I love racing simulations, like arcade. Love playing gran Turismo and Forza. But damn, gta 5 is a mix of sa and 4. It makes sense. Tbh, i don't like the handling of gta 4. It's not because it's hard. I get the hang out of it. Played it good. The thing is, it's not realistic at all. That's not how cars and bikes react. It's very heavy, yes, but often to heavy. Yes gta 5 is to light, but in some ways even more realistic, atleast at alot newer cars, but also not optimal. First to heavy, now to light. But seriously, i loved the detail and damage system in gta 4.
One of the reasons car damage isn't fleshed out in most games is due to licensing, car manufacturers don't want their cars smashed up. Usually they draw the line at broken windshields and doors flying off. That being said, Driver San Francisco struck a good balance.
Exactly. That argument only works between games with unlicensed cars. That is still lacking in the industry but Forza wasn't the best example because they really can't do real crashes. But it really sucks car manufacturers do that.
Games like GTA don't suffer from licensing issues as the cars aren't real brand cars, they're fictionary so crash physics are purely down to the developer choosing not to model decent crash physics.
It's a more recent thing tho. Grid 1 and 2 and some of the older NFS games had brutal damage models. Bumpers, hoods, all panels. Nothing was off the table, even for supercars or licensed race cars.
One of the things that GTA IV did when creating that new driving was adding some layers of complexcity and difficulty. Driving in GTA was always really easy, but adding those two changes for IV's driving made the game super fun to me, you really need to learn how to handle the vehicles in order to play without unaliving yourself. Great video, I can agree with everything you said here.
Tbh it baffles me why modern gamers are so hostile towards a challenging gameplay mechanic. Like, isn’t overcoming challenges the essential core of gaming? Ofc there is a difference between challenging and frustrating, but Driving in GTA 4 wasn’t frustrating when you mastered it.
9:48 The reason realistic damage isnt included in most (if not all) racing games is thanks to corporate demand. No CEO wants to see the car of their brand get mangled or destroyed (which it on itself is stupid, its like the long drawn out argument of "videogames cause mass shootings") the reason Burnout 3 has better damage models than FH5 is because you arent driving a Dodge or a Ferrari, you are driving a "Compact Type 1" or a "Super Type 1" TLDR: no brand = better damage spectacle
@@Frosty_V0 Two things: 1.) A 25-second clip from a focused gameplay demo is a very different thing from seeing that in-action in a game that's released to the public. See: Watch_Dogs and its incredible disappointment between its E3 showing in 2012 and its release. 2.) Even in the footage they showed with an Audi R8 bodyslamming a Lambo straight into the outside wall, the front right of the R8 didn't crumple along the front right of the car like you would expect a car going at that speed directly into something else would. We didn't even get a chance to see the rear of the Lambo and how that would have been affected by it, they straight on flew past it. Don't get me wrong, I hope the damage model is as good as Turn 10 says it is-it would still be a step up on most of the licensed driving games we have on the market right now. But to say definitively how well cars can sustain damage in that game, based on a gameplay demo from 10 months ago on a game still a bit out from release that none of us have played yet, is just not something that we can do.
Wreckfest bills itself on the breaking of cars, but is actually a competent racing game underneath it all. It handles dirt really well, and rewards skilled driving, when you aren't on the dirty servers.
if you like crashing and handling do Beam NG Drive (btw not someone trying to sell a game to you its just that I really like the game and I feel like more people should play it) oof this is long
Totally with you, the cars feel all feel different and importantly, they feel weighty. You also get good tactile feedback from the controller and it's just the right amount of challenge with all assists off.
I loved the cars in GTA IV, but the biggest issue and the biggest thing most people dislike about it isn't that it has "realistic handling", it's the suspensions that are much too soft, which makes the cars feel bouncy.
No you didnt. Nobody liked GTA IV physics when it was out. Now suddenly everyone loves to act like they liked the physics, now suddenly according to everyone GTA IV physics are underrated. Why else would they change the car physics for V?
@@R9naldo literally stfu They changed it in GTA V because most people don't like realism, they like things that are fun like mario kart and NFS, not BeamNG.
@@TanitAkaviriusThe thing is, he isn't really wrong. Why else would they change the physics? While not everyone disliked GTA IVs car physics, a lot of them did, so R* responded by making them more like an arcade game than BeamNG. I think the main issue is that when you get into GTA, you expect a more arcade experience, not a simulation. People play GTA for the open world and story, not car physics. I find it funny that you say "most people don't like realism" since now there's an entire group of people saying why that they didn't keep GTA IVs car handling. If most people didn't like realism, I guess most simulators don't exist then! Again, the argument is that it doesn't fit GTA.
@@awii.neocities Yes i completely agree with you. Most people who play GTA games want more arcade driving. I'm more of an exception there and i liked the more realistic driving of IV. "If most people didn't like realism, I guess most simulators don't exist then!" Driving sims are vastly less popular than more arcade driving games like GTA and NFS and the likes, so yeah, most people don't like realism.
BeamNG drive is the best example of good driving physics and damage. These few german devs created the most realistic Driving Physics in a game ever. The other games do not have to be THIS good but a least be standart. Good Video.
Beam ng would not make for a great gta nor driving game, it is just too realistic. A good balance between beamng and bumper carts is needed for fun gameplay.
@@husemann0770beamng is a great driving game, crashing actually has consequences. Gives you an incentive to drive well if that matters to you The rush of driving at high speeds trying not to crash is unmatched
@@rashadvqAs a player of beamng, I agree with your first statement. It's like a crash that would scrape off a body panel on a car in real life takes up the entire side of the crumple zone in beamng. As for the second thing you said, the odd handling is mostly a result of playing with a keyboard instead of a steering wheel. The beamng physics engine uses math to calculate the velocity, centrifugal force, and a whole lot of other things. This is what makes the handling so similar to a real car. Playing with a keyboard in beamng is like using a keyboard to control a real car, it all of a sudden becomes so much harder to drive. I've been playing beamng on a keyboard for a while so I've gotten good at dealing with it. The worst thing about it however is the steering. If you want to make a really small input, you basically can't. The only way to do it is by playing in slow motion, which gets boring quickly. This is a problem present in almost every racing game you play on PC. Overall I think your 2nd statement is true, but only applies to new racing game players as people that have played for a while have acknowledged these problems and have gotten a proper setup for these games.
I remember in midnight club los angeles you could fully damage a car during a race but if you start the race afterwards the game will replace the parts you lost with Grey parts which is kinda unique.
@@not360kaii yeah not really "crash phisics" since what they are is just pre damaged models swapped out during a crash, beamng on the other hand simulates it. Even AC doesn't have popper crash phisics just a couple prenade crashed cars, shows how big game studios sometimes honestly don't give a single frick
@@not360kaii it's honestly really cheap rn to get a pc like you can get a used lenovo thinkcentre with an i5 6500 or something and get a cheap gtx 1650 and kaboom like 200 dollar gaming pc that's crazily capable
Or, in other words, they give the masses what they enjoy. Not that I like that and I agree that clipping through objects must not happen in today's games. But let's face it, nobody wants realistic driving physics. Realistically, you would have a broken axle as soon as you drove up a kerb at speed with anything but a truck. You can't drive over lampposts. You'd total your car (and die!) all the time.
VR Support is not as easy as simply moving the camera inside the car and enabling motion input. You have to do a TON of extra work to make sure everything is intractable from inside VR, intuitive, and you have to put WAY more detail into areas like the rear interior of a car because the player can turn their head and see it, where they normally couldn't with a regular game camera. That's a lot of work for a feature 99.9% of players will NEVER use!
Yup. VR is just something that simply never be a standard due to the amount of work required to get it done properly. Plus even some games with VR support have a limited number of cars that can be used in VR for this very reason. With how many cars some have like Forza have it's unreasonable. Arcade style games also just don't have a number of people wanting VR since the vast majority of people play in 3rd person and won't use a 1st person mode, even if it was available.
This dude makes a lot of good points but he is wildly underestimating a lot of work that goes into these games. A lot of physics are due to the engine, which simulates the driving physics. It's not as simple as "not wanting to be as good as Rockstar" in 99% of the cases.
As a kid I always loved Midtown Madness, where destroying the car was basically a mini game. It was great how the cars limped along after breaking something important, like in a demolition derby. Old game, primitive by today, but a good game.
Wait....is that the game that had London and San Francisco as the map? There was an old open world driving game on my computer that I can't remember the name of...but that rings a bell.
While I share your frustration with regards to damage in driving games, I feel that we might be being too harsh here. Isn't it odd that all the games with great damage (burnout, GTA) use fictional vehicels? This isn't a coincedence, It's actually the result of racing games' licenses with the car manufacturers they feature in their games. No brand wants their cars to seem dangerous, so they all agree that their cars won't be depicted getting destroyed or experiencing a fatal accident. Take Driver: San Francisco for example, that's got to be one of my favourite racers out there. 90+ percent of the cars in that game are licensed, real vehicles. the other ~10% of cars are fictional, these are the ones they use in cutscenes where a car explodes or kills / injures somebody. Gets around legal trouble and keeps the car brands happy.
Hi :) i'm sorry, but the "licencing" excuse is BS .. Why ? because in midnight club 3 (2005) you could blow up your car at service stations. roof, glass, completly deformed, Midnight club L.A 2008, you can lose parts like bumpers and blow up you cars too.. and no.. Driver SF (Ubisoft) and Rockstar games never had issues with this
@@richoumiaou It is actually not a BS excuse. In GTA games they go out of there way to avoid car manufactures. And most modern games with super cars or just basically any Toyota/BMW/whatever trash? Good luck getting to even damage a bumper. Your lucky to be allowed to scratch or crack a windscreen.
@@richoumiaou this isn't a theory, this is confirmed by industry developers. Car manufacturers nowadays doesn't want their cars to look destroyed or dangerous. Also, I tested the damage in Midnight Club LA, it's minor, no chassis deformation.
@@bur_s It would be our money in the end, going into pockets of car manufacturers which I grow to despise over time as a petrolhead (seeing how they degrade various lines of cars into heavy, useless and dangerous SUVs designed and marketed to flatter inflated egos). Actually looking at example of BeamNG I think that I could live without branded cars: it is a matter of designing interesting and good looking equivalents - this is what BeamNG authors absolutely nailed.
Mafia 2 did it best, where in the settings you could choose between an arcade and simulation driving style. Missions were really difficult with simulation driving in the first few snowy chapters.
I’ve been amazed how even Driver 3 and Parallel Lines can dettach the wheels from a vehicle after crashing them for a long tome just like in Mafia 2. If a open world game have bad driving physics that’s is a big down for me
@@fenn_fren Mafia: Definition Edition lets you choose between Automatic and Manual (stick shift) too, which is cool. I forget if the original Mafia or Mafia II does that.
12:35 What I feel is not often talked about, and unfortunately it isn't mentioned here as well, is the fact that when you use the cockpit view in racing games, it is ALWAYS stiff facing forward. When I am driving, I want to look AHEAD of the curve; not turning blindly into it. That could be solved with an invisible dot in front of the car, that follows the track of the game ahead of you, which your camera always automatically focus at. And depending on speed, it will either be far ahead or close up front of your car. It's a very simple solution to a very common problem.
Even in third person some games are always snapping the camera back to straight ahead. Annoys me because I'm constantly moving the camera to lookin5o the corner
there are games that turn your vision by yours steering wheel turning. I use it. However it also makes a little harder to judge where exactly the car is going. Especially when you are corrrecting for sliding.
I'm glad you mentioned the weightiness of GTAIV's driving, something I feel has always lacked in most driving games is the sheer sense of speed and screen shake, if you ever see irl footage of time attacks, the driver is bouncing and swinging around inside the car, but in video games, the 1st person camera is static like a mounted camera, theres no simulated inertia.
As a developer the biggest most important thing to make a vehicle system feel good is how the camera is scripted. Honestly good camera scripting can easily make up for some sub par physics. A good example of this would be need for speed most wanted.
There's obviously tons of good and bad examples of this out there, but something I recently played was Pico World Race for the Pico-8 fantasy console. For as basic and simple as the game is, it has a genuinely better sense of speed than most modern AAA racers.
As a game developer I got to say the camera blur and pan of the field of view ara awesome yes But the light trails and the music makes it fell faster than the camera for me
i mean the most important thing is pretty obviously the actual system not the camera since a simple orbital camera is definitely enough though not perfect. doing tricks with the camera to mask bad work is just laziness
Gta iv still holds up very well as an in between of arcade and realistic being just controllable enough to be worth using and just fragile enough to still be a challenge.
