulator ever made.

Source :
http://uploadvr.com/project-cars-2-preview-racing-sim-ever/

Suggested Video Card: GTX 1080
http://store.steampowered.com/app/378860/

That's a nice way to cut starting VR income to minimum...

I'm running it with a 980Ti, lots of low and medium settings but I haven't had any issues running max grids. Haven't tried the less clement weather yet though...

Hi, are you saying you have project cars 2 ? And that a 980ti is holding up well ?. If you have some spare time I would love to hear how it performs or compares to assetto corsa . Thanks

Yes, I have access to the dev builds...

I ran 15 laps of Oulton Park in light rain to thunderstorm last full grid of AI at 110% skill (goes up to 120%) and 50% aggression (separate slider) last night. The puddles work, I felt the wheel go light when I hit them and aquaplaned, I kept locking up and destroyed the tyres so I had to pit, got lapped came in last and had an absolute blast...

The 980Ti is working fine in VR but looking at video settings everything is defaulting to low or medium but only an occasional fps drop that I noticed. I'm not a huge eye candy fan the immersion in the rift does it for me. This is only recently as the earlier dev builds were not optimised enough for me to run the game before about March time, my PC is quite old now.

Comparing it to Assetto Corsa is difficult, I don't really want to get flamed because I'm not a huge fan of AC. I love the way AC drives but found the VR implementation a lot less slick than the original Project CARS. AC has always felt like an unfinished technical exercise to me, it lacks immersion and oddly for an italian product it feels sterile almost lacking passion, I know it sounds weird for an italian racing sim which includes Ferrari but that's my take on it.

I found some T500 settings for PC1 that along with the Jack Spade tweaker files got the FFB in PC1 as good as AC if not better so this year I've been mostly playing that.

Project CARS 2 in my opinion is utterly brilliant, can't compare it to the first game as the lateral grip is so much more realistic, there are 3 FFB "flavours" to choose from but on PC the detailed FFB setup I believe will still be there in the background too...

The wheel in my hands does exactly what I expect it to, it does exactly what it's doing on the screen, and it's made me want a motion rig with traction loss. I'm using my transponder setup with the SimCom4 PC1 plugin chassis mode and in my opinion it's utterly brilliant. You definitely get the feeling they've aimed for realism rather than trying to achieve any pre-conceived sim standard of driving/car behaviour. The difficult thing to get your head around is how easy racecars are to drive until you get right on the limit. Importantly it's a lot less buggy and more finished than the first game was this close to release...

PCars (1) is beautiful but that lateral grip bit has kept me from really enjoying it. So glad to hear it's been fixed for 2 and I have to wonder why they never addressed it in 1. I don't understand why a simple update wouldn't have been able to fix such a glaring issue.

I'm not a hard core racer but I've always loved AC and missed it terribly for the time that I had boxed and sold my DK2 and it didn't support the Vive. When they added native Vive support it was like going home for me.

With AC, PCars, and soon PCars2, it's a wonderful time for VR and racing sims! Being over a year in on gen 1 headsets puts us that much closer to gen 2 with inevitably higher resolution. We aren't that far away from only missing the exhaust and burning rubber smells.

Thanks for the report, @born2bslow !

I think all the updates to fix the first game were more important some of them game breakers frankly, XBoxOne controller issues anyone?
Simple update? Unlikely given the complexity of the underlying physics which is a lot better than the final game portrays ... while it's easy to say it's a simple update, that's like someone looking at your motion rig knowing very little about the slog that went into it and saying, oh just make it move a little bit more that way...it'll be easy...5 minute job.

In fairness to SMS they were a fairly small team which had come back from the brink of extinction/despair after being shafted big time by EA, so to achieve what they did was extraordinary. The WMD experience of the first game, watching the game develop and the work that went into it was an extraordinary experience for me personally, sadly it did produce some properly over the top preachy fanboys who couldn't admit the game had it's faults, but I digress.

By the time all the game breakers were done they were into Project CARS 2 development...bills to pay, mouths to feed and all that.

So what dof motion sim is a smelly-vision one?