What’s truly remarkable about AC is the incredible diversity in the way it is used and the different elements of car culture it supports, from circuit racing, to drifting, to rally, to touge, to drag racing, NASCAR and everything in between. Almost “Drivetribe” like – reminds me of the opening scene of the Grand Tour with all the different car cultures driving across the desert brought together by their love of cars.
So, as we all contemplate AC Evo, we all come to it with our own perspective, how will it support the things we love doing in AC? And given that diversity, it’s hard to imagine it will cover it all.
My own perspective is a love of motor racing through the ages, and the ability to race across all eras and all disciplines, and replicate championship seasons and major races. From a collection of over 4600 cars and 1400 circuits, I have over 220 championships built in Content Manager across Formula, Sports and GT, and Touring car categories – some I’ve built myself and some from the modding community.
Around 50 of the 74 seasons of Formula 1 can be created in varying levels of detail, some with individual, high-quality mods of each car in the season, some less so, some with a single high-quality mod/car representative of the season with liveries for each car (think RSS 70, 79, 86, 90, 10, 13). On this forum,
@Apocalypse211 has accurately created around 15 F1 seasons across the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. Pyyer’s F1 track extensions and the VRC FA means we can do the F1 season in real-time.
The AC Le Mans project now has 8 Le Mans 24hr races created with correct liveries and representative grids, some almost exact. I’ve created another 9. Similarly, there are WEC/ICM, DTM, BTCC and ATCC seasons/grids across many years from the 60’s through to today. And of course that’s just a very small sample – many other modders are doing the same to one or more elements.
For me, (and I do compete IRL in a historic Group A Alfetta GTV6 touring car, and in an Alfetta 2L GTV historic sports car) being able to re-create and experience some of the great moments in motorsport, to get some sense of what it was like is just amazing. From Mulsanne in a 917 in 1970, to Senna and Prost at Suzuka, Plato v Menu v Neal at Thruxton, Moffat v Brock or Whincup v Mostert at Bathurst, to driving through the night and winning in the 499P at Le Mans 2023 (incidentally the in-car from car 83 499P was live to Youtube and is fantastic – but what was amazing was how close it was to the AC in car!)
I see AC as more of a living, virtual encyclopedia of motorsport that you can jump into at any time and recreate virtually. And it’s the combination of the base AC game and importantly its openness, CSP, Pure/Sol, Content Manager, and the incredible modding community that has made this possible.
If I had one improvement I’d like to see in AC (other than better AI, and less volatile curbs), it would be adding more depth and functionality to the User Championships/Career building mode to support the user’s ability to build more accurate Championships with a greater ability to include the actual history of the season, and of individual races, including things like custom grids/liveries per race, weather for practice, qualifying and race, better record of results. I know some of this can be done in the current AC career mode (as opposed to User Championships) but it has to be done outside of CM and is bit tedious outside the CM interface.
So how does this relate to ACE? Well, AC started with a broad selection of race and road cars, a selection of race circuits and a couple of point-to-point road sections (and it seems ACE will start in a similar place) but looking at the ACE info to date there are several red flags for me and my own little part of the AC world.
But the positives first:
- It seems the focus on driving physics remains – it will be a simulation – opinion on the pre-alpha has suggested a mix of AC and ACC handling and FFB feel – no bad thing
- The focus on motorsport remains with race cars and circuits in the early access release and an in-built online (iracing style) competition
- It looks great – the graphics do look amazing
- Weather built-in with transition, drying line, standing water modeled, time acceleration etc
The red flags:
- A career mode that locks you into grinding to unlock cars or tracks is of no interest and would be a major disincentive
- The marketplace/car modding/renting (including liveries) model may or may not support building seasons/championships or putting together season grids
- Modding may be very restrictive and impair the ability to create the cars, tracks, and championships – would it even be possible to create an ASR 1991 car pack? Will this fall under the licensing support Kunos has mentioned?
- How easy will it be to create historic/or current track skins? Will extensions be able to be built to cover different layouts and years? Would this fall under the licensing support?
- Haven’t seen anything on custom/user-built championships or careers – all the focus has been on the game providing a career mode.
Now these are just red flags – that is, things of concern given the announcements to date. Of course, there has been very little on modding revealed other than it will be there, and they will seek to limit IP/license infringements. There is very little detail on how career modes will work and whether they will be user customisable.
Will I buy it – of course I will! Will I still need to keep AC and my CSP/Pure subscriptions – well only time will tell, but I expect I’ll be running AC for some time yet.