No.Its one of the worst driving physics in any game I have ever seen.Driving feels like driving in the ice and handling is so worse and the break takes like 5-7 seconds to work even in slower speed.Dont know how you guys even liked that for its driving physics when its not even close to realistic and Gta-5 does have good destruction physics for cars but it takes a bit more hit to do more damage and physics of it is decent, not too much over the top like gta-4.
its not arcady its realistic and the reason is not arcady because the cars get damage from bumping into things and this might be a punishment cause doing this like 2 times might cause the car to start smoking and not only that but the car getting flipped is a punishment for not focusing on your drive, i wish if open world third person games had the same idea of car collusion and the punishment of doing something to the car
I feel like beamng drive is the best driving game released honestly, from the car's reaction to steering, the bumps damaging your axyl, the speed management, reaction to the roads and the over all physics especially the crash physics it honestly makes me always go back to it to have a drive. If there is any game worth your money its beamng drive, there is no objectives exept for the missions but the physics alone are the selling point. And with modding support its literally perfect
A game not mentioned in the video is Wreckfest, it has good physics, interaction with the environment, very good damage and you can feel the weight of the vehicles. A game that can be played perfectly with keyboard, controller or steering wheel and feels great in all.
Yeah Wreckfest really has it done properly, it's probably the only game besides the original Flatout that I'll enjoy playing with a keyboard and also has an awesome destruction system
i can't play wreckfest, the lack of an orbital camera is insane. you can't even properly look at the damage on your car because your camera is locked to 4 sides. i don't know why an orbital camera isn't standard for these games, its super useful to help line up the direction you wanna send your car towards
Watch Dogs physics remind me a lot of Most Wanted 2012 physics. The cars are hard to steer and slide easily at high speeds making them hard to control especially in a crowded city setting, but honestly I like that. Makes it so driving fast feels actually dangerous.
WD1 physics weren't bad. I liked the way the older cars had a softer suspension and would bounce more over bumps whereas the sports cars would have a stiffer suspensions. Also the cars in WD1 felt like it had weight. WD1 in my opinion is an amazing game and is easily on the same boat as GTA 5 even though I do prefer GTA 5 over WD1, WD1 definitely had it flaws but I prefer some aspects of that game over GTA 5
I love the sense of speed in beamNG, the fear of crashing the car and the grip levels all add to the lightning fast reaction time you need to have to keep the car from turning into a fireball stuck to a tree which makes the game feel unique. Especially coming from a person who played forza games all his life.
@@cyberdemon6517 i mean yeah,using a keyboard in a game with realistic handling is not great,because you are either steering all the way,or not steering,that said,i still play on keyboard
I do expect you to talk about Mafia 2's handling. Just like GTA 4, it strikes a perfect balance between realism and arcadey/easy controls (and it also featured a simulation mode which also makes the handling way more realistic). And cars do feel fast and dangerous (as hitting could kill you as cars back then didn't have safety belts (some cars have them as an option which barely anyone wanted) And Mafia 1 also implemented a proper steering wheel support with actual force feedback. And driving physics feel pretty good too at its time
Driving those hotrods at max speed on the highway felt like 1 small mistake could kill you instantly (which it could) Also the way tires deform in that game is amazing
@@IskenderCaglarM41B441 -Mafia series is pretty much falling apart- One thing for sure is that Mafia DE is a massive improvement over III's questionable quality (thanks a lot crowb) even though the game was made out of a tight budget (thanks to that one cancelled game), so yeah I basically have a bit of hope that Mafia 4's actually gonna be fine, even though Blackmen left and replaced by some guy who was in charge of II and III's remasters or something (Dunno if it's true or it's just MGV doing some trolling)
Driver: San Francisco was such a good game, last of the franchise. It's what brings creativity into light. The story, the mechanics, and the damage models especially with licensed vehicles. It's sad to see a franchise like that end.
I do think that vr isn’t a priority for games like FH5, considering its simcade physics, weird in-game wheel rotation and the lack of people who are looking into using their vr headset for FH5. Instead if you are looking for immersion then it’s probably best to play something like iRacing, Assetto Corsa or rFactor 2 as they all offer a far supperior driving experience even if they don’t have any major crash phyics
I don't think gyro controls for bikes would be much of a good idea. They're good on paper and as a gimmick, but having to do that a lot with a controller that you hold in the air with your hands can get very tiring. The DualSense triggers were an interesting idea on paper, but in long term use it becomes annoying or outright uncomfortable. Same thing would be with gyro controlled bikes I feel.
I have to say I've loved watching BeamNG come along, especially in the physics department. Driving on dirt roads in particular feels incredibly satisfying.
Something you forgot in my opinion is the sound design ! For me it completely break the immersion when cars in games have bad engine sounds, especially in GTA, GTA games always had fake and terrible engine sounds, for example a muscle car in a GTA game doesn't have a real V8 engine sound, it completely break the immersion and it feel like you're driving a fake chinese replica lol.
Thats my problem too with cars in GTA, handling and physics in GTA 4 is maybe great but the engine sound are so bad, an infernus(Lamborghini) sounds more like a racing bike than a car
Modern Need for Speed games, Unbound especially, are really bad with this. For some reason the faster you go, the more quiet your car gets. The old Blackbox games, MW05 especially, had it be really loud and you heard those woosh sounds driving past signs, other cars and lamp posts. MW2012 also had amazing sounds and sound design
GTA 5's damage was nerfed slightly after the PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions came out because of the first person camera. In GTA 4 and original versions of GTA 5, cars can be completely caved in. Especially when hit with a heavy vehicle or of course, a tank.
Yes! I remember back on the Xbox 360 hitting random pedestrians cars and the wheels coming off super easy Now on the updated version it is very rare to get a wheel to pop off unless it's being ran over by a tank
You can crush cars completely even on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Although yes, they do take longer, but then again, considering how most GTA players, myself included, play the games, should you be surprised that the cars are practically indestructible?
@@linkskywalker5417 Fair point, but that just gives novice players an excuse to not drive well. Honestly should have made damage terminal in 2 or 3 hits so that the average GTA player would be forced to drive good. Just my opinion, though.
"Many games don't have VR support despite it being easy to implement." Tell me you aren't a Software Engineer without telling me you aren't a Software Engineer.
i agree, but i'd hope he was referencing the actual core implementation of it being easy. not necessarily from a development process, but the fact that it's just a POV from inside the car instead of needing all these dedicated systems for reloading guns, interacting with items and the world environment, etc.
The driving was very weird in Watch Dogs 1, I agree. Once I couldn't find a unlocked car without stealing one, so I took the train, which was funnily enough very relaxing, knowing physics wouldn't screw with me. Glad you picked up on the missing steering wheel support. This is one of the reasons I have so many hours in ETS2 and a few in ATS now as well.
One racing game I love is Wreckfest. It’s one of my favorite modern racing games, with great realistic car handling, a good sense of speed and weight, and awesome destruction. It feels great being in a big muscle car, smashing into a small subcompact, and still keeping most of your momentum while the other car gets wrecked!
frrr that game is pretty amazing. It is one of my most played games on Steam, and the driving physics are indeed super enjoyable. I can comfortably play on keyboard in that game!
@@thejonatan._ I have Wreckfest on my PS5, and it works really well with the Dual-Sense triggers and vibration! It feels awesome accelerating the trigger and the vibrations on impact. But I found out how well the game worked with my steering wheel a few weeks ago. I have a Thrustmaster T150 steering wheel, which is a mid-range overall really good wheel made for the PS4, PS3, and PC. I’ve tried it on a couple PS5 games, but usually doesn’t feel right, which makes sense because it wasn’t made for those games. Surprisingly it worked really well with Wreckfest, though. The driving felt responsive, though I did need to turn the force feedback setting down a bit first. It felt even more fun, drifting around corners and smashing into other cars. I also think the first person is really great, which adds to the immersion!
@wavecraft123 dam that's great that you are able to experience it with those setups! I have a Dualsense controller, but i don't get those triggee sensations while playing on pc :( i bet it would be fun I also want to get a wheel setup some time in the future, they look so great to use and I'm glad to hear about how great wreckfest worked for you with the wheel
Wreckfest is an underrated gem and no other racing game gave me more fun than this masterpiece. I really hope the next thing that Bugbear is cooking is equal or even better. Their long silence lately is a bit worrying..
As a person who's been riding motorcycles for many years now, I can safely say that GTA IV got the motorcycle riding physics very close an enjoyable experience with it still being a bit realistic.
@@AeiouCommander its bad. Somehow develpers of riding games clearly dont ride themselves. imo, it starts with what Dark Space said in the video, the stick being the primary single input device, makes it inherently inferior, because it needs to cover both the bike leaning and it coming back out of it, and the result is extremely sensitive controls and jerkyness, or so many assists that it gets rather boring and feeling stiff etc. The solution seems rather simple, but then again, most people dont care and just want the object to move around. I mean, lets be honest, do you enjoy ride 4 or do you think its lacking somewhere?
It's crazy to think that indie games like BeamNG and Wreakfest have better car physics than pretty much all of the recent triple A titles with driving in them.
Beam ng would suck as a racing game BECAUSE of the realism. What would happen if you put Beam ng’s physics in a need for speed game? It would suck, because cars are fragile, and that just doesn’t work for a game like need for speed. They wouldn’t be able to even if they wanted to, because licensed car companies wouldn’t want their cars to be seen destroyed.
@@biponacci yeah, you're right. a game like need for speed where you are constantly bumping your car into things would suck with car physics like in beam ng. A sim racer would be much better for those types of physics because you are meant to have to watch your car's damage and other things. my problem in this video is that Dark Space tries to say that every racing game NEEDS these types of physics, when they don't and shouldn't.
For open world driving games, Burnout Paradise still remains my favourite in terms of the overall package. Fantastic feeling cars, damage models and a near perfection on the arcade style. Yes it had some jankiness to it, but even the bikes feel better than most others I've played.
Vehicle artist in the game industry here. I'd like to chime in and share a few things. Regarding being 'half assed' you always ALWAYS contextualize the driving/handling around the type of game being made. If its purely a 'car' game eg :Forza, NFS then they really don't have an excuse for the physics being boring and broken, it would be like if in GTA the character couldn't walk straight. However with open world games like GTA, watch dogs, saints row etc usually (not always) the vehicle interaction comes secondary to the rest of the game. In other words that part of the game is deemed not as important and receives far fewer resources. There are outliers to this of course but you can probably count on one hand how many open world games actually have really good driving physics. Point two : Physics programmers and people that understand the nuances of car physics are usually not the same person, so you now have to find two or more very specialized people, and once again if your game's primary focus isn't cars then the companies will probably cheap out as the priority is the 'bigger picture' (usually characters and shooting) and not the vehicle physics. Point three : If your system is underdeveloped the studios can keep using a broken foundation for several titles and never fix the fundamental problems. On the flipside for one reason or another, studios like to throw away perfectly good systems and star over. The anecdote I have is that the system developed for Driver San Franciso was amazing (as is the handling in that game ) but for some reason Ubisoft decided to put it into the garbage for The Crew and start over. Point four : Real world car manufacturers are all over the place when it comes to vehicle damage but for the most part they do not want any kind of realistic damage depicted in a game. Fictional vehicles are therefore the prime go-to for this kind of thing, however on that point, fictional cars are also really hard to design well, there are far too many examples of games with really terrible looking fictional cars.
You also missed the difficulty in adding in VR into a game because it's no where near simple to add in as well. It requires detailed interiors as well as many game engines not supporting it
In my book it is tied with Midnight Club 3 in that regard (and better then MC:LA). Only issues with Driver SF were the flipping physics (it got kinda wonky if you landed a jump upside down) and the super cars were a little overly drifty.
@@scottthewaterwarrior I liked how the drift physics were in DSF. If you eased on the throttle and didn't break traction, you could accelerate harder. But if you floored it from a standstill in a high-power RWD car (or pulled the parking brake), you were going to spin the wheels. The driving was great in the sense that anyone could pick it up, but players with racing sim experience could be much, much faster. It made setting times super fun.
This is not an issue of lazy devs or bad physics, it's a licensing issue with the manufacturers, they don't want their cars getting badly smashed up in the games they're being licensed for.
Midnight Club 2 features the best motorcycle physics ive played. They're not perfect but it features the option to hold down L1 while turning to enable leaning, which feels great ingame.
GTA IV had physics based driving and it was superb. Perhaps it took a bit to get used to but it was way more precise and predictable than anything else. I also agree that Most Wanted was awesome.
Not a big deal, but a pet peeve I've had for a while was tire smoke. After playing Driver: San Francisco and seeing how the rear half of a rwd car can be *completely* obscured by smoke when burning rubber, all other games kinda feel like a let down when I do burnouts.
