Morgoth mentioned what is the absolute worst AI tendency. Braking on exit. At the bare minimum this irritating behavior needs to be eliminated. I used to run heavy damage on my 'Ring Arcades until I got so tired of rear ending a braking AI. Just as I'm accelerating on exit, BAM! Braking OUT of a turn, just no.
I can deal with dumbing down my tires as I'm of the opinion GT5's default tires have gotten too grippy. But needing to drive in an unnaturally defensive trailing manner has got to go.
I actually don't have much trouble with them doing that to me at the Ring, probably it's just become instinctive knowing where they'll do it and so staying to the side in those spots after 1,000-odd races there. It does usually take me a few laps to get used to some of their oddities after I haven't raced them in a while.
But I had to give up in frustration after 90 minutes of trying to run a race at Le Mans last night without ever being able to make it more than 3 laps without the AI braking into me on exit, braking into me when on a perfect line right before an apex, swerving into me just before a corner entry, bashing me off track mid corner(obviously on their way to reaching the road's edge too early and braking) or one of my great pet-peeves that GT5 shares with rFactor: the megabrake they engage at the end of a heavy braking zone when they suddenly bleed off 25mph in one tenth of a second and you instantly go from 30 feet behind them to being attached to their bumper(why don't they use that when they are behind me?). The combination of the super-draft and my unfamiliar MP4-12C didn't make things any easier of course.
It's almost as if you need to fully learn a racetrack twice. Once to learn how to drive the track itself, and then once again to learn how the AI drives it and how to avoid them. Every game has this to some extent, but the more strangely they drive the more difficult is it to learn how close you can run with them as it requires you to do more things that you instinctively don't want to do.
We do ask a lot of developers to get AI perfect, but it is important that they at least don't make sudden insane moves such as these and the famous GT5 parking in order to be able to have them be anything more than the time-trial obstacles they are in the GT series. The braking-on-exit thing should be easy enough to fix by just spending a few more minutes per track giving them a proper race line that lets them accelerate cleanly out of a corner, even if that sacrifices a little apex speed to set it up. Speaking of spending just a few more minutes per track, how hard could it honestly be to stop them from swerving all over and slamming on their brakes in the run from Flugplatz to Schwedenkreuz for crying out loud?? Surely several million restarts across the GT5 userbase could have been eliminated by fixing that one section of just one track. Ok, 3-5 tracks - I've noticed it seems worst on the Nordschleife alone but they do it on all three layouts.
I'd personally prioritize an AI that doesn't constantly hit me or force me to hit them over one that makes high-quality defensive and overtaking maneuvers and adjusts its pace intelligently according to a race strategy, or even that can run a lighting-fast pace. That may have been the intent of the GT5 AI patch but it did not work at all.
Sometimes I don't think it's possible for me to make a post less than 1,000 words... at least not on this subject. I start with two sentences and end up with a novel, every time.
