The Crew, The Passenger

[MadManCK]

The Crew, The Passenger More and more i'm under the impression that with every update the handling becomes more Arcade oriented and less Simulated. Even on HC i drive on, there is auto correction, too much traction control and other strange stuff that should not belong in a proper Hardcore mode.

The driving is still fun, don't get me wrong, but i just did the Ice track challenge and felt like a passenger sometimes, instead having total control over the car. Throttle controlled power slides are virtually not possible anymore.
This actually slows me down as i can not depend on the car like i want and therefore over correct as the game is doing it also.

Hardcore drivers don't like it when the game is thinking too much for them. Right now it is. Devs should know that by now.

The remedy: leave the Hardcore thinking to the drivers and only interfere with Full Assist.

Full Assist needs tweaking as well, as FA drivers are not affected by driving through objects and over grass, like other players on Sport mode and Hardcore are.
I know they need a little help as they cant do it without, but the speed influence should be the same for everybody. Right now FA players get an unfair advantage in races because of that.
And wall riding is not punished enough according to some feedback i got today.

I just heard that wallriding is still possible after the patch. Cars do slow down more, but still not enough.

So again a patch "fixes" a lot of stuff that is not mentioned in patch notes and not needed. And other stuff is not taken care of good enough. Wall bouncing should lead to a spin or crash, rail riding to a stop, massive slow down or crash. That way nobody will try it again.

BTW did anybody see that the FordGT in circuit spec has been nerfed a little? Only the mini was mentioned but they have been tempering with a lot more.

We all like that the whole team is still working at The Crew. But sneaky tweaks like this are like a kick below the belt. And a waste of time and money. Balancing stuff because some complain that one car is too fast and they can not keep up? Come on.

And the more realism oriented drivers do get less and less to enjoy.
Fun cars are nerfed (Shelby 500) because some are complaining about too much wheelspin. Instead of learning to drive without flooring it all the time, there now is TC that makes it more difficult to drift the car like it was fun to do before. And so are many more interferences killing the driving in The Crew, slowly.

I still like to play it, but if this dumbing down of the game continues, i will find another playground.

Sometimes less grip will increase the realism. There are enough Dinky Driving Games out there. Driving realism was what makes The Crew stand out from NFS and Burnout Paradise.

Get HC mode close to simulation again, make Sport mode more Simcade and FA for those that can not drive without assists, like before.
The solution for making the game more competitive is not dumbing down HC mode but FA.

This is my opinion, based on driving The Crew in HC mode with Fanatec CSW, CSP V2 and being Crew World Boss twice

What do you guys think?

[NascarVike]

I agree on principle but I'm trying to be realistic: it's all about console teens with gamepads. We more mature PC wheel players are second class customers because we represent less than 10% of the customer base.

So it wouldn't be a good move to make default hardcore mode really hardcore. Because those loud knuckleheads on the official forum can't get into their heads why The Crew doesn't play exactly like either the latest NFS or Burnout and no amount of educational material will change that. Those idiots build circuit spec cars with all acceleration and speed parts, then complain that the car isn't a god-mode winner. Don't try to get them to brake before corners, they can't even understand you conceptually. That's not what the industry has told them a game like The Crew should be like. Asking them to downgrade performance related parts and upgrade handling related ones with grip bonuses? Then they'd have to choose between speed and grip. They can't understand that. They spent so much ime 'working hard' ( I'd almost wish they'd be dropped in an ISIS outpost) to get to 1299 with all plat parts with speed bonus, that cars should be able to take a 90° turn at 300 mph without losing any grip. Don't expect the situation to change, it will only get worse with time.

Those clowns are the target audience, and nos-drifting (one of the things that made me stop playing the game at all for about a month) and wall-riding aren't really bugs, they're part of the experience that the customer base is driving The Crew toward, which probably explains why wall riding was only relunctantly tone down a little bit.

No, in my opinion, we'd be better off with a separate HC mode, like in TDU 1. Let's face it, I've said it time and again, current hardcore is a vanity difficulty mode. Like in Forza Horizon 1 and 2, its purpose is to stroke its delusional, spoiled, pampered, narcissistic target demo's ego.

What we need is a sim-like HC mode without collision avoidance system crap, steering corrections or artificial drift aid. PVP lobby options like HC-mode only, Cockpit View only, controller-type filtering if it's technically feasible etc.

