I was pretty dissappointed when the game came out as the graphics are horrendous, particularly compared to how good GT7 is. Some of FM8 models look absolutely crap.
But, I put that aside and have just focussed on the driving. And I have to say, the feel of the cars are really really good. They feel different to one another, their characteristics are good, you can balance on throttle/steering etc. Where GT7 feels one or two dimensional, FM8 feels pretty good.
thoughts?
I've never thought FM's graphics look bad. Playing on PC, even with it only set to High quality and Ray Tracing off, it looks terrific to me. Very natural contrast and saturation, I think some people have got used to the artificial look that many other games have, and their brains now perceive it as normal. There was a similar thing when AoE 4 came out and people said the graphics were much worse than AoE 2. AoE 4 actually has far superior graphics, and if you only play AoE 4 for a while, then go back to AoE 2, it's AoE 2 that looks terrible.
With Nordschleife coming to the game, I've been driving Nordschleife with GT3 and LMP1 cars in all of FM, GT7, PC2 and AC, and IMO FM has the best driving feel of those 4 games with a controller. That's not to say the other games don't have their good points. The in-helmet view in PC2 is spectacular and the most immersive visual experience. AC has a more accurate track rendition (but from many years ago). But in the other games, I feel like I'm battling against the controller handling code as well as the physics, and it's hard to separate the two. AC exposes controller parameters like gamma and filter etc to the user, and these have a huge impact that greatly exceeds what you'd normally expect for the impact of tuning the car, so you can't really tell what is physics and what is controller handling code. Both combine to translate what you're doing with the controller into car movements. The one that overall does the best job of converting my controller actions into car behaviour, feeling the most natural and intuitive and like driving a real car, is FM. I can't drive Nordschleife in ACC yet, but I did re-visit ACC as well, and while the physics and controller handling are undoubtedly good, it is at the same time a bit clinical and sterile feeling compared to FM. It might be that it's realistic for a GT3 car to feel that way, I can't comment on that as I've never driven one in real life.
I probably should have kept my mouth shut about it because I don't tune or do any kind of setup work
You're missing out on a lot if you don't do that. As I said in an earlier post, both the '21 and '23 Cadillac LMP cars have bad stock tunes IMO and need fixing. I cannot believe that these cars in real life would have oversteer and understeer to the extent they do in the game. If you don't mess with anything else, start off just changing tyre pressures, ARBs, and the anti-squat.
I haven't tried it yet, but for the '23 Cadillac, you want to adjust the rear anti-squat to be high, because the car has masses of rear wheel grip, but is understeering on corner exit, so by reducing the weight transfer to the back on acceleration you keep more weight on the front wheels, letting it turn better. But if this causes it to lose rear wheel traction, you need to find a setting that balances the two elements.
Tyre pressures and ARBs generally work on the principle that softer is more grip, so for the '23 Cadillac I'd also try reducing front tyre pressure and ARB stiffness, and maybe increasing rear tyre pressure and ARB stiffness, but obviously don't go so far as to have it oversteering when all you're doing is trying to go around a corner.
Changes for the '21 would be the opposite of these, as it has the opposite problem.
Edit: After doing the Road America race quite a few times with the '21 Cadillac, I think the car is just pretty bad for pace relative to PI in stock form. I did eventually manage to get it handling quite nicely with the stock build, but it didn't really make my fastest lap times any faster, it just meant I was more consistently close to that lap time. The changes I had to make to the tuning parameters were very extensive. The best I was able to do against the max difficulty AI was to finish 2nd, 3 secs behind the winner, starting from 10th ish. But if you upgrade the rear tyre width, the car becomes much faster for no change in PI, and it's then easy to beat the AI.
) You cannot expect to just take the car out of the trailer and run pole position lap-times. You and your team needs to work a bit to dial in the car for the track. Ten sec`s away might seem a bit much but as soon as you get a grip (cough
) on where you`re loosing time you`ll start seeing mid-50`s
