Hi all!
I bought PC2 about 2 months ago after taking a break from sim racing and selling off all my racing gear in early 2013. One of my ex-colleagues opened up a sim racing centre here in Reykjavik, Iceland called "GT Akademian", and the licensed game he was running was PC2, so my first experience of it - and sim racing again - was around November and in a proper 3-screen full motion rig with crazy expensive setup. Like this:
After years of playing Gran Turismo 5P and 5 with my Logitech wheels at home, competing in GT Academy and regularly in the WRS here on GTPlanet, I felt immediately at home in the game (which I assume must have been running the latest patched version) and felt all of my gathered experience of physics and track knowledge to be immediately transferable to PC2 on these rigs.
As the owner of the centre is my ex-colleague, a bunch of us from the office who are enthusiastic about this sort of thing all went regularly for a few nights and then downloaded the game for playing in the office, on X-box controllers on PC. Lunchtime races became a thing, and although some of the less-experienced players in the office struggled on pad and much preferred the sim rig experience, I managed to make pad use work for me better than I ever had done on GT5P with Sixaxis.
I once kept a journal thread here on GTPlanet about my transition from Sixaxis to G25 use and all the experiences, difficulties and successes that involved. So to be able to match the wheel laptimes I was doing over the next month or so in the office on pad - even setting one world record time on the time trial leaderboards - was extremely refreshing. It also meant I could enjoy sim racing again without the whole wheel/stand (and now a strong PC) at home, making it affordable and easier to fit in around family life.
Having helped out with GT Academy UK and Mercedes benz GT events in the past, I was really interested to see how the GT Akademian centre here in Iceland would do hosting its opening celebration tournament using Project Cars 2, especially with the rigs they have, the smaller audience here but with a full streaming team in house. We did have some issues with setting up the lobby, and the VR machine which was one of the 8 rigs here gave us some issues but overall it was a huge success. The track boundary penalties almost decided the outcome of one race, which is a shame as they seem completely draconian at some locations!
Playing the game more and more at the centre on the rigs, I started to improve a lot and some of the old technique filtered back, to the point where I could regularly carry out direct comparisons with the pad use. Some odd things started to emerge, like how on my controller set up at full lock, a number of corners were not full throttle as the car would understeer, but on the rigs using the wheel with precisely the same settings, the car would almost have a higher turning angle and be able to do corners full throttle - e.g. the last corner at Algarve in a default setup McLaren 650S GT3 with Stable setting. I did the same laptime after 2 laps in the rig in time trial as I had in the office on pad after an hour.
Maybe this is a setting I'm just missing on the pad in the controller setup menu? It seems a wild disadvantage to not be able to get the same steering/turning angle with the exact same car setup and environmental settings as a wheel.
Before that realisation, I had been extremely happy with the pad use and I was very competitive. It was possible to race clean, save some slides (but not as much as with the wheel), with the obvious caveat that the odd countersteer resulted in snap oversteer in the opposite direction. Definitely an issue with more loose setups needed for some of the time trial leaderboards.
EDIT: Right, Steering Sensitivity. Found it haha!
One of my absolute favourite features of PC2 is the ability to create custom liveries in photoshop and then use them in-game. Working with a bunch of graphic designers has really allowed us to explore this feature and create some mega liveries that we export and use in the rigs at GT Akademian too. I know it's a niche feature, but I dream of Project Cars 3 allowing the option to have multiple custom liveries for the same car. I basically had to abandon my amazing 80s Lambo livery above because one of my colleagues was desperate to race the Lambo in our events, so I migrated to the McLaren, since we wouldn't be able to have 2 different custom liveries in-race. It's been really awesome to have the Big Mac McLaren, a Sony VHS-liveried 488, a ZX Spectrum liveried AMG and a Wipeout-liveried Audi - all designed by graphic designers (and me) race together. Watching the replays has been incredible fun, although i wish the trackside camera angles were more varied lap after lap the way GT's are.
I really like the sounds in the game and I find much more success using the cockpit view than I ever did in GT - where I used bumper cam for lap time purposes.
I really find it surprising that there's no reverse grid option, so in the tournament when the lobby went kaput after qualifying, we really had to fudge it to get the correct grid for the final race - as there was no way to set the custom grid after re-making a lobby.
Overall, I really love the game. It got me back into sim racing after nearly 6 years away, and the itch had really started to come back, yet something about GT Sport made me hesitate to dive in. I wonder if people are still using the handbrake in GT racing cars to get more rotation in corners as they were at the end of GT5 and that year's GT Academy time trial at Silverstone
PC2 does have issues with lobbies and lag, the bugs where the pit crew won't put the right requested tyres on etc... so basically when we race we turn off the tyre and fuel wear and just race for speed and close fun racing, and we tend to race together locally instead of venturing into online lobbies where we had some awful experiences with punters. In that respect I guess it's similar to GT where it's worth investing time in joining a community and getting into league/WRS race groups where you know the racing is clean.
Oh, and it doesn't hurt my feelings towards the game that I won the opening GT Akademian championship event
EDIT: I forgot to add, I do wish there was a way of watching ghost replays in the video section; something more than just trying to keep up with the ghost on track to see how the best do it!
All the best
Maz
. Also still enjoying the game though, despite the problems.
