RACING REALITY
Can a real-world car lover truly enjoy driving sims? Jeremy Laird is about to find out...
Can a real-world car lover truly enjoy driving sims? Even with all the gaming gear? We jumped into the driving seat to find out.
PC games let you do awesome stuff. You know, stuff like riding a dragon, building a city, commanding a Roman legion, wailing on a zombie with a big stick, or braining an innocent bystander for the dumb thrill of it. In other words, stuff that’s either very hard or actually impossible to achieve in real life. Well, that and stuff that’s thoroughly inadvisable, such as braining people. But driving cars? You can drive cars in real life.
Personally, I drive a lot of cars in real life, thanks to being a car hack, as well as a technology journalist. So here’s the thing: I’ve loved PC games for as long as I can remember. I’ve loved driving cars for as long as I can remember. But driving games? Not so
much. Since I learned to drive, my default position on driving games has been the assumption that driving even the most mundane shopping car in real life is more engaging than getting behind the wheel of a virtual supercar car. Or racing car. Or whatever.
But maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe the latest driving sims, complete with hyper-accurate physics, and force-feedback peripherals, not to mention the latest display technology, add up to something a real-world car lover can dig after all.
To find out, we’re going to need to do this right. That means the right hardware and the right games. Jabbing away at the keyboard while sitting at a desk isn’t going to fly. I’ll need some kind of uber display, a full-on driving seat, a wheel, a pedal box—the whole nine yards. Then there’s the software side of the equation. Will chasing realism be the key to enjoyment? Or is that always going to be a doomed mission, and keeping it arcadey, simple, and fun is the way to go? Either way, the learning curve is going to be steep; mistakes will be made.
Overall, then, this promises to be quite a ride, a dive into the unknown but shot through with familiarity. There’s a fair bit of baggage, bias, and baked-in preconceptions to drag around the track, too. Can a real-world car lover, even one who is a big fan of PC gaming, really love driving sims? Let’s find out.
First, a confession. Depending on how you look at all this, you could argue that I’m a poor candidate for this gaming experiment. The problem is that I’m particular—and I mean really particular—about cars.
I prefer them analog and involving. The latest sports cars with paddle-shift gearboxes, driving modes, turbo engines, driver aids, and power-assisted everything leave me cold. Give me a manual gearbox, minimal computer intervention, and a zingy naturally aspirated engine, please.
In that context, the odds of me gagging on an entirely synthesized driving sim seem pretty solid. But the genie is out of the bottle. I’m never going to forget my experiences in real cars, and that’s also what makes this experiment intriguing. I’m not an expert in driving sims. But I’ve got a little form in both PC games generally and driving. So, can I really come round to the delights of driving sims?
The theory of games and why we play them enters the equation, too. Isn’t gaming about escapism, doing things you can’t normally do in real life, like the aforementioned dragon-riding?
Of course, I can’t race in the Indy 500 in real life. But I can drive a real car on a real track. If I really wanted to, I could get up very early tomorrow morning, jump in my car, and make it in time for a few evening laps at the infamous Nürburgring in Germany. While it wouldn’t be cheap, it wouldn’t completely bankrupt me. So the baggage I bring to all this is that I struggle to compute the appeal of a virtual Indy car compared with any kind of real-world driving. But hold that thought—we’ll be coming to the question of cost momentarily.
PROJECTOR PROJECT
The first hurdle to leap is the hardware setup. Having just completed a new projector-powered gaming dungeon in my basement, the display tech takes the form of a gaming-centric short-throw projector, courtesy of the Optoma GT1080, a 1080p DLP model. Now, you might think a projector would be one of the more expensive parts of this project. At $699, the Optoma ain’t cheap, but nor is it the fourfigure bank account buster you might fear.
Admittedly, there are compromises at this price. The GT1080 has low-spec optics that make achieving a perfect setup in terms of image size, geometry, and focus tricky. It doesn’t even en have zoom adjustment;adjustment ment; you physicallyy move the projector to change hange the size of the image. But its short-throw characteristics mean it can be situated in front of the rest of the rig, and still fill my nine-foot screen.
As for the gaming PC, the beauty of this kind of setup, and using a 1080p projector, is that the demands on your system are pretty low. Driving games aren’t hugely demanding, and driving a mere 1920x1080 pixel grid is peanuts compared to a highspec PC monitor weighing in at 2560x1440 pixels, or more. So my spare rig, running an elderly AMD Radeon HD 6970 and a twoyear-old quad-core Intel Core i7, is plenty.
From here, it gets trickier. One of the big surprises for me has been the cost of driving peripherals. One of the main reasons to play a driving sim rather than really drive is cost. Driving any kind of car is expensive. Racing is one of the best ways ever conceived to make a small fortune, but the problem is that you
must start out with a very large fortune. Racing cars will wipe you out financially.
DRIVING PRICES UP
Now, I’m not saying that driving sims are on anything like that level. But it was still a double-take moment when I saw the price of the Thrustmaster TX wheel and pedal box combo. $468 for some gaming peripherals? And we’re not even talking about high-end enthusiast equipment.
The final major piece of the puzzle was a driving seat. For that I turned to one of the bigger boys in this part of the market: Playseat. The Playseat Evolution Alcantara model pictured here rocks in at $369, and there are other, similar models available for around the same price. Admittedly, it has a few limitations, as you can read about on page 45, but it was still the one item that was a little more affordable than I was expecting, especially given how important it is to achieving an authentic feel.