O right! Yea Mafia 1-3 had awesome car handling. I had wanted a manual transmission in Mafia 2 and 3!! (sequential no clutch just like NFS MW 2005/Mafia 1) I have had so much more fun driving around free roam in the Mafia games then trying to play them as a Grand Theft Auto like. Mafia 2 was such a waste of potential. And Mafia 3.... Nuff said. No but I do have somethings to say about Mafia 3. I do like Lincoln clay and the main story. The driving after patches and turning realistic driving on was really good too. Yet the buggy release and endless boooooring open world missions of repetitive garbage really makes you want to forget it even exist. Mafia 2 and 3 had some really grate truck/lorry driving. I do not know how many hours I drove around in Mafia 2 just being a truck driver. That gearbox shifting sounds and realistic physic and traffic was awesome! Agen what a waste not getting the Mafia 2 we where promised! Still feel cheated out of not being ticketed running red lights! Joe even scream at you for doing it! ARRRRRRG.
@@ididntmeantoshootthatvietn5012I don't remember that Mafia 2 has the driving options. It was introduced to Mafia 3 and also in Mafia 2 definitive edition.
This whole video is proof that you know nothing about how games actually work. Stop demanding developers to focus on such insignificant things that don't matter. Not every game is Grand Theft Auto, and they don't need to be.
Shame vehicle handling data was written by a drunk monkey, pretty much none of cars behaves like they should, despite game having top-notch physics. Mods fix it, sure, but they shouldn't be needed in the first place.
@@kireta21 Yep those who saying Gta-4 driving physics is realistic gotta drive vehicles themselves cause I can guarantee you most of them are just gamers who hiding in their basement and trying become a keyboard warrior 😂
GTA4 isn't realistic, the body roll is hugely exaggerated and motorcycle handling is a joke example, Gran Turismo and Forza are the benchmark for realistic feeling driving
@Wilko with too much traffic it lags, but with an amount of traffic that is not absurd it can play smoothly (for console standards, aka 30fps) on a entry level computer.
Why did you call FH5 a simulator in this video? It's a Simcade, it was intentionally dumbed down from the FM handling model which only just brushed simulator territory to begin with. You had BeamNG footage at the ready if you wanted to use a simulator that wasn't track-only
burnout and gta 4 have great damage and forza doesn't is mainly due to licensing. A lot of car brands don't want damage to be shown on their cars in games. It's not the only reason but its one of the reasons why modern racing games like the recent forza and need for speed (Especially the ones that feature new real cars) lack damage.
I read it somewhere, damage on car is limited nowadays because licensing issue, the license holder of that car dont like their product looks wrecked in game.
man if every game was like beamng drive I would be so mad because its so annoying when youll be just chilling. your tire pops and you fall off a cliff killing your entire body system in seconds
Regarding damage, I used to feel the same about how GTA5's damage was a complete downgrade over GTA4's... But I ended up realizing that it makes life a lot more convenient in most situations, especially given the Online component. Dying instantly in Story Mode because of an unfortunate lamp post hit is simply an instant fun killer. Having a stunt session ruined because your car flipped on its roof is an instant fun killer (before 5 at least - this turning the car around mechanic is, imho, an absolutely welcome addition). The older cars in GTA5 were more malleable, but that comes with so many downsides. In some stunt races, just racing cleanly and normally would absolutely destroy the suspension of my Entity XF after a few landed jumps, making it an absolute pain to drive. In freemode, more recent sports and supercars are designed and built in such a way that the front bumper sticks out enough to usually protect the headlights after head-on collisions. Is it unrealistic? Of course. Is it practical? Immensely and absolutely.
This is a really touchy subject, realism is racing games isn't something that everyone wants, simulation games are there for it, games like NFS, Burnout, Midnight Club and etc. are more focused on the speed and fun, imagine a game like that with forza motorsport realism, it wouldn't be fun, forza horizon is the best example of an arcade game with realism in it, still has an arcade feeling to it with a decent touch of realism, some of the most realistic "racing" games aren't even built for racing, like BeaNG drive, it feels more like a tech demo than a racing game, there are people who actually use it for racing but it's a small portion of the fan base, realism isn't always the best choice.
Kinda sad that you didn't mention NFS ProStreet as one of the examples. It's that middle ground between arcade and sim, where cars feel realistic in both damage and physics, while still being arcadish enough to be enjoyable.
Or Porsche for that matter given the extra tuning which still seems unmatched in the series. Can you name another NFS game that lets you adjust gear ratios and toe-in ?
The reason motorcycles are steered with one input is that when you're riding a motorcycle, you mostly steer by leaning and the front wheel turns with you. I can actually ride and steer my Harley without using my hands. (After locking the throttle of course) Dirt bikes are much different, but street bikes, sport bikes & cruisers are this way.
I had to lol when you say, VR is easy to implement, whilst on the surface it might seem so, in reality it is not - lots of love from a race game dev :) Ps. It is largely the publishers and licences which constrain and hold back our industry, not the developers themselves.
You did a fantastic job outlining a lot of quirks of driving games! I have some additional input of my own: Part of the issue is compromise between expectations and reality. You have lots of people (kids) who really don't know how cars work, and realistic physics are annoying for them. Even adults who have driven their whole lives have a surprisingly shallow understanding of how vehicles really behave in the extreme situations you see them in on screen. Most people won't understand that their offroad truck isn't "steering" properly because it has a locked rear differential, which works differently than an open one. They'll just go "ugh, I hate this truck" and pick a different one instead. So developers will almost exclusively choose to leave that behavior out--if they even have any idea what a differential is themselves. Take, for example, motorcycles. Anyone who's ridden knows about "countersteer," but normal people don't. Hence, video games always require you to steer in the direction you want to go. but in real life, motorcycles require you to turn *opposite* of the direction you want to go, once you reach a certain speed. If games worked that way, people would get annoyed and give up, because it doesn't make sense to them. But there are *lots* of complexities like this in real life--even with cars. Another example is aircraft. I had a friend who played a game where the airplane steers like a car: left to right (yaw). He swore up and down that "that's how planes work in real life." But he'd get frustrated if the controls were realistic, especially if he had to deal with realistic performance, stalling, turbulence and crosswind, ice accumulation, the impact of altitude on performance and behavior, etc. etc.--or even situations where there's loss of control, like flat-spins, overspeed, dives of death, etc. Not to mention that even small changes in design can lead to fatal situations if you aren't familiar with the aircraft. On top of that, programming the behavior of any system is much more complex than it seems, especially because it can't be solved in an intuitive way. You can't program a car by typing "if it hits a rock, the wheel bounces." If you try to program it in an intuitive way, you'll have all kinds of hair-pulling bugs and issues, and it won't behave correctly. That's because our modern-day physics engines aren't 1:1 compared to, well, *life's* physics engine. You need an exceptionally rare type of talent to take a complex physics system and "translate" it into a (relatively) simple equation that produces the desired result. All in all, it's not just darn hard to program these systems. Most people don't WANT vehicles to work realistically. Just realistically *enough* to immerse--not everyone, but specifically--the *target* audience. And when you throw in these expectations, coding a system that works *as expected* is incredibly difficult. You have to figure out what inputs someone is expecting to give, and what outputs they're expecting to see on the screen. And then you have to turn that into code. Both of those problems--figuring out what your audience wants and how to give it to them--are more difficult to solve than people think, especially if you're a massive company where getting anything done requires wading through a swamp of "red tape." People who have both the *inspiration* and especially the *ability* to execute a vision like yours are *exceedingly* rare. And that's the real problem.
For me this like engineering, You can imagine you have a linear force and easily use that to impulse certain machine... but vehicles in gaming are like take that linear force and develop a whole factory that fully works only from that linear force. This happens also the whole time with rigging, people dont get how hard is for example to pretend to move 40 muscles always realistically with barely a couple of imputs... at the end you dont really "control it" more like the rigging is a simulation that behaves correctly depending the situation/scrips and your imputs (like 90% of the movement are a simulation and only 10% of your imput are actually taken on count)
It’s licensing. Toyota started pulling their cars from video games because they didn’t believe people would be interested in buying their cars, but that’s changed. As far as damage, it’s licensing. Companies don’t want you to see their cars damaged because it might “put consumers off about safety” so games like gta have to resort to making their own parodies of cars so they can add damage. The difference between gta4 and 5 is the fact that players were complaining about loosing tires and totaling their cars. GTA5 had a somewhat minor soft body physics. But they removed some of it and they started realizing cars that took absolutely no damage. And I hear players boast about “gta’s impressive scratch physics” that I find super annoying. I aren’t hours crashing cars in gta4 because it was fun, and I was able to challenge myself when I tackled to see how little damage I can get on my car and see how long I could drive a car. But gta 5 I don’t want to damage them because it’s more annoying driving around with you hood popped open and there be a scratch on it after you just accidentally touched a light post. Gta6 will be just like the crew, or they will go back to vice city type damage. Take 2 doesn’t do physics, they do graphics. 😒
All that talk about damage but no mention of what is considered fun. That’s a big reason why you don’t total your car just for hitting 1 wall. They may have even had that feature but it was removed because play testers said it made the game boring to constantly have your car get destroyed. It’s not always low effort or rushed, just because it looks like that to you.
As far as bike physics go, gta iv on the ps3 had whats called "sixaxis". You would use the controller to tilt bikes, helicopters, and even reload. It was the only time ive seen any game use the software
i heard that damages on licensed vehicles has something to do with the license itself because sometimes the manufacturers themselves don't wanna see their cars get damaged in video games and or the game publisher/dev have to pay more to apply at least cosmetic damage to them
Simply put: Pathetic! If one is willing to give up on details simply because "me no ok with you making virtual stuff kaput" then DONT add it and make something original
This is going to sound weird but I think there's a large market segment in which innovation in car driving mechanics is not desirable. For games that merely feature driving rather than being all about driving (e.g. stuff like Just Cause or Watch Dogs, not racing games), I think customers would be much happier if "good driving physics" was a drop-in middleware that games studios could just buy and configure. Similarly to how lots of games just drop in Havok or Bullet or Box2D rather than inventing rigid body physics simulation from scratch.
Mafia II has the best driving I've ever seen in a game. Piloting those land barges felt exactly as it should, the body roll, the sliding and traction, the everything was dead nuts on accurate. The only thing it didn't have was a great damage model. It was passable but if it had GTA IV's damage it'd be perfection.
You do know that the cars from the 40's and 50's era was made from solid metal and not light aluminium and plastic? That is why the cars in Mafia 2 don't deform as much after an collision as in Gta 4..
5:17 as much as I prefer IV's handling, I do like how I can flip my vehicle back up. It isn't exactly what I would call "handholding", more of a QoL feature.
I agree. But in combination with the arcade'y driving-physics in GTA V, and the ability to adjust the car in mid-air; the entire "flipping of the car" seems a bit too unrealistic and breaks the immersion - although it's a very convenient feature. If Rockstar Games instead would have combined the ability to flip the car, with realistic driving-physics, and an inability to adjust the car in mid-air; then the car-flipping wouldn't feel as unrealistic. It's simply easier to forgive only 1 unrealistic aspect, than it is to forgive 3 unrealistic aspects.
Tourist Trophy on PS2 was the best motorbike racing game for almost a decade and the reason for that was because it was built upon the Gran Turismo 4 engine. It's outdated by today's standards but it's still a blast to play, even if it needs an update in its physics and other aspects. Kazunori Yamauchi has briefly mentioned that he wants to make a successor that incorporates proper racing sim setups and motion controls but it's still not possible with the current technology (or at least affordable to gamers). There's at least one RUclipsr who has mentioned that VR could work as a possible workaround in lieu of expensive racing hardware that it's not streamline yet. I also think this is a viable option even though VR is still out of reach for most of gamers' pockets, especially on the PC side.
The motion sensor idea for motorcycles is bad because the controls would be extra clunky since we don’t have a table to rest our arms on and nobody holds their controller straight it’s always going to be at an angle
This video seems to be lacking some basic fact checking. First of all, Kyloton is NOT a remotely well respected company, and they lost their WRC licence because the last 4 games they released under that licence were hot garbage. Secondly, and most importantly, it has been an open and easily researched fact that car companies have been the driving force (No pun intended) behind the "No Damage" in modern racing titles. It's why GTA does not feature ANY real life vehicles. If it did, you would have zero damage, just as you find in Forza Horizon games. I mean yes, games companies do need to do a hell of a lot better, and it absolutely is possible to persuade companies to relax their rules around showing their products getting damaged, but ultimately the final decision is not, and never has been, down to the developers. I'm a racing game addict, a sim racing enthusiast, and a lover of driving fast and smashing shit up, so I don't say any of this to cover for the game devs, just that facts are facts, and you seem to have missed some pretty bloody big ones.
