Sadly, I think SMS and consoles really don't deserve to be together. The game is designed from the ground up for close to the bleeding edge of PC and PC graphics cards' capabilities. Which consoles will NEVER come close to. Whatever the capability of the PS5 is going to be, I can guarantee that PC3's minimum PC specs will far outstrip it. Once again, we will have reduced grid sizes, framerates, probably no VR, and be the last to have major bugs addressed.
To be quite honest, my suggestion for PC3 and SMS is, take your lumps, make the game PC only, and stop using console owners as cash cows to fund your development of games that cannot be played fully on them. Or, make the PC game have parity with console, make multiplayer cross platform (by the time the PS5 comes out) that should be doable, as it has already been done successfully on a few titles on PC/consoles (not sim racer, but it's a start!).
Player base parity makes for a successful game. Make a niche game, divide your player base even further by restricting console players to only themselves, make it utterly obvious you are focused almost entirely on the PC version, and you aren't exactly likely to get much growth with the console segment. Make the PC version identical to whatever the capabilities the next gen console should be capable of, unite the player bases, you might have something to challenge the big franchises. But if this trend to use the money from 50% of your base (both console's player base) to fund development for a game neither will play well on doesn't strike me as a good practice.
The next gen consoles capabilities may well approach current gen PC's capabilities. So how about freezing features that are currently very good on PC, and wait for the consoles to draw level..? The time spent NOT developing features that can't be used on a console could well be spent cleaning up the huge buglist.
IMHO, PC2 is currently very close to the perfect sim racer game. But much of it is buggy, inconsistent and suffers from wildly varying setup quality. The time spent on perfecting consistent AI speed at whatever % set would make the game far better. The time making sure ALL stock tunes deliver an equal level of ease/difficulty would go a long way to making the game far better. The time spent making sure AI race behavior, aggression and pit strategy consistent, ditto. Rinse and repeat.
But a mad dash to add new features that will only benefit bleeding edge PC's and graphics cards while a litany list of inconsistencies and poor default behavior will only serve to marginalize the console base. We deserve more than being the supporters of R&D that is unlikely to benefit us.
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