With the projector aligned, the seat assembled, and the Thrustmaster bits installed, I was good to go. The only question was what to play? The options were realism with a high-end sim on the one hand, or simple thrills with something arcadey on the other. My hunch was that a full-on sim was more my thing. I also had an inkling that trying to get as close as I could to my own real-world experience would be an interesting way to get things rolling.
For better or worse, the game I chose was AssetoCorsa. Apart from reading good things about AssetoCorsa’s driving dynamics, it offered a couple of crucial features. First, I could start on a track I’ve driven in the real world, namely the onetime Formula 1 race track that is Brands Hatch, just outside London in the UK. It also included several cars I’ve actually driven, including a second-generation supercharged Lotus Elise.
So this is how it all began. First, some tweakage in AssetoCorsa’s settings. I didn’t want to make things too easy; I wanted the full deep-end experience from the get-go. So, I turned off the stability and traction control systems. The result was shocking. On my very first lap out of the pits, braking
into what’s known as the “Graham Hill” corner on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit, it felt like my guts were trying to exit my body through my feet. Genuinely, it was intense.
Very likely, it was the combination of the huge screen filling my field of view, the Playseat delivering a familiar seating position, the steering wheel tugging at my hands, and the noise filling the gaming dungeon. Whatever, my brain was fooled into thinking there was some real driving going on, so when I was braking into that downhill corner, it was confused, and began to generate some intense and completely phantom physical sensations. It was as though I had a hydraulic rig operating in my mind. Truly, it was weird.
The intensity calmed pretty quickly over the opening laps, which I might add were messy as hell. From there, I could begin to get to grips with the whole experience of driving sims, the things that were familiar, and the things that were completely alien.
One of the aspects that works best is the steering feel. The AssetoCorsa team has done a very nice job with that, and the Thrustmaster wheel really delivers, too. Overall, I was very impressed with how the essential character of the Lotus Elise’s rack has been captured. It’s not a perfect or complete rendering, but it’s on a completely different level from what I was expecting, and it’s surely a big part of what made for that intoxicating initial experience.
FOOT NOTES At the other end of the scale is the pedal feel. Put simply, it’s crappy. Nobody who has even the most cursory understanding of cars or driving signed those Thrustmaster pedals off. The biggest issue is the brake pedal, which is far too long in travel, and too soft and springy in action. It’s horrible.
At this stage, a little research taught me that what I need is a pedal box with load cells, which allow brake modulation based on pedal pressure, rather than pedal movement. That can be achieved with certain pedal boxes via aftermarket modifications, though I can’t comment on how easy or effective that is. Or you can snag a pedal box that comes complete with load cells from an outfit such as Fanatec, though that will add around $400 to your driving sim bill of materials.
Once I began to get to grips with the basics and the weirdness, what was really fascinating was that I found myself in much the same rhythm that I do during a track day in real life. Working on lines and braking points, feeling frustrated with my lack of talent, but pounding round and occasionally being rewarded by momentary exhilaration when I nailed a corner just right, or finally
understood where I was getting something wrong with my braking points or turn-in. It was a hell of a lot of fun.
But the really impressive bit, in terms of confirming how realistic the sim setup turned out to be, is that I was quickish in the same parts of the track, and was struggling to find the absolute best line in the same parts, as I am when driving the circuit in the real world. That, I think, is remarkable.
BRAKING POINT
On the other hand, there was plenty that was different about sim driving. Those pedals make judging braking points darn difficult. I found it a real challenge to judge entry speeds, too. But the biggest issue is the lack of feedback beyond the steering. Seat-of-the-pants feedback, what you might call your built-in G-sensor or butt dyno, is such a big part of driving a real car, and its absence in driving sims—at least, when you aren’t running some kind of mega-money hydraulic rig—is the biggest limitation when it comes to realism. I often feel disconnected by modern cars in the real world, but that problem is far worse when it comes to driving sims.
I did also try the arcade-style option, courtesy of the new Forza Motorsport demo for PC, but almost instantly I knew that style of gaming isn’t for me. Realism to the max, please. Overall, the whole experience left me with mixed emotions. In many ways, driving sims are massively more realistic and engaging than I dreamt possible. But when the initial euphoria cooled, I realized that a long-term driving sim habit would be a serious commitment.
Firstly, I’m sure that online competition is what I’d need to fill that hole left vacant by the limited physical feedback. But I also know from my Counter-Strike days that being even half competitive online is a hefty commitment. You need to be at it all the time just to keep up.
Then there’s the temptation to tumble down the rabbit hole of super sims. I haven’t put enough hours in to really run into the limitations of the Thrustmaster wheel, but that would almost certainly happen in time. Then I could see myself going through multiple upgrade cycles with both the wheel and the pedals, and maybe even the seatpod, too. It would be all too easy to spend thousands of dollars chasing the perfect super sim setup. That’s a little scary, and also makes me ponder the point of it all. For a few hundred bucks, driving sims are good, clean fun. But if I have to spend thousands to keep my interest levels up, that’s a whole different ball game. The harsh truth is that I’d prefer to spend those dollars on real-world driving.