Wow. You basically summarized my entire thoughts about this topic I had since the release of GTA V. Just like you, I was EXTREMELY disappointed with the physics in it and took me 2 - 3 years to get around it. You needed real skills to drive in IV, V held your hand all throughout. Every other game apart from GTA IV, the cars feel like an afterthought, where they don’t interact with the environment. No weight, no damage, no crumple zones, no suspension travel, and agile handling in EVERY vehicle weather it be a supercar or an SUV etc. it’s infuriating! Test Drive Unlimited 1 & 2 were great games BUT they also lacked the same issue with handling where cars felt like they drove on ice. Hopefully this issue doesn’t carry over onto the next one.
I still haven't gotten around to completing GTA V, mostly because of the boring driving physics. Hardly ever had to slow down for curves and even when I did, practically every vehicle could stop on a dime, so even if I misjudged my speed, I could correct mid-corner and be fine. The only challenge seemed to come from the police's rubber banding with their magic turbo boost ram ability that would force you to swerve. The swerve wasn't even a predictable thing based on impact angle most the time, felt random.
2 things: Games like Forza horizon five and GTA 5 don't use crash physics because it makes the game more frustrating if ur car brakes every time u make a mistake. Considering ur in police chases a lot in GTA. And they want you to have freedom in forza, thats why u can smash through trees with only a scratch. U wanna be able to drive around without being stopped by damages. That being said, i can't believe you didn't talk about BeamNG Drive!!
bikes don't turn by rotating their handlebars in the direction of the turn, they turn using centrifugal force and the side walls of the tire by leaning into the turn. the only reason motorcycles have a handlebar is to steer at walking speeds.
A lot of driving games that have licensed cars won't have realistic damage because the car companies won't license the cars if they are destroyed in the game. Which is very dumb to me. Which is why games like Burnout didn't use licensed cars.
One thing I can say about GTA V’s physics, even tho the ability to roll your car onto it’s wheels is very unrealistic and weird, it would be highly inconvenient to have to hop out of the car and find a new one, especially in GTA Online. So I can see why they added that. As for the damage physics, yes, they need to fix that in GTA VI. Some cars barely even deform, while others, such as the cop cars can literally be compressed into a toaster. The inconsistency is what bothers me so much.
"Why are game studios simply reselling the same content in new packages rather than offering true innovation with each new release?" Big game companies: Apple:
The problem with realistic damage is, that many car manufacturers don't want that in games. So you either have realistic damage or real cars. Doing both just isn't really possible, due to how stuck up car manufacturers are.
they are stuck up, the live in the fucking 1950's or even worse. They pressure god damn governments to design car-centric cities, where you can't realistically cycle or walk, but you have to buy their hunk of steel. This motor industry lobbying is insane in the US.
I think most users of the game would bale their car on the corner of a building at the first bend (did you see the 120 mph crash on fifth gear?), thus game cars are made out of 8 inches of plate steel and given thirty thousand horsepower engines to compensate. That way they can drive into anything like battering rams and just get a few scratches on the paintwork. The exception is beamng and Garry's mod
"VR is easy to implement!" As someone who has talked to devs from Codemasters/EA, I can call BS on that. There's a reason the VR for WRC 2023 is coming AFTER release. It's because it's NOT easy to implement, and takes time to do right.
Need For Speed Porsche has a really good balance - you can really bang up the car and it will affect not just the acceleration and top speed but also the handling, like it will start to pull left or right depending in the crash
GTA IV's motorcycle physics are still some of the best motorcycles I've ever seen, you can actually lean on them and the crotch rockets still work with body roll and traction, once you get the hang of them they're actually very dynamic
I like the damage physics in Flatout 2, it has the most satisfying crashes I've ever seen in a game Also, I've read somewhere that when a game officially licenses real cars, the manufacturers forbid adding damage physics because they don't want to see their cars being damaged. That's why cars in Flatout and GTA series don't use their real names and don't look exactly like their real life versions.
@@AyyEf They can use words like PRESTIGE but they still look completely insane being afraid of damage to a fake car on a video game. It wouldn't affect their sales negatively by having awesome physics attached to their in game cars. Completely the opposite.
Apparently the deformation in gta 5 used to be better on last gen but it was somewhat disabled at the sides and roof I guess so the interiors wouldn't get messed up in first person. Don't quote me on that though, I never owned it on last gen and just read some forums. Still a huge shame :(
I mean, if the roof deformed and blocked my view I'd just switch to 3rd person, that's what I do in Wreckfest. Or if they really want to keep the immersion, design it so that your character ducks down some if the roof is in the way.
@@scottthewaterwarrior There's an interesting fact I learned from the video "A Look Behind GTA 5's Weird Gameplay Design" is that car roof deformation can be toggled in real time, so why they didn't just do that based on selected camera perspective is mind boggling.
Год назад+4
One thing to note is that car manufacturers often prohibit their cars receiving significant damage when licensing them for games.
A game that did motorcycles really well and driving in general, was sleeping dogs. That game had arcadey physics, but driving in it was always a joy. Along with the ability to quickly switch to different vehicles from all types by jumping from one to another during driving. I wish they'd make a Sleeping Dogs 2.
Car companies don't license their brands to games if they will get damaged badly, or usually, at all. That's why every game that HAS good destruction physics use unbranded cars or "close but not close enough to trigger copyright law" cars. Flatout and Wreckfest are good examples.
If you had any knowledge or even did a little research, you would know that licensing requirements of many manufacturers stipulate that their vehicles do not show crash damage.
This one is a miss imo Part of what made IV give cars a heavy feel is how unresponsive they are and body roll. The reason V went for a lighter approach is because that game regularly has you traverse a larger area. I personally feel that it is too stiff, but it makes sense. Most of the physics you showed weren't "wrong"; they were deliberate stylistic choices that, while they did act up in some scenarios, such as airborne, were important to the feel of the game.
THIS, my god i'm so fed up with racing games "fans" complaining about specific design choices of a game, no one complains that "ballistic physics in csgo are unrealistic", it's a goddamn design choice but only racing games "fans" come in to make video essays saying the specific features and design choices he likes in a game should be in every single game of the entire genre
The reason VR isn't in more games it's because it's still pretty niche, especially on console. Crew 2 (and arcade racers in general) isn't a game worthy of wheel and pedal support if it doesn't have the physics to back it up. Even if it's a racing game, it should have the physics to back it up if it has wheel and pedal support. As for WRC Generations, last I heard about that game is that when it launched, there wasn't accurate enough response from the throttle - the car basically crawled until the gas was about 80% pressed - so I don't know if that game series was the _best_ example. I'm surprised you didn't mention Dirt Rally 2.0 though! Even a classic of Richard Burns Rally is insanely fun today. I'm also surprised you quite quickly glossed over FOV. I remember trying NFS Heat during a free weekend on Steam, and going 125mph felt like I was going only 45-55mph.
At least when it comes to games that use real cars, a lot of manufacturers don't want to license there cars to games if they will be shown all damaged and twisted up, so that is the reason.
13:02 "Many driving games don't have VR [...] despite the fact that it's *easy* for racing games to implement" That's the hottest take I've heard in a while. VR definitely isn't *easy*, especially in a game where you're moving at high speeds and crashing. It's not easy to make that a good experience. But if you drop the word "easy", I agree that it would be good to have VR in many driving games.
Its easier compared to any other genre of game. No need to have the player model track hand position of motion controls. Cockpit is already modeled and animated. Just place the camera in the right place, and you're good to go. All game engines can move the camera well enough, the headset motion data just needs to be fed to the game engine. In modern game engine like Unreal, it's literally a few clicks. Modders have added VR support to several racing games even Richard Burns Rally.
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Vid is out for 20 secs and man already has a comment from 11 hours ago bruh
if you want some real destruction try wreckfest, one of the best driving games imo. Checks off all ur boxes
@@Hass2518 Time traveller
@@Hass2518 most likly a patrion situation where people get them early
I love racing simulations, like arcade. Love playing gran Turismo and Forza.
But damn, gta 5 is a mix of sa and 4. It makes sense. Tbh, i don't like the handling of gta 4. It's not because it's hard. I get the hang out of it. Played it good. The thing is, it's not realistic at all. That's not how cars and bikes react. It's very heavy, yes, but often to heavy. Yes gta 5 is to light, but in some ways even more realistic, atleast at alot newer cars, but also not optimal. First to heavy, now to light. But seriously, i loved the detail and damage system in gta 4.
One of the reasons car damage isn't fleshed out in most games is due to licensing, car manufacturers don't want their cars smashed up. Usually they draw the line at broken windshields and doors flying off. That being said, Driver San Francisco struck a good balance.
Exactly. That argument only works between games with unlicensed cars. That is still lacking in the industry but Forza wasn't the best example because they really can't do real crashes. But it really sucks car manufacturers do that.
None of the cars in GTA V are licensed, but collision physics are still trash
Games like GTA don't suffer from licensing issues as the cars aren't real brand cars, they're fictionary so crash physics are purely down to the developer choosing not to model decent crash physics.
It's a more recent thing tho. Grid 1 and 2 and some of the older NFS games had brutal damage models. Bumpers, hoods, all panels. Nothing was off the table, even for supercars or licensed race cars.
@@0uttaS1TE grid legends and unbound also have good damage model
One of the things that GTA IV did when creating that new driving was adding some layers of complexcity and difficulty. Driving in GTA was always really easy, but adding those two changes for IV's driving made the game super fun to me, you really need to learn how to handle the vehicles in order to play without unaliving yourself. Great video, I can agree with everything you said here.
exactly.
GTA IV and Mafia 2 did the handling right for their eras.
Tbh it baffles me why modern gamers are so hostile towards a challenging gameplay mechanic. Like, isn’t overcoming challenges the essential core of gaming?
Ofc there is a difference between challenging and frustrating, but Driving in GTA 4 wasn’t frustrating when you mastered it.
@@LegioXXI Biggest facts on earth.
@@LegioXXI simply because nowadays people are also lazy in a videogame and not only in real life anymore.
Chad
9:48
The reason realistic damage isnt included in most (if not all) racing games is thanks to corporate demand.
No CEO wants to see the car of their brand get mangled or destroyed (which it on itself is stupid, its like the long drawn out argument of "videogames cause mass shootings") the reason Burnout 3 has better damage models than FH5 is because you arent driving a Dodge or a Ferrari, you are driving a "Compact Type 1" or a "Super Type 1"
TLDR: no brand = better damage spectacle
False; FM8 has realistic damage.
@@Frosty_V0 Forza Motorsport 8? Dude, that game hasn't even come out yet, how do we know what its damage model looks like?
@@TheManWithThePlan360 official gameplay demo
@@Frosty_V0 Two things:
1.) A 25-second clip from a focused gameplay demo is a very different thing from seeing that in-action in a game that's released to the public. See: Watch_Dogs and its incredible disappointment between its E3 showing in 2012 and its release.
2.) Even in the footage they showed with an Audi R8 bodyslamming a Lambo straight into the outside wall, the front right of the R8 didn't crumple along the front right of the car like you would expect a car going at that speed directly into something else would. We didn't even get a chance to see the rear of the Lambo and how that would have been affected by it, they straight on flew past it.
Don't get me wrong, I hope the damage model is as good as Turn 10 says it is-it would still be a step up on most of the licensed driving games we have on the market right now. But to say definitively how well cars can sustain damage in that game, based on a gameplay demo from 10 months ago on a game still a bit out from release that none of us have played yet, is just not something that we can do.
@@TheManWithThePlan360 True, I didn't take most of that into consideration.
In my opinion "Wreckfest" has one of the most satisfying arcade style driving physics. It's butter... and crashing feels so good,
Wreckfest bills itself on the breaking of cars, but is actually a competent racing game underneath it all. It handles dirt really well, and rewards skilled driving, when you aren't on the dirty servers.
if you like crashing and handling do Beam NG Drive (btw not someone trying to sell a game to you its just that I really like the game and I feel like more people should play it) oof this is long
Totally with you, the cars feel all feel different and importantly, they feel weighty. You also get good tactile feedback from the controller and it's just the right amount of challenge with all assists off.
@tuckerc9778 You're a few years to late kind, sir. Of course, I have BeamNG! 😀
Or Burnout
I loved the cars in GTA IV, but the biggest issue and the biggest thing most people dislike about it isn't that it has "realistic handling", it's the suspensions that are much too soft, which makes the cars feel bouncy.