The physics engine is a full sim engine, you know that. By default, it even accounts for tire temperature and fuel consumption. They took those features out of the engine because The Crew is meant to be an arcade experience with a simcade nod to the core TDU crowd. Making a full sim mode wouldn't be a technical challenge because they wouldn't have to create anything from scratch, they would only have to restore what they took out (Dixit Tixier). Sadly, the game being plagued with issues for a few months means this will have to take a back seat. But back in the summer, Tixier exhorted the TDU-France community to ask for a full sim mode, because neither Ubisoft or Fergus believe there is a substantial demand for it. Obviously it's too early for that, which is why I haven't created a thread with relevant info on the matter to get people behind this. Let's see how things go in the next 6 months because I don't expect anything to get going before that, realistically. They're going to have too many things to fix or improve until then.

My only hope for now is that they don't 'fix' the Viper GTS because some doofus thinks it doesn't spin tires in first gear (or even third) but I'm half resigned to it.

[Alvin]

Agreed. I gotta try out this patch soon. Heard they made A LOT of tweaks. Explains the half a gig update but if they make the driving much worse for standard driving mode well looks like i will say good bai to the crew forever. Already people were getting pissed at crashing, unable to connect type of problems and now the tamper with driving controls that were near perfect. As MadMan said patches aint bad but unnecessary ones are.

As an old saying : If it ain't broken, Dont fix it.

[MadManCK]

Just for your info, Fergus plays on FA and is a big fan of Arcade racing. I was surprised about that. But he also knows the importance of serving players that like a little challenge.

The real Hardcore guy is Seb Tixier. He even builds wheels himself. High torque.
Maybe he should stand his ground some more.

But i will get trough to them, as the HC mode is meant for wheel users specially and they now try to balance the PvP lobbies by making HC less HC, instead of punishing the FA players (read Fergus) a bit more.

I really wished they had kept it the way it was during our first playtest in Lyon, sigh...

Fortunately for us they do read all the reviews and sometimes mellow the adjustments they made before, based on our feedback. It is all about balancing. And at least they put in some effort to get it right.

[Bez]

I tend to agree with a lot of what has been said in this thread, I don't play 100% in Hard Core but lately I have been playing it a lot as I don't think it is much different than Sport in fact in some cars I cant tell the difference.

One thing is for sure it is not TDU Hard Core in that game it had a distinct difference and you knew when you where driving in it.
So I do think it should be made more distinctive and sim like, but I also think when in PvP races everyone should be set to Sport as having different races for different modes of driving would be a nightmare trying to join a race (its bad enough now )

[Whoamus]

I don't think there is a difference if you look at this post and chart, http://tdudrivetime.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 625#p28638 not for a wheel anyway. Think they made adjustments for gamepad crowd. I started playing with HC day 1, since I saw there would not be a difference.

[MadManCK]

A lot of the adjustments made are making sense btw, like the Buggy. I have not tested that one yet.

The new Faction races are a lot of fun and badly needed.

You can also start faction races now when you drive to them and not just from the map.
The daily challenges are displayed correctly now. But there are still challenges selected you can not do, like discover wrecks or data stations. Once you have been there, you can not re-discover them. And these tasks are randomly selected from a pre-programmed pool and do not take in consideration that some still can't be done.

I have not checked if the stats will update correctly now, but i planned to get the 30%, 15.000 Achievement bonus. For that i need to re-do a lot of skill challenges in all specs.

For that i will look at the drive hub to select those that have been beaten while i was in the running for faction Boss.

Leaderboards need to be cleaned. That cleaning lady from Atari comes in handy now, as long as she does not trip over server wires.

I don't have too many complaints about the base handling model as it feels and drives like a car, most of the times.
It is just the amount of unwanted and unneeded assists in HC mode that are contra productive in my humble opinion. It is like the assistant of the assistant of my carwash guy. Eric Tsu was right after all.
Good drivers can make use of a little wheelspin and subtle control is hard to get this way.

Maybe they will release a more purist mode in the future. I prefer bumper cam in this game btw, as i already have a cockpit and do not like an animated one on my screen. Cockpit view is cool with an oculus.
And we need mirrors as well.

Lots of new stuff to do and to try out. New content every month is a very good thing. Keeps things interesting.

[NascarVike]

Just for your info, Fergus plays on FA and is a big fan of Arcade racing. I was surprised about that. But he also knows the importance of serving players that like a little challenge.

The real Hardcore guy is Seb Tixier. He even builds wheels himself. High torque.
Maybe he should stand his ground some more.

But i will get trough to them, as the HC mode is meant for wheel users specially and they now try to balance the PvP lobbies by making HC less HC, instead of punishing the FA players (read Fergus) a bit more.

