





It's going to be a busy year for racing games. At some point, we expect Gran Turismo Sport to finally arrive, Forza Motorsport 7 is on its way, and then there's Project Cars 2. The first Project Cars, which arrived a couple of years ago, was an uncompromising sim racer of the kind hitherto unknown on consoles. It was also fiendishly difficult, something fans seized upon as proof of just how good a simulation it was compared to, say, Forza. But here's the thing: just because a game is very hard to master, that doesn't necessarily mean it's accurate to the real thing. Reassuringly, that's a view shared by Rod Chong, COO at Slightly Mad Studios, the game's developer.

"If you look at sim racing as a whole, there's this misconception that it needs to be really, really difficult, or it's not a sim. This is not simulation, that's not reality," Chong told me. So it's heartening to hear that in the quest to improve the game's physics—particularly the tire model—Project Cars 2 should be both a more accurate simulation of real life but also a much more accessible game.

Better tire physics

"The acid test is taking a powerful rear-wheel drive street car on road tires and [trying] to drift it. When you're over the limit and burning the tires, does the sim stand up? The answer was no, it didn't," Chong explained. At issue in the original Project Cars was how the tires behaved once they exceeded the limit of grip. Unlike a real tire, that game's handling of the physics once the grip was gone was merciless—the back steps out and the car is gone.

The original Project Cars was notable for spending several years in development, during which time 30,000 community members tested the game in beta. Project Cars 2 has been undergoing testing with a much smaller group—about 700 gamers—as well as with a group of professional racing drivers who have been making sure that the game's cars behave realistically. These racers include Corvette Racing's Tommy Milner, a driver with not just plenty of real-world experience but also a long background in sim racing. And like Chong, he also thinks that sim racers sometimes focus too much on difficulty as a sign of verisimilitude.

"This is where hardcore sims have gotten a bad rap sometimes. It's very easy to drive these race cars in real life at 80 percent. Maybe there's other factors that make it hard to go fast, like the sheer speed or not being used to it. But driving under the limit in these cars is very easy," he told me. "I often found a lot of sims that were in many ways really good. Some were really good under the limit, and then when you got to the limit and just a little bit over, it got very difficult to drive. Sometimes that was heralded as being a realistic hardcore sim because it was difficult, but there's a fine balance between being too easy and so far out of the window that it becomes its own challenge. Some cars are easier than others; likewise, some sims are easier than others. It's tough just to say, 'This one is better because it's the most realistic.' It's a subjective experience."

When Milner tested an early build of the new game last year, he found the tire physics lacking. Handily for the developers, Milner has a wealth of experience of working with race car engineers, which was used to good effect on a dry erase board to graph out what the tires were doing in the game versus how they ought to behave.

"Like in any racing situation, you have to have a good rapport with your engineer to give them the right information to figure out how to make the car go faster," Milner said. "In this situation, I'm the driver and I'm talking to the engineer and trying to make the car and the sim more realistic. Having had some experience looking at tire models in the past and seeing what they're supposed to look like and then trying to deduce how that feels in the simulator and putting it all together—I could use as many words as I want to describe what the cars were doing, but it was the easiest way to describe what I was feeling, and it turns out what I drew was exactly what was being calculated by the game, and there was something wrong with that."

"It was amazing after offering that suggestion and seeing the process the guys went through modeling the tires looking at what could be the problem, seeing it manifest in the game, fixing it, then driving it in the sim a few weeks later and seeing a real appreciable difference," Milner said. "Likewise, seeing the feedback from the team members and how they reacted to how that was a transformative change to the experience of driving the car. It was cool to see that come to fruition."