No you didnt. Nobody liked GTA IV physics when it was out. Now suddenly everyone loves to act like they liked the physics, now suddenly according to everyone GTA IV physics are underrated. Why else would they change the car physics for V?
@@R9naldo literally stfu
They changed it in GTA V because most people don't like realism, they like things that are fun like mario kart and NFS, not BeamNG.
@@R9naldomisread?
@@TanitAkaviriusThe thing is, he isn't really wrong. Why else would they change the physics? While not everyone disliked GTA IVs car physics, a lot of them did, so R* responded by making them more like an arcade game than BeamNG. I think the main issue is that when you get into GTA, you expect a more arcade experience, not a simulation. People play GTA for the open world and story, not car physics. I find it funny that you say "most people don't like realism" since now there's an entire group of people saying why that they didn't keep GTA IVs car handling. If most people didn't like realism, I guess most simulators don't exist then! Again, the argument is that it doesn't fit GTA.
@@awii.neocities Yes i completely agree with you. Most people who play GTA games want more arcade driving. I'm more of an exception there and i liked the more realistic driving of IV.
"If most people didn't like realism, I guess most simulators don't exist then!"
Driving sims are vastly less popular than more arcade driving games like GTA and NFS and the likes, so yeah, most people don't like realism.
BeamNG drive is the best example of good driving physics and damage. These few german devs created the most realistic Driving Physics in a game ever. The other games do not have to be THIS good but a least be standart. Good Video.
Beam ng would not make for a great gta nor driving game, it is just too realistic. A good balance between beamng and bumper carts is needed for fun gameplay.
@@husemann0770 yes. thats why i said "The other games do not have to be THIS good"
@@husemann0770beamng is a great driving game, crashing actually has consequences. Gives you an incentive to drive well if that matters to you
The rush of driving at high speeds trying not to crash is unmatched
@@husemann0770I think beam ng cars are way too fragile. It’s like paper. And the cars handles odd too
@@rashadvqAs a player of beamng, I agree with your first statement. It's like a crash that would scrape off a body panel on a car in real life takes up the entire side of the crumple zone in beamng.
As for the second thing you said, the odd handling is mostly a result of playing with a keyboard instead of a steering wheel. The beamng physics engine uses math to calculate the velocity, centrifugal force, and a whole lot of other things. This is what makes the handling so similar to a real car.
Playing with a keyboard in beamng is like using a keyboard to control a real car, it all of a sudden becomes so much harder to drive. I've been playing beamng on a keyboard for a while so I've gotten good at dealing with it.
The worst thing about it however is the steering. If you want to make a really small input, you basically can't. The only way to do it is by playing in slow motion, which gets boring quickly. This is a problem present in almost every racing game you play on PC.
Overall I think your 2nd statement is true, but only applies to new racing game players as people that have played for a while have acknowledged these problems and have gotten a proper setup for these games.
I remember in midnight club los angeles you could fully damage a car during a race but if you start the race afterwards the game will replace the parts you lost with Grey parts which is kinda unique.
Unpainted temporary parts?
@@RedCobraQC Yes
"Huge game studios, like Ubisoft, go above and beyond in underachieving." Holy shit this quote describes them perfectly!
While a team of a few people made beamng, the best publicly available real time car simulator. Like bro ubisoft can do better but they just wont
@@not360kaii yeah not really "crash phisics" since what they are is just pre damaged models swapped out during a crash, beamng on the other hand simulates it. Even AC doesn't have popper crash phisics just a couple prenade crashed cars, shows how big game studios sometimes honestly don't give a single frick
@@not360kaii it's honestly really cheap rn to get a pc like you can get a used lenovo thinkcentre with an i5 6500 or something and get a cheap gtx 1650 and kaboom like 200 dollar gaming pc that's crazily capable
Or, in other words, they give the masses what they enjoy. Not that I like that and I agree that clipping through objects must not happen in today's games. But let's face it, nobody wants realistic driving physics. Realistically, you would have a broken axle as soon as you drove up a kerb at speed with anything but a truck. You can't drive over lampposts. You'd total your car (and die!) all the time.
@@not360kaii no sadly not on RUclips but I can help you on dc
VR Support is not as easy as simply moving the camera inside the car and enabling motion input. You have to do a TON of extra work to make sure everything is intractable from inside VR, intuitive, and you have to put WAY more detail into areas like the rear interior of a car because the player can turn their head and see it, where they normally couldn't with a regular game camera. That's a lot of work for a feature 99.9% of players will NEVER use!
Yup. VR is just something that simply never be a standard due to the amount of work required to get it done properly. Plus even some games with VR support have a limited number of cars that can be used in VR for this very reason. With how many cars some have like Forza have it's unreasonable. Arcade style games also just don't have a number of people wanting VR since the vast majority of people play in 3rd person and won't use a 1st person mode, even if it was available.
This dude makes a lot of good points but he is wildly underestimating a lot of work that goes into these games. A lot of physics are due to the engine, which simulates the driving physics. It's not as simple as "not wanting to be as good as Rockstar" in 99% of the cases.
right, these poor indie studios like ubisoft or microsoft can't bear the costs and the complexities of such a thing.
As a kid I always loved Midtown Madness, where destroying the car was basically a mini game. It was great how the cars limped along after breaking something important, like in a demolition derby.
Old game, primitive by today, but a good game.
Holy shit i still have that game on my old laptop. Tend to just smash over cars in cruise mode every once in a while
You remembered me that joy of a game
Wait....is that the game that had London and San Francisco as the map? There was an old open world driving game on my computer that I can't remember the name of...but that rings a bell.
@@markvogel5872 yep that's exactly what ur thinking
@@slash_86 oh man I know what I'm going to try and find when I get home today! Thanks!
While I share your frustration with regards to damage in driving games, I feel that we might be being too harsh here. Isn't it odd that all the games with great damage (burnout, GTA) use fictional vehicels? This isn't a coincedence, It's actually the result of racing games' licenses with the car manufacturers they feature in their games. No brand wants their cars to seem dangerous, so they all agree that their cars won't be depicted getting destroyed or experiencing a fatal accident. Take Driver: San Francisco for example, that's got to be one of my favourite racers out there. 90+ percent of the cars in that game are licensed, real vehicles. the other ~10% of cars are fictional, these are the ones they use in cutscenes where a car explodes or kills / injures somebody. Gets around legal trouble and keeps the car brands happy.
Hi :) i'm sorry, but the "licencing" excuse is BS .. Why ? because in midnight club 3 (2005) you could blow up your car at service stations. roof, glass, completly deformed,
Midnight club L.A 2008, you can lose parts like bumpers and blow up you cars too.. and no.. Driver SF (Ubisoft) and Rockstar games never had issues with this
@@richoumiaou It is actually not a BS excuse. In GTA games they go out of there way to avoid car manufactures. And most modern games with super cars or just basically any Toyota/BMW/whatever trash? Good luck getting to even damage a bumper. Your lucky to be allowed to scratch or crack a windscreen.
@@TheDiner50 Yh because it costs fucking money to use their brand and guess what rockstar hates, spending money
@@richoumiaou this isn't a theory, this is confirmed by industry developers. Car manufacturers nowadays doesn't want their cars to look destroyed or dangerous.
Also, I tested the damage in Midnight Club LA, it's minor, no chassis deformation.
@@bur_s It would be our money in the end, going into pockets of car manufacturers which I grow to despise over time as a petrolhead (seeing how they degrade various lines of cars into heavy, useless and dangerous SUVs designed and marketed to flatter inflated egos). Actually looking at example of BeamNG I think that I could live without branded cars: it is a matter of designing interesting and good looking equivalents - this is what BeamNG authors absolutely nailed.
I think Driver: San Francisco, the first two Mafia games, and GTA IV had the best examples of not just car damage, but driving in general.
The driving in Driver: SF was impressively solid, Ubisoft really had no excuse for how bad the driving was in The Crew.
Mafia 2 did it best, where in the settings you could choose between an arcade and simulation driving style. Missions were really difficult with simulation driving in the first few snowy chapters.
I’ve been amazed how even Driver 3 and Parallel Lines can dettach the wheels from a vehicle after crashing them for a long tome just like in Mafia 2. If a open world game have bad driving physics that’s is a big down for me
@@fenn_fren Mafia: Definition Edition lets you choose between Automatic and Manual (stick shift) too, which is cool. I forget if the original Mafia or Mafia II does that.
Driving was terrible in GTA 4, lmao, every car drove like it was filled with bricks
3:26 FH5 isn’t a simulation racer, it’s still an arcade racer. That would go to iRacing or Assetto Corsa
I actually replied the exact same thing, happy to see more that noticed this
fh5 reason i bought ps5 to play gran turismo instead
It's more like a hybrid tbh
12:35 What I feel is not often talked about, and unfortunately it isn't mentioned here as well, is the fact that when you use the cockpit view in racing games, it is ALWAYS stiff facing forward. When I am driving, I want to look AHEAD of the curve; not turning blindly into it.
That could be solved with an invisible dot in front of the car, that follows the track of the game ahead of you, which your camera always automatically focus at. And depending on speed, it will either be far ahead or close up front of your car. It's a very simple solution to a very common problem.
Test drive Unlimited had this feature (there are probably others too) and it was really helpful.
Assetto has a feature in CM for it and NFS SHIFT 2 did it too
Even in third person some games are always snapping the camera back to straight ahead. Annoys me because I'm constantly moving the camera to lookin5o the corner
Move right stick
there are games that turn your vision by yours steering wheel turning. I use it. However it also makes a little harder to judge where exactly the car is going. Especially when you are corrrecting for sliding.
I'm glad you mentioned the weightiness of GTAIV's driving, something I feel has always lacked in most driving games is the sheer sense of speed and screen shake, if you ever see irl footage of time attacks, the driver is bouncing and swinging around inside the car, but in video games, the 1st person camera is static like a mounted camera, theres no simulated inertia.
As a developer the biggest most important thing to make a vehicle system feel good is how the camera is scripted. Honestly good camera scripting can easily make up for some sub par physics. A good example of this would be need for speed most wanted.
To also mention: Bad camera movement can ruin the perspective of good physics to the player. Assetto Corsa's 3rd-person camera is horrendous.
There's obviously tons of good and bad examples of this out there, but something I recently played was Pico World Race for the Pico-8 fantasy console. For as basic and simple as the game is, it has a genuinely better sense of speed than most modern AAA racers.
As a game developer I got to say the camera blur and pan of the field of view ara awesome yes
But the light trails and the music makes it fell faster than the camera for me
@@turbochargedfilmsyou on drugs or something??
i mean the most important thing is pretty obviously the actual system not the camera since a simple orbital camera is definitely enough though not perfect. doing tricks with the camera to mask bad work is just laziness
Gta iv still holds up very well as an in between of arcade and realistic being just controllable enough to be worth using and just fragile enough to still be a challenge.
I loved GTA IV man, it was my favorite. The cars were so heavy
@@DarkSpaceStudios ikr I only got to try it for the first time recently but I still appreciate just how fantastic it is particularly for its time.
No.Its one of the worst driving physics in any game I have ever seen.Driving feels like driving in the ice and handling is so worse and the break takes like 5-7 seconds to work even in slower speed.Dont know how you guys even liked that for its driving physics when its not even close to realistic and Gta-5 does have good destruction physics for cars but it takes a bit more hit to do more damage and physics of it is decent, not too much over the top like gta-4.
its not arcady its realistic and the reason is not arcady because the cars get damage from bumping into things and this might be a punishment cause doing this like 2 times might cause the car to start smoking and not only that but the car getting flipped is a punishment for not focusing on your drive, i wish if open world third person games had the same idea of car collusion and the punishment of doing something to the car
LMFAOO "balance between arcade and realistic" there is not a GRAIN of realism lamoooo
I feel like beamng drive is the best driving game released honestly, from the car's reaction to steering, the bumps damaging your axyl, the speed management, reaction to the roads and the over all physics especially the crash physics it honestly makes me always go back to it to have a drive.
If there is any game worth your money its beamng drive, there is no objectives exept for the missions but the physics alone are the selling point.
And with modding support its literally perfect
a full on career mode is coming too...eventually
Easily, the base game is already amazing, and the excellent mods make it the best driving sim ever.
It's litterally the minecraft of cars,even though you can download boats and planes.
@@Damian-cilr2 and there was a leak where an official multiplayer would come out
Optional missions*.
And you missed the part in which its sole existence is LITERALLY only based on making it realistic.
A game not mentioned in the video is Wreckfest, it has good physics, interaction with the environment, very good damage and you can feel the weight of the vehicles. A game that can be played perfectly with keyboard, controller or steering wheel and feels great in all.
