Kunos Simulazioni has taken part in a keynote presentation at the 2024 ADAC Sim Racing Expo in Dortmund, revealing more about the upcoming early access launch of Assetto Corsa Evo.
Marco Massarutto, co-founder and executive manager at Kunos, and game director Davide Brivio formed part of a small panel in which they explained more about the ethos behind ACE, the development process, and what players can expect from the title when it becomes available through the early access program in January.
Assetto Corsa Evo: New Game Engine
The original AC was of course based on an in-house engine developed by Kunos, but then the spin-off ACC title ran on an off-the-shelf engine: Unreal Engine 4. We already knew that ACE would return to a Kunos-developed engine built specifically for the title, and Massarutto explained a little more about the reasons for that.
“We created a brand new engine because we want to handle the technology that is behind Assetto Corsa“, said Massarutto. “We want to put the best, maximum attention to VR, triple screen, and all those technologies that are specifically dedicated for sim racers.”
VR in particular is something that has not been a traditional strength of Unreal, even in the current UE5, as noted by other developers too. With it being something of increasing importance to the most dedicated sim racers, it would seem a wise choice — though we’re not sure how it would translate to console and devices like the PSVR2.
“So we created a brand new KS engine that is specifically designed for racing applications, and it also allows us to include a lot of new stuff,” he continued.
Assetto Corsa Evo: Dynamic Weather, Dynamic Track
Among that new stuff is dynamic weather and dynamic track conditions, which were not part of the first title.
Massarutto didn’t specifically elaborate on these features in the presentation, but we have already seen the former in the trailer released last month. However he was also sitting in front of a large screen which had bulletpoints including several additional features.
One that intrigues us is “gravity based dynamic track technology”, which would appear to govern how and where surface water flows, accumulates, and persists. That will have an interesting impact on a drying track in particular.
Other bullet points included dynamic global illumination, physically based sky, volumetric fog, and dynamic particle effects. We’ll have to wait a while for more information and examples of these.
Assetto Corsa Evo: Free Roam Mode & Procedural Terrain
One of the big pieces of confirmed news was something a lot of us suspected after seeing September’s trailer: free roam.
Massarutto’s time was brief, but he did manage to sneak in a note that ACE will feature a free-roaming mode to allow players to drive the game’s cars on the road. That’s also an emergent property of the new KS engine, with Massarutto adding that it’s “based on a new terrain technology that can allow us to manage a very big map and hundreds of kilometers of roads”.
As above, the big screen behind him added more information, with a bulletpoint stating “procedural technology for free roam maps”. That could mean that the roads you drive on are generated on the fly, though we’d imagine some players will also want more permanent road locations too.
We’ll have to wait and see on this, but Massarutto did comment that “a lot of people are enjoying AC with mods created on roads like the LA Canyon or the Tokyo Highway,” noting that KS will be recreating that with its own content “generated and created in KS that are based on real data on real locations that we believe will be very connected with the life of the petrolhead”.
Assetto Corsa Evo: Career and Game Economy
Noting that the original AC’s gameplay was very simple — “the formula of choose a car, choose a track, hot lap, race, setup, is absolutely great and good for a lot of people but possibly in 2024-25 will [not] be enough any more” — Massarutto explained that one of the goals for ACE was to make an engaging career mode for car lovers:
“We want to create not just a career but something that actually is the RPG of the petrolheads. All of us we are car enthusiasts: we love cars, we love driving, some of them like to collect diecast models or real cars, they want to drive on track, on road, they want to tune and customize their car.”
Brivio explained a little more on how this career will work, although precise details are of course a long way off. “You enter the game, you start from some point, you develop with total freedom but gaining momentum inside the game”, he comments.
“So what we think to lay down is a game economy system that will be as simple as we can, but will help players to enter the game with a budget, choose the first car, then with total freedom they can play, accumulate experience, and virtual currency … and buy the cars you want.”
The game can still be played as a sandbox like AC, but there you’ll only be able to “rent” cars and not be able to apply any customization.
Of course gaming being the way it is right now, the words “virtual currency” may cause some concern. Brivio has good news though: the currency is earned solely in-game and there will be no microtransactions.
Assetto Corsa Evo: Car Physics
Noting that AC is and always has been designed with simulation as a goal, Massarutto plainly states that “if we start to do something else we will kill Assetto Corsa, so to embrace a broader audience we’ll not make the simulation easier, or ‘simcade’, or anything like this.”
The team has been able to work a lot on the physics — “in order to improve what is good in the Assetto Corsa franchise and working on those aspects that can be considered weak maybe” — and Massarutto highlights one aspect that has changed since the original title.
“What changes a lot is also the relationship with car manufacturers that also thanks to Competizione,” he commented. “The handling of the cars … are of course based on the car data we receive from the manufacturers, but we also have the possibility to drive many of the cars — the real cars — on track and on road that will be included in Evo, and this help us to match even better the real counterpart with the virtual one.”
Assetto Corsa Evo: Future Support
It looks like Kunos Simulazioni has grand plans to support ACE for quite some time to come — after all, it’s been ten years since the original game!
“We made a proper design of Evo four years ago when we started,” says Massarutto, “and we said okay what do we want to see in Evo: this, this, and this and that. During the development we adjusted a bit the targets because some things are feasible, some things are great but can be feasible in the long-term.”
“Assetto Corsa Evo has been designed from scratch with a different structure that will allow us to support the game for many, many years – so we want to expand the game, possibly forever – and the way we are working reflects what we want to achieve.”
There was quite a lot of detail packed into this short presentation, which you can view in the video at the top of the page, but the key takeaway from it was, as Massarutto says, that Kunos wants players to enjoy ACE in whatever way they want.
