Opinion: What Do You Think Is Missing From Sim Racing?

Paul Jeffrey · Sep 23, 2019

Reviving an old topic from a couple of years ago, we would like to know what the RD community think is missing from the current sim racing landscape.

The subject was brought back to my attention by RD staff member @Daniel Monteiro during The RD Podcast recording earlier this evening, and I thought it might be worth throwing this question back out to the community to see if opinions have changed since 2017.

Sim racing does indeed continue to improve and get bigger at a seemingly endless rate, but even with all the progress made since back in the early 2000's, I'm sure it is fair to assume plenty still remains to be done in order to tick all those boxes our sim racing faithful would like to see in the hobby we all so love.

With that in mind, it's feeling like the time is right to ask you all this (rather large and broad) question once again:

What have you always thought should be part of a sim-racing game but somehow has (almost) never made it to any game?

Over to you, folks.

Screenshot Credit: Tino66

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MPortnoy · Sep 23, 2019

30-50 iconic laser scanned Kunos quality tracks in ACC and I'd never leave my house again

Salvatore Sirignano · Sep 23, 2019

The fact that there is no 'complete' sim. All are missing something, and as modding becomes more demanding in future I think what future sims will improve on (better physics, graphics/FFB) will be balanced by a lack of content.
Gone will be the days of full historic F1 championships, for example...

eg01st · Sep 23, 2019

I would like to see ACC kind of quality and attention to historic cars. Most official content is modern sequential, flappy paddle gearbox cars, but not enough old-school stuff. Imagine if ACC was about 1990s DTM, or DRM.

Flip-Flop Driver · Sep 23, 2019

Yeah. Like mentioned the lack of a 'complete' sim.
IMO ACC is the closest one. But other games like the upcoming Automobilista 2 or even updates to RF2 and they can overtake it, who knows.
Like the tifosi say "next year is the year".

moisescarvalho · Sep 23, 2019

A modern and customisable rally sim, with realistic physics.

howitzer155mm · Sep 23, 2019

This.

For under $400

TyXo · Sep 23, 2019

Safety car and racing/series rules properly implemented along side a realistic AI, one that actually take risks. I want incidents to happen among them as well.

Andy Kettler · Sep 23, 2019

Flip-Flop Driver said:
Yeah. Like mentioned the lack of a 'complete' sim.

Exactly this...

Years and years of waiting make me tired of the simracing genre...

EAKMotorsports · Sep 23, 2019

More damage, and Mechanical and electronic damage and fails.

Tero Dahlberg · Sep 23, 2019

Taking this in a different direction than the previous posts... separately rendered multi-monitor support ie. proper triple monitor support. Sure, you can get any game to run on multiple monitors but only a handful can render correctly on triples.

Loren Thomas · Sep 24, 2019

To me, the so-called "serious" sims concentrate on the physics too much, and neglect the simulation of other aspects - specifically the visual and audio aspects of how the driver receives information. Two examples that drive me nuts are lack of realistic mirrors and use of screen overlays instead of pit-to car radio. You know why the aviation industry builds those multi-million dollar simulators, and doesn't just use MS flight sim? It's all about the pilots' interaction with their environment. We've got VR now, but most of today's racing sims either don't allow or can't reasonably be driven without some kind of HUD elements. A related aspect is that the graphics need to be optimized for driving, not screenshots - take a lot of detail out of the places that you don't see when driving, and get better framerates/resolution/draw distance.

The other thing I'd like is for more sims to have a cohesive set of cars, tracks, and basic race rules. It doesn't have to be a licensed series, but for each car, try to get at least 3-4 tracks that it actually races on. And at least have appropriate standing/rolling start options for whatever the cars in a sim actually use.

Case_ · Sep 24, 2019

Common sense.

E304LIFE · Sep 24, 2019

The physics of a modern sim, and having a "real world" city and surrounding areas environment along with tune-able parts available on the real factory and aftermarket for the available vehicles and be so precise, that a guy could even use the game as a test bench for his own real life project. How much would that cost? Get to work on those licenses and give us a price!

DonZmeuheu · Sep 24, 2019

A HillClimb Race Simulator. With laserscanned Alpine passes from Europe and Switzerland

oh dear....that would be great

adamcyan1624 · Sep 24, 2019

G-force...

Dobermann92 · Sep 24, 2019

Proper racing rules, proper safety car implementation, manually selectable grid (including the ability to pick each individual livery), full historical grids, including manufacturers which don't exist anymore, better AI.

Augusto Dufloth · Sep 24, 2019

Loren Thomas said:
To me, the so-called "serious" sims concentrate on the physics too much, and neglect the simulation of other aspects - specifically the visual and audio aspects of how the driver receives information. Two examples that drive me nuts are lack of realistic mirrors and use of screen overlays instead of pit-to car radio. You know why the aviation industry builds those multi-million dollar simulators, and doesn't just use MS flight sim? It's all about the pilots' interaction with their environment. We've got VR now, but most of today's racing sims either don't allow or can't reasonably be driven without some kind of HUD elements. A related aspect is that the graphics need to be optimized for driving, not screenshots - take a lot of detail out of the places that you don't see when driving, and get better framerates/resolution/draw distance.

The other thing I'd like is for more sims to have a cohesive set of cars, tracks, and basic race rules. It doesn't have to be a licensed series, but for each car, try to get at least 3-4 tracks that it actually races on. And at least have appropriate standing/rolling start options for whatever the cars in a sim actually use.

Actually we build those multi million fsim because the authorities require so.

We also do “lower fidelity” fsim used for training.