Yeah Wreckfest really has it done properly, it's probably the only game besides the original Flatout that I'll enjoy playing with a keyboard and also has an awesome destruction system
i can't play wreckfest, the lack of an orbital camera is insane. you can't even properly look at the damage on your car because your camera is locked to 4 sides. i don't know why an orbital camera isn't standard for these games, its super useful to help line up the direction you wanna send your car towards
I just bought for my iphone. I loved to play it on the xbox.
@@doggz2701yep.
Watch Dogs physics remind me a lot of Most Wanted 2012 physics. The cars are hard to steer and slide easily at high speeds making them hard to control especially in a crowded city setting, but honestly I like that. Makes it so driving fast feels actually dangerous.
I really really loved Watch Dogs 1 driving physics and i had the best time driving in this game, so i agree
WD1 physics weren't bad. I liked the way the older cars had a softer suspension and would bounce more over bumps whereas the sports cars would have a stiffer suspensions. Also the cars in WD1 felt like it had weight. WD1 in my opinion is an amazing game and is easily on the same boat as GTA 5 even though I do prefer GTA 5 over WD1, WD1 definitely had it flaws but I prefer some aspects of that game over GTA 5
I love the sense of speed in beamNG, the fear of crashing the car and the grip levels all add to the lightning fast reaction time you need to have to keep the car from turning into a fireball stuck to a tree which makes the game feel unique. Especially coming from a person who played forza games all his life.
i hate beamng's controls on keyboard
with that said it has an unmatched sense of speed
@@cyberdemon6517 i mean yeah,using a keyboard in a game with realistic handling is not great,because you are either steering all the way,or not steering,that said,i still play on keyboard
@@Damian-cilr2yeah would agree. I use a controller simply because its easier for me.
@@Damian-cilr2Wooting keyboard with analog input is really good for this
I do expect you to talk about Mafia 2's handling.
Just like GTA 4, it strikes a perfect balance between realism and arcadey/easy controls (and it also featured a simulation mode which also makes the handling way more realistic). And cars do feel fast and dangerous (as hitting could kill you as cars back then didn't have safety belts (some cars have them as an option which barely anyone wanted)
And Mafia 1 also implemented a proper steering wheel support with actual force feedback. And driving physics feel pretty good too at its time
Driving those hotrods at max speed on the highway felt like 1 small mistake could kill you instantly (which it could)
Also the way tires deform in that game is amazing
@@Ganjatraining Yeah
The first 2 Mafia games were known to go face to face with GTA when it comes to attention to detail
@@JadeyFreakinM Shame they ruined it all with mafia 3. Hope they do better with mafia 4.
@@IskenderCaglarM41B441 -Mafia series is pretty much falling apart-
One thing for sure is that Mafia DE is a massive improvement over III's questionable quality (thanks a lot crowb) even though the game was made out of a tight budget (thanks to that one cancelled game), so yeah I basically have a bit of hope that Mafia 4's actually gonna be fine, even though Blackmen left and replaced by some guy who was in charge of II and III's remasters or something (Dunno if it's true or it's just MGV doing some trolling)
I WAS ABOUT TO COMMENT THIS, thank you so much for pointing this out.
Driver: San Francisco was such a good game, last of the franchise. It's what brings creativity into light. The story, the mechanics, and the damage models especially with licensed vehicles. It's sad to see a franchise like that end.
Maybe it's for the best.
Wow you still remember that game it is a memory now for me 😥
@@TechnoCookie4life Yeah haha, I still have the disc in my house along with the ps3.
@@An3ient lucky you
That game is so good, I have completed it like 4 times
I do think that vr isn’t a priority for games like FH5, considering its simcade physics, weird in-game wheel rotation and the lack of people who are looking into using their vr headset for FH5. Instead if you are looking for immersion then it’s probably best to play something like iRacing, Assetto Corsa or rFactor 2 as they all offer a far supperior driving experience even if they don’t have any major crash phyics
I don't think gyro controls for bikes would be much of a good idea. They're good on paper and as a gimmick, but having to do that a lot with a controller that you hold in the air with your hands can get very tiring. The DualSense triggers were an interesting idea on paper, but in long term use it becomes annoying or outright uncomfortable. Same thing would be with gyro controlled bikes I feel.
The gyro idea is literally what the wii did for some games
Damn the Wii is underrated af
I have to say I've loved watching BeamNG come along, especially in the physics department. Driving on dirt roads in particular feels incredibly satisfying.
yeah but tire thermals ....
@@Blacksmith52 Which is a miniscule problem.
@@Blacksmith52 Tire thermals are the least of your concern. What you should worry about is that oilpan being destroyed after the slightest bump.
@@martinmethod427 that's how it works IRL too
@@Blacksmith52 It's almost like the game is in beta. Oh wait, it is
Something you forgot in my opinion is the sound design ! For me it completely break the immersion when cars in games have bad engine sounds, especially in GTA, GTA games always had fake and terrible engine sounds, for example a muscle car in a GTA game doesn't have a real V8 engine sound, it completely break the immersion and it feel like you're driving a fake chinese replica lol.
Thats my problem too with cars in GTA, handling and physics in GTA 4 is maybe great but the engine sound are so bad, an infernus(Lamborghini) sounds more like a racing bike than a car
Modern Need for Speed games, Unbound especially, are really bad with this. For some reason the faster you go, the more quiet your car gets. The old Blackbox games, MW05 especially, had it be really loud and you heard those woosh sounds driving past signs, other cars and lamp posts. MW2012 also had amazing sounds and sound design
The Mustang in Assetto Corsa is just a loop and to fill out the sound the played it backwards for the second half.
one should also consider engine sounds in Cyberpunk 2077
GTA 5's damage was nerfed slightly after the PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions came out because of the first person camera. In GTA 4 and original versions of GTA 5, cars can be completely caved in. Especially when hit with a heavy vehicle or of course, a tank.
Yes! I remember back on the Xbox 360 hitting random pedestrians cars and the wheels coming off super easy
Now on the updated version it is very rare to get a wheel to pop off unless it's being ran over by a tank
Oh good. I wasn't tripping after all.
You can crush cars completely even on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Although yes, they do take longer, but then again, considering how most GTA players, myself included, play the games, should you be surprised that the cars are practically indestructible?
@@mayteexxis thought i was too lmao
@@linkskywalker5417 Fair point, but that just gives novice players an excuse to not drive well. Honestly should have made damage terminal in 2 or 3 hits so that the average GTA player would be forced to drive good. Just my opinion, though.
"Many games don't have VR support despite it being easy to implement." Tell me you aren't a Software Engineer without telling me you aren't a Software Engineer.
Get VR Sickness (Motion Sickness) once.
You'll NEVER play another VR game again. EVER!!😂😂
i agree, but i'd hope he was referencing the actual core implementation of it being easy. not necessarily from a development process, but the fact that it's just a POV from inside the car instead of needing all these dedicated systems for reloading guns, interacting with items and the world environment, etc.
The driving was very weird in Watch Dogs 1, I agree. Once I couldn't find a unlocked car without stealing one, so I took the train, which was funnily enough very relaxing, knowing physics wouldn't screw with me.
Glad you picked up on the missing steering wheel support. This is one of the reasons I have so many hours in ETS2 and a few in ATS now as well.
One racing game I love is Wreckfest. It’s one of my favorite modern racing games, with great realistic car handling, a good sense of speed and weight, and awesome destruction.
It feels great being in a big muscle car, smashing into a small subcompact, and still keeping most of your momentum while the other car gets wrecked!
frrr that game is pretty amazing. It is one of my most played games on Steam, and the driving physics are indeed super enjoyable. I can comfortably play on keyboard in that game!
@@thejonatan._ I have Wreckfest on my PS5, and it works really well with the Dual-Sense triggers and vibration! It feels awesome accelerating the trigger and the vibrations on impact.
But I found out how well the game worked with my steering wheel a few weeks ago. I have a Thrustmaster T150 steering wheel, which is a mid-range overall really good wheel made for the PS4, PS3, and PC. I’ve tried it on a couple PS5 games, but usually doesn’t feel right, which makes sense because it wasn’t made for those games.
Surprisingly it worked really well with Wreckfest, though. The driving felt responsive, though I did need to turn the force feedback setting down a bit first. It felt even more fun, drifting around corners and smashing into other cars. I also think the first person is really great, which adds to the immersion!
@wavecraft123 dam that's great that you are able to experience it with those setups! I have a Dualsense controller, but i don't get those triggee sensations while playing on pc :( i bet it would be fun
I also want to get a wheel setup some time in the future, they look so great to use and I'm glad to hear about how great wreckfest worked for you with the wheel
Wreckfest is an underrated gem and no other racing game gave me more fun than this masterpiece. I really hope the next thing that Bugbear is cooking is equal or even better. Their long silence lately is a bit worrying..
@@ozar1472 I fully agree! I have 152 hours in the game and i wish there were more things to do
As a person who's been riding motorcycles for many years now, I can safely say that GTA IV got the motorcycle riding physics very close an enjoyable experience with it still being a bit realistic.
It felt weird to me.
Personally the base game motorcycle physics felt weird to me, TLAD fixed it.
I remember playing GTA IV on PS3 and wandering why my inputs seemed to be off, then I realised I still had SIXAXIS tilt controls on.
what do you think of RIDE 4 motorcycle gameplay?
@@AeiouCommander its bad. Somehow develpers of riding games clearly dont ride themselves.
imo, it starts with what Dark Space said in the video, the stick being the primary single input device, makes it inherently inferior, because it needs to cover both the bike leaning and it coming back out of it, and the result is extremely sensitive controls and jerkyness, or so many assists that it gets rather boring and feeling stiff etc.
The solution seems rather simple, but then again, most people dont care and just want the object to move around. I mean, lets be honest, do you enjoy ride 4 or do you think its lacking somewhere?
It's crazy to think that indie games like BeamNG and Wreakfest have better car physics than pretty much all of the recent triple A titles with driving in them.
wreakfest is a 10/10
Beam ng would suck as a racing game BECAUSE of the realism. What would happen if you put Beam ng’s physics in a need for speed game? It would suck, because cars are fragile, and that just doesn’t work for a game like need for speed. They wouldn’t be able to even if they wanted to, because licensed car companies wouldn’t want their cars to be seen destroyed.
@@genricjohnLiveForSpeed.
more realistic, and more fun
@@genricjohnDepends what kind of racing game you’re talking about
@@biponacci yeah, you're right. a game like need for speed where you are constantly bumping your car into things would suck with car physics like in beam ng. A sim racer would be much better for those types of physics because you are meant to have to watch your car's damage and other things. my problem in this video is that Dark Space tries to say that every racing game NEEDS these types of physics, when they don't and shouldn't.
For open world driving games, Burnout Paradise still remains my favourite in terms of the overall package. Fantastic feeling cars, damage models and a near perfection on the arcade style. Yes it had some jankiness to it, but even the bikes feel better than most others I've played.
Agreed I can't believe he didn't mention Burnout Paradise in the video
ngl I like burnout 3 more than paradise. Probably just my nostalgia speaking for me but I loved booting up my original Xbox and playing some burnout 3
I take Burnout Takedown over any other game in the franchise
@@seva7500 I did say for open world driving games.
@@fehmartinss I did say for open world driving games.
Vehicle artist in the game industry here. I'd like to chime in and share a few things.
Regarding being 'half assed' you always ALWAYS contextualize the driving/handling around the type of game being made. If its purely a 'car' game eg :Forza, NFS then they really don't have an excuse for the physics being boring and broken, it would be like if in GTA the character couldn't walk straight. However with open world games like GTA, watch dogs, saints row etc usually (not always) the vehicle interaction comes secondary to the rest of the game. In other words that part of the game is deemed not as important and receives far fewer resources. There are outliers to this of course but you can probably count on one hand how many open world games actually have really good driving physics.
Point two : Physics programmers and people that understand the nuances of car physics are usually not the same person, so you now have to find two or more very specialized people, and once again if your game's primary focus isn't cars then the companies will probably cheap out as the priority is the 'bigger picture' (usually characters and shooting) and not the vehicle physics.
Point three : If your system is underdeveloped the studios can keep using a broken foundation for several titles and never fix the fundamental problems. On the flipside for one reason or another, studios like to throw away perfectly good systems and star over. The anecdote I have is that the system developed for Driver San Franciso was amazing (as is the handling in that game ) but for some reason Ubisoft decided to put it into the garbage for The Crew and start over.
Point four : Real world car manufacturers are all over the place when it comes to vehicle damage but for the most part they do not want any kind of realistic damage depicted in a game. Fictional vehicles are therefore the prime go-to for this kind of thing, however on that point, fictional cars are also really hard to design well, there are far too many examples of games with really terrible looking fictional cars.
You also missed the difficulty in adding in VR into a game because it's no where near simple to add in as well. It requires detailed interiors as well as many game engines not supporting it
Driver San Francisco had one of the BEST arcade handling physics to date
In my book it is tied with Midnight Club 3 in that regard (and better then MC:LA). Only issues with Driver SF were the flipping physics (it got kinda wonky if you landed a jump upside down) and the super cars were a little overly drifty.
@@scottthewaterwarrior I liked how the drift physics were in DSF. If you eased on the throttle and didn't break traction, you could accelerate harder. But if you floored it from a standstill in a high-power RWD car (or pulled the parking brake), you were going to spin the wheels.
The driving was great in the sense that anyone could pick it up, but players with racing sim experience could be much, much faster. It made setting times super fun.
This is not an issue of lazy devs or bad physics, it's a licensing issue with the manufacturers, they don't want their cars getting badly smashed up in the games they're being licensed for.
Midnight Club 2 features the best motorcycle physics ive played. They're not perfect but it features the option to hold down L1 while turning to enable leaning, which feels great ingame.
The bikes in that game are overpowered
Have you played midnight club 3? It feels waaaayyy more polished than anything in mc2
GTA IV had physics based driving and it was superb. Perhaps it took a bit to get used to but it was way more precise and predictable than anything else.
I also agree that Most Wanted was awesome.
Car damage in games is hugely impacted by the manufactures. Why would they want to show their car being smashed up...
Not a big deal, but a pet peeve I've had for a while was tire smoke. After playing Driver: San Francisco and seeing how the rear half of a rwd car can be *completely* obscured by smoke when burning rubber, all other games kinda feel like a let down when I do burnouts.
If we get a game that mixes GTA IV and Mafia 2 handling, it would be great.
Mafia 2 on realistic handling is awesome, shame he didnt mention it on this video, he could say that realistic handling is optional
O right! Yea Mafia 1-3 had awesome car handling. I had wanted a manual transmission in Mafia 2 and 3!! (sequential no clutch just like NFS MW 2005/Mafia 1) I have had so much more fun driving around free roam in the Mafia games then trying to play them as a Grand Theft Auto like.
Mafia 2 was such a waste of potential. And Mafia 3.... Nuff said. No but I do have somethings to say about Mafia 3. I do like Lincoln clay and the main story. The driving after patches and turning realistic driving on was really good too. Yet the buggy release and endless boooooring open world missions of repetitive garbage really makes you want to forget it even exist.
Mafia 2 and 3 had some really grate truck/lorry driving. I do not know how many hours I drove around in Mafia 2 just being a truck driver. That gearbox shifting sounds and realistic physic and traffic was awesome! Agen what a waste not getting the Mafia 2 we where promised! Still feel cheated out of not being ticketed running red lights! Joe even scream at you for doing it! ARRRRRRG.
@@TheDiner50 mafia de has manual transmition
@@ididntmeantoshootthatvietn5012I don't remember that Mafia 2 has the driving options. It was introduced to Mafia 3 and also in Mafia 2 definitive edition.
The car damage of original Mafia was way ahead of its time because they bend. Every 3D GTA game doesn't have this feature.
This whole video is proof that you know nothing about how games actually work. Stop demanding developers to focus on such insignificant things that don't matter. Not every game is Grand Theft Auto, and they don't need to be.
GTA4 on PS3 actually used the 6-axis controller to incorporate lean on motorcycles as you were describing.
I would say FH5 is not a simulator, at best it's a "simcade", even though I personally think it leans to the Arcade side.
GTA 4 once again being the standard-bearer for driving physics in open world games
Shame vehicle handling data was written by a drunk monkey, pretty much none of cars behaves like they should, despite game having top-notch physics. Mods fix it, sure, but they shouldn't be needed in the first place.
@@kireta21 Yep those who saying Gta-4 driving physics is realistic gotta drive vehicles themselves cause I can guarantee you most of them are just gamers who hiding in their basement and trying become a keyboard warrior 😂
BeamNG?
GTA4 isn't realistic, the body roll is hugely exaggerated and motorcycle handling is a joke example, Gran Turismo and Forza are the benchmark for realistic feeling driving
@Wilko with too much traffic it lags, but with an amount of traffic that is not absurd it can play smoothly (for console standards, aka 30fps) on a entry level computer.
Why did you call FH5 a simulator in this video? It's a Simcade, it was intentionally dumbed down from the FM handling model which only just brushed simulator territory to begin with. You had BeamNG footage at the ready if you wanted to use a simulator that wasn't track-only
Forza Horizon is far from being a simcade either. the Motorsport series is simcade.
burnout and gta 4 have great damage and forza doesn't is mainly due to licensing. A lot of car brands don't want damage to be shown on their cars in games. It's not the only reason but its one of the reasons why modern racing games like the recent forza and need for speed (Especially the ones that feature new real cars) lack damage.
I read it somewhere, damage on car is limited nowadays because licensing issue, the license holder of that car dont like their product looks wrecked in game.
man if every game was like beamng drive I would be so mad because its so annoying when youll be just chilling. your tire pops and you fall off a cliff killing your entire body system in seconds
Regarding damage, I used to feel the same about how GTA5's damage was a complete downgrade over GTA4's... But I ended up realizing that it makes life a lot more convenient in most situations, especially given the Online component. Dying instantly in Story Mode because of an unfortunate lamp post hit is simply an instant fun killer. Having a stunt session ruined because your car flipped on its roof is an instant fun killer (before 5 at least - this turning the car around mechanic is, imho, an absolutely welcome addition).
The older cars in GTA5 were more malleable, but that comes with so many downsides. In some stunt races, just racing cleanly and normally would absolutely destroy the suspension of my Entity XF after a few landed jumps, making it an absolute pain to drive.
In freemode, more recent sports and supercars are designed and built in such a way that the front bumper sticks out enough to usually protect the headlights after head-on collisions. Is it unrealistic? Of course. Is it practical? Immensely and absolutely.
This is a really touchy subject, realism is racing games isn't something that everyone wants, simulation games are there for it, games like NFS, Burnout, Midnight Club and etc. are more focused on the speed and fun, imagine a game like that with forza motorsport realism, it wouldn't be fun, forza horizon is the best example of an arcade game with realism in it, still has an arcade feeling to it with a decent touch of realism, some of the most realistic "racing" games aren't even built for racing, like BeaNG drive, it feels more like a tech demo than a racing game, there are people who actually use it for racing but it's a small portion of the fan base, realism isn't always the best choice.
Kinda sad that you didn't mention NFS ProStreet as one of the examples. It's that middle ground between arcade and sim, where cars feel realistic in both damage and physics, while still being arcadish enough to be enjoyable.
Or Porsche for that matter given the extra tuning which still seems unmatched in the series. Can you name another NFS game that lets you adjust gear ratios and toe-in ?
@@TheExileFox Prostreet...
@@TheExileFox good old underground 2 lets you play around with the suspension a surprising amount like that
The reason motorcycles are steered with one input is that when you're riding a motorcycle, you mostly steer by leaning and the front wheel turns with you. I can actually ride and steer my Harley without using my hands. (After locking the throttle of course) Dirt bikes are much different, but street bikes, sport bikes & cruisers are this way.
I had to lol when you say, VR is easy to implement, whilst on the surface it might seem so, in reality it is not - lots of love from a race game dev :)
Ps. It is largely the publishers and licences which constrain and hold back our industry, not the developers themselves.
I love the work put into your videos man their top tier.
You did a fantastic job outlining a lot of quirks of driving games! I have some additional input of my own:
Part of the issue is compromise between expectations and reality. You have lots of people (kids) who really don't know how cars work, and realistic physics are annoying for them. Even adults who have driven their whole lives have a surprisingly shallow understanding of how vehicles really behave in the extreme situations you see them in on screen. Most people won't understand that their offroad truck isn't "steering" properly because it has a locked rear differential, which works differently than an open one. They'll just go "ugh, I hate this truck" and pick a different one instead. So developers will almost exclusively choose to leave that behavior out--if they even have any idea what a differential is themselves.
Take, for example, motorcycles. Anyone who's ridden knows about "countersteer," but normal people don't. Hence, video games always require you to steer in the direction you want to go. but in real life, motorcycles require you to turn *opposite* of the direction you want to go, once you reach a certain speed. If games worked that way, people would get annoyed and give up, because it doesn't make sense to them. But there are *lots* of complexities like this in real life--even with cars.
Another example is aircraft. I had a friend who played a game where the airplane steers like a car: left to right (yaw). He swore up and down that "that's how planes work in real life." But he'd get frustrated if the controls were realistic, especially if he had to deal with realistic performance, stalling, turbulence and crosswind, ice accumulation, the impact of altitude on performance and behavior, etc. etc.--or even situations where there's loss of control, like flat-spins, overspeed, dives of death, etc. Not to mention that even small changes in design can lead to fatal situations if you aren't familiar with the aircraft.
On top of that, programming the behavior of any system is much more complex than it seems, especially because it can't be solved in an intuitive way. You can't program a car by typing "if it hits a rock, the wheel bounces." If you try to program it in an intuitive way, you'll have all kinds of hair-pulling bugs and issues, and it won't behave correctly. That's because our modern-day physics engines aren't 1:1 compared to, well, *life's* physics engine. You need an exceptionally rare type of talent to take a complex physics system and "translate" it into a (relatively) simple equation that produces the desired result.
All in all, it's not just darn hard to program these systems. Most people don't WANT vehicles to work realistically. Just realistically *enough* to immerse--not everyone, but specifically--the *target* audience. And when you throw in these expectations, coding a system that works *as expected* is incredibly difficult. You have to figure out what inputs someone is expecting to give, and what outputs they're expecting to see on the screen. And then you have to turn that into code. Both of those problems--figuring out what your audience wants and how to give it to them--are more difficult to solve than people think, especially if you're a massive company where getting anything done requires wading through a swamp of "red tape."
People who have both the *inspiration* and especially the *ability* to execute a vision like yours are *exceedingly* rare. And that's the real problem.
For me this like engineering, You can imagine you have a linear force and easily use that to impulse certain machine... but vehicles in gaming are like take that linear force and develop a whole factory that fully works only from that linear force.
This happens also the whole time with rigging, people dont get how hard is for example to pretend to move 40 muscles always realistically with barely a couple of imputs... at the end you dont really "control it" more like the rigging is a simulation that behaves correctly depending the situation/scrips and your imputs (like 90% of the movement are a simulation and only 10% of your imput are actually taken on count)
@@BioClone Absolutely, it sounds like you know what you're talking about, too! 😁
This video expressed a lot of my frustrations pretty well, ESPECIALLY the comparison between Horizon 5 and Burnout 3
It’s licensing. Toyota started pulling their cars from video games because they didn’t believe people would be interested in buying their cars, but that’s changed. As far as damage, it’s licensing. Companies don’t want you to see their cars damaged because it might “put consumers off about safety” so games like gta have to resort to making their own parodies of cars so they can add damage. The difference between gta4 and 5 is the fact that players were complaining about loosing tires and totaling their cars. GTA5 had a somewhat minor soft body physics. But they removed some of it and they started realizing cars that took absolutely no damage. And I hear players boast about “gta’s impressive scratch physics” that I find super annoying. I aren’t hours crashing cars in gta4 because it was fun, and I was able to challenge myself when I tackled to see how little damage I can get on my car and see how long I could drive a car. But gta 5 I don’t want to damage them because it’s more annoying driving around with you hood popped open and there be a scratch on it after you just accidentally touched a light post. Gta6 will be just like the crew, or they will go back to vice city type damage. Take 2 doesn’t do physics, they do graphics. 😒
All that talk about damage but no mention of what is considered fun. That’s a big reason why you don’t total your car just for hitting 1 wall. They may have even had that feature but it was removed because play testers said it made the game boring to constantly have your car get destroyed. It’s not always low effort or rushed, just because it looks like that to you.
Yes exactly. But they should add an option to toggle it off and on
As far as bike physics go, gta iv on the ps3 had whats called "sixaxis". You would use the controller to tilt bikes, helicopters, and even reload. It was the only time ive seen any game use the software
For what that's worth, that was an _option._
i heard that damages on licensed vehicles has something to do with the license itself because sometimes the manufacturers themselves don't wanna see their cars get damaged in video games and or the game publisher/dev have to pay more to apply at least cosmetic damage to them
And if the devs of FH5 wasn't allowed to implement damage for all vehicles, then implementing damage for some and not all would be inconsistsent
Simply put: Pathetic!
If one is willing to give up on details simply because "me no ok with you making virtual stuff kaput" then DONT add it and make something original
I'll never understand why companies are so insanely paranoid
@Owen J probably it has something to do with their image I think
This is going to sound weird but I think there's a large market segment in which innovation in car driving mechanics is not desirable. For games that merely feature driving rather than being all about driving (e.g. stuff like Just Cause or Watch Dogs, not racing games), I think customers would be much happier if "good driving physics" was a drop-in middleware that games studios could just buy and configure. Similarly to how lots of games just drop in Havok or Bullet or Box2D rather than inventing rigid body physics simulation from scratch.
"Motorcycles are more complicated than vehicles.."
So motorcycles aren't vehicles? What are they then, turtles?
Mafia II has the best driving I've ever seen in a game. Piloting those land barges felt exactly as it should, the body roll, the sliding and traction, the everything was dead nuts on accurate. The only thing it didn't have was a great damage model. It was passable but if it had GTA IV's damage it'd be perfection.
You do know that the cars from the 40's and 50's era was made from solid metal and not light aluminium and plastic? That is why the cars in Mafia 2 don't deform as much after an collision as in Gta 4..
@@erwaldox yea but they should defrom.more of you are going 60 MPH than they do
5:17 as much as I prefer IV's handling, I do like how I can flip my vehicle back up. It isn't exactly what I would call "handholding", more of a QoL feature.
I agree. But in combination with the arcade'y driving-physics in GTA V, and the ability to adjust the car in mid-air; the entire "flipping of the car" seems a bit too unrealistic and breaks the immersion - although it's a very convenient feature. If Rockstar Games instead would have combined the ability to flip the car, with realistic driving-physics, and an inability to adjust the car in mid-air; then the car-flipping wouldn't feel as unrealistic. It's simply easier to forgive only 1 unrealistic aspect, than it is to forgive 3 unrealistic aspects.
Tourist Trophy on PS2 was the best motorbike racing game for almost a decade and the reason for that was because it was built upon the Gran Turismo 4 engine. It's outdated by today's standards but it's still a blast to play, even if it needs an update in its physics and other aspects. Kazunori Yamauchi has briefly mentioned that he wants to make a successor that incorporates proper racing sim setups and motion controls but it's still not possible with the current technology (or at least affordable to gamers). There's at least one RUclipsr who has mentioned that VR could work as a possible workaround in lieu of expensive racing hardware that it's not streamline yet. I also think this is a viable option even though VR is still out of reach for most of gamers' pockets, especially on the PC side.
The motion sensor idea for motorcycles is bad because the controls would be extra clunky since we don’t have a table to rest our arms on and nobody holds their controller straight it’s always going to be at an angle
This video seems to be lacking some basic fact checking. First of all, Kyloton is NOT a remotely well respected company, and they lost their WRC licence because the last 4 games they released under that licence were hot garbage. Secondly, and most importantly, it has been an open and easily researched fact that car companies have been the driving force (No pun intended) behind the "No Damage" in modern racing titles. It's why GTA does not feature ANY real life vehicles. If it did, you would have zero damage, just as you find in Forza Horizon games.
I mean yes, games companies do need to do a hell of a lot better, and it absolutely is possible to persuade companies to relax their rules around showing their products getting damaged, but ultimately the final decision is not, and never has been, down to the developers. I'm a racing game addict, a sim racing enthusiast, and a lover of driving fast and smashing shit up, so I don't say any of this to cover for the game devs, just that facts are facts, and you seem to have missed some pretty bloody big ones.
how did you not even talk about wreckfest
Wow. You basically summarized my entire thoughts about this topic I had since the release of GTA V. Just like you, I was EXTREMELY disappointed with the physics in it and took me 2 - 3 years to get around it. You needed real skills to drive in IV, V held your hand all throughout.
Every other game apart from GTA IV, the cars feel like an afterthought, where they don’t interact with the environment. No weight, no damage, no crumple zones, no suspension travel, and agile handling in EVERY vehicle weather it be a supercar or an SUV etc. it’s infuriating!
Test Drive Unlimited 1 & 2 were great games BUT they also lacked the same issue with handling where cars felt like they drove on ice. Hopefully this issue doesn’t carry over onto the next one.
I still haven't gotten around to completing GTA V, mostly because of the boring driving physics. Hardly ever had to slow down for curves and even when I did, practically every vehicle could stop on a dime, so even if I misjudged my speed, I could correct mid-corner and be fine. The only challenge seemed to come from the police's rubber banding with their magic turbo boost ram ability that would force you to swerve. The swerve wasn't even a predictable thing based on impact angle most the time, felt random.
NFS Prostreet had great damage and collision models
Sounds like skill issue if you need that long for your brain to realise that your car doesn’t have jelly as suspensions anymore.
@@NerfMaster000 Nah, it's just so easy it's boring.
Nah TDU2 was terrible and the driving in the 1st game was fine.
2 things: Games like Forza horizon five and GTA 5 don't use crash physics because it makes the game more frustrating if ur car brakes every time u make a mistake. Considering ur in police chases a lot in GTA. And they want you to have freedom in forza, thats why u can smash through trees with only a scratch. U wanna be able to drive around without being stopped by damages. That being said, i can't believe you didn't talk about BeamNG Drive!!
bikes don't turn by rotating their handlebars in the direction of the turn, they turn using centrifugal force and the side walls of the tire by leaning into the turn. the only reason motorcycles have a handlebar is to steer at walking speeds.
Well how would you do a driving game with more realistic damage while not making the cars unusable when you hit a corner wrong
I loved the Test Drive Unlimited games, if TDSC comes out, finally going to have a driving game to enjoy again.
A lot of driving games that have licensed cars won't have realistic damage because the car companies won't license the cars if they are destroyed in the game. Which is very dumb to me. Which is why games like Burnout didn't use licensed cars.
One thing I can say about GTA V’s physics, even tho the ability to roll your car onto it’s wheels is very unrealistic and weird, it would be highly inconvenient to have to hop out of the car and find a new one, especially in GTA Online. So I can see why they added that. As for the damage physics, yes, they need to fix that in GTA VI. Some cars barely even deform, while others, such as the cop cars can literally be compressed into a toaster. The inconsistency is what bothers me so much.
"Why are game studios simply reselling the same content in new packages rather than offering true innovation with each new release?"
Big game companies:
Apple:
The problem with realistic damage is, that many car manufacturers don't want that in games. So you either have realistic damage or real cars. Doing both just isn't really possible, due to how stuck up car manufacturers are.
they are stuck up, the live in the fucking 1950's or even worse. They pressure god damn governments to design car-centric cities, where you can't realistically cycle or walk, but you have to buy their hunk of steel. This motor industry lobbying is insane in the US.
Doesn't matter. This dude doesn't get things. One of the most infuriating videos i've seen in a while.
This is why I love beamng drive its physics feel real, wish you would've talked about it more
Always excited to see a new top tier video from you man. Mad respect for the production value boss.
I think most users of the game would bale their car on the corner of a building at the first bend (did you see the 120 mph crash on fifth gear?), thus game cars are made out of 8 inches of plate steel and given thirty thousand horsepower engines to compensate. That way they can drive into anything like battering rams and just get a few scratches on the paintwork. The exception is beamng and Garry's mod
"VR is easy to implement!"
As someone who has talked to devs from Codemasters/EA, I can call BS on that. There's a reason the VR for WRC 2023 is coming AFTER release. It's because it's NOT easy to implement, and takes time to do right.
BeamNG Drive has the best car crash physics I've seen in a video game. But I imagine physics like those would make games like GTA unplayable.
Need For Speed Porsche has a really good balance - you can really bang up the car and it will affect not just the acceleration and top speed but also the handling, like it will start to pull left or right depending in the crash
GTA IV's motorcycle physics are still some of the best motorcycles I've ever seen, you can actually lean on them and the crotch rockets still work with body roll and traction, once you get the hang of them they're actually very dynamic
Spot on. Sport bikes were a joy to ride. All the bikes in gta 5 are stiff trash
I like the damage physics in Flatout 2, it has the most satisfying crashes I've ever seen in a game
Also, I've read somewhere that when a game officially licenses real cars, the manufacturers forbid adding damage physics because they don't want to see their cars being damaged. That's why cars in Flatout and GTA series don't use their real names and don't look exactly like their real life versions.
My favorite game!
Why would they care about fake damage to a non-existent car on a computer screen? Are they literally insane??
@@arcrides6841 they care about P R E S T I G E. Apparently, 3D model of a totalled Lamborghini or Porsche would sullen their I M A G E
@@AyyEf They can use words like PRESTIGE but they still look completely insane being afraid of damage to a fake car on a video game. It wouldn't affect their sales negatively by having awesome physics attached to their in game cars. Completely the opposite.
biggest reason for gta not using real cars is still money. licensing is not cheap
"What do you think the GTA 6 disc would smell like"
NAHH BRO YOU DID NOT 💀💀💀
What wrong with arcade-y physics?
Apparently the deformation in gta 5 used to be better on last gen but it was somewhat disabled at the sides and roof I guess so the interiors wouldn't get messed up in first person. Don't quote me on that though, I never owned it on last gen and just read some forums. Still a huge shame :(
Yea it was, cabin area cant deform now, but on release the damage was still worse than in 4, and it got worse with online cars they added
I mean, if the roof deformed and blocked my view I'd just switch to 3rd person, that's what I do in Wreckfest. Or if they really want to keep the immersion, design it so that your character ducks down some if the roof is in the way.
@@scottthewaterwarrior There's an interesting fact I learned from the video "A Look Behind GTA 5's Weird Gameplay Design" is that car roof deformation can be toggled in real time, so why they didn't just do that based on selected camera perspective is mind boggling.
One thing to note is that car manufacturers often prohibit their cars receiving significant damage when licensing them for games.
A game that did motorcycles really well and driving in general, was sleeping dogs. That game had arcadey physics, but driving in it was always a joy. Along with the ability to quickly switch to different vehicles from all types by jumping from one to another during driving. I wish they'd make a Sleeping Dogs 2.
Car companies don't license their brands to games if they will get damaged badly, or usually, at all. That's why every game that HAS good destruction physics use unbranded cars or "close but not close enough to trigger copyright law" cars. Flatout and Wreckfest are good examples.
If car damage was real in a game like gta v your car would be totaled real quick
If you had any knowledge or even did a little research, you would know that licensing requirements of many manufacturers stipulate that their vehicles do not show crash damage.
Car producers are those, who actually preventing the damage being introduced into these games.
This one is a miss imo
Part of what made IV give cars a heavy feel is how unresponsive they are and body roll. The reason V went for a lighter approach is because that game regularly has you traverse a larger area. I personally feel that it is too stiff, but it makes sense.
Most of the physics you showed weren't "wrong"; they were deliberate stylistic choices that, while they did act up in some scenarios, such as airborne, were important to the feel of the game.
THIS, my god i'm so fed up with racing games "fans" complaining about specific design choices of a game, no one complains that "ballistic physics in csgo are unrealistic", it's a goddamn design choice but only racing games "fans" come in to make video essays saying the specific features and design choices he likes in a game should be in every single game of the entire genre
The reason VR isn't in more games it's because it's still pretty niche, especially on console. Crew 2 (and arcade racers in general) isn't a game worthy of wheel and pedal support if it doesn't have the physics to back it up. Even if it's a racing game, it should have the physics to back it up if it has wheel and pedal support.
As for WRC Generations, last I heard about that game is that when it launched, there wasn't accurate enough response from the throttle - the car basically crawled until the gas was about 80% pressed - so I don't know if that game series was the _best_ example. I'm surprised you didn't mention Dirt Rally 2.0 though! Even a classic of Richard Burns Rally is insanely fun today.
I'm also surprised you quite quickly glossed over FOV. I remember trying NFS Heat during a free weekend on Steam, and going 125mph felt like I was going only 45-55mph.
At least when it comes to games that use real cars, a lot of manufacturers don't want to license there cars to games if they will be shown all damaged and twisted up, so that is the reason.
13:02 "Many driving games don't have VR [...] despite the fact that it's *easy* for racing games to implement"
That's the hottest take I've heard in a while. VR definitely isn't *easy*, especially in a game where you're moving at high speeds and crashing. It's not easy to make that a good experience.
But if you drop the word "easy", I agree that it would be good to have VR in many driving games.
Its easier compared to any other genre of game. No need to have the player model track hand position of motion controls. Cockpit is already modeled and animated. Just place the camera in the right place, and you're good to go. All game engines can move the camera well enough, the headset motion data just needs to be fed to the game engine. In modern game engine like Unreal, it's literally a few clicks. Modders have added VR support to several racing games even Richard Burns Rally.