I really wished they had kept it the way it was during our first playtest in Lyon, sigh...

Fortunately for us they do read all the reviews and sometimes mellow the adjustments they made before, based on our feedback. It is all about balancing. And at least they put in some effort to get it right.

True, I think Fergus talked about it in a live web interview. Tixier also talked about it on the TDU-France forum. There's also Sylvain Branchu, another Eden vet who also worked on NFS Porsche Unleashed. He's the middle-of-the-road guy, more sim-cade oriented.

I don't think it's a matter of Tixier standing his ground enough. I mean, what kind of leeway does he have? He's part of a team and that team answers to the people who pay them. Both Fergus and Ubi management want a mainstream game, and they're absolutely right because no sim not named Grand Turismo or Forza has gained mainstream appeal. There's also the problem with the handling being one of the most unanimously hated aspects of the game in almost every review and generalist gaming forum, maybe even more than the graphics.

The only thing Tixier can really do, based on the stuff I've read so far, is hope enough people make noise for a true HC mode. he's said so himself on the TDU-France forum, back in July or August.

What scares me most is precisely that they read forums, especially their own. I remember Fergus's words: the community is their game designer. That's downright scary because based on all the crying from the Mario Kart crowd, they have already started to turn this game into a generic NFS clone. See the faction races, now they play exactly like one would expect from every single arcade game ever released: once you pass the AI, you'll never see them again unless you screw up real bad. And apparently police pursuits are pointless now? Hopefully they'll partially reverse course based on a handful of players not being happy about it, who knows.

One thing is for sure it is not TDU Hard Core in that game it had a distinct difference and you knew when you where driving in it.
So I do think it should be made more distinctive and sim like, but I also think when in PvP races everyone should be set to Sport as having different races for different modes of driving would be a nightmare trying to join a race (its bad enough now )

And the best part is that TDU HC worked magically on an antiquated physics engine, so imagine the kind of experience we'd get with a much more refined engine! The weight transfer as brutal but more subtle and detailed than in TDU, and without the immersion-braking glitches that came with some cars, like the Vipers.

I wouldn't mind PVP so much if everyone played on Sport but I think what really matters is to have Full Assist people compete separately from the others. They're a different type of players playing a completely different game, and sadly they're forcing everyone into a dumb arcade experience to keep up.

[Bez]

Some good points made and unfortunately this is the way things are heading, you get ten players complaining they cant handle the cars and they need more grip and on the other hand you have one guy saying can we have a bit more sim in the driving.
Who do you think they are going to listen to?

[MadManCK]

It does make sense if they make the FA as easy as possible to serve the Mario Kart-Need For Speed audience. But it does not make sense to nerf the Hardcore mode.

The balancing is only in the so called Arcade specs. The Full Stock cars are not affected. Driving these stock cars, like i just did at a modest pace is still more close to simulation.

It is logical that the Arcade modes are made so you can pick any car you want and compete in PvP and have a chance of winning. Even if there are obvious favorites in each class.

But i wished they would make Full assist a bit more challenging and leave Sport Mode and Hardcore for the real drivers.

I know Alain, i have met him. He is more the controller dude, where Tixier is the wheelman.
He told me they would reduce the wheelspin on the CTR3, which i loved the way it was. But i have to admit that nobody else from our group or the devs was able to drive that car on my settings (540 degrees, HC on T500RS) they were all spinning almost instantly. So making that car more drivable was already done before the release and even more with last months patch. And at high tuning levels it is still a handful, so they were right to do that. All cars should be competitive in PvP after all.

In addition to the adjustments that are constantly made to the way the cars behave, i have also experienced that playing on a steady 60fps does improve the response in the game noticeably. The handling feels more alive and predictable now.

And i'm under the impression that the analogue controllers and wheels respond much worse to The Crew than the modern wheels and controllers. From the feedback you can notice that g27 users have more complaints about cars handling. Same for some controller players.

I still think they should revert to the basic setup for controls they had at the playtest in Lyon. All influencers liked the direct responsiveness with a controller and were blown away with the wheel. Changing that was a big mistake, especially after that positive feedback.
They already planned to "work" on the controller setup (Hervé told me) and have only made things worse and indirect afterwards. Certainly not better.
And for a development team who say they listen to their players, that is the exact opposite of what they should have done.

If something is good, don't temper with it. There are plenty of options in the settings to adjust controllers for players who can not handle direct response. Now they nerfed it for everybody, without the possibility to create a satisfying setting for the real good controller players.

Large part of the complaints about the handling are controller related. But they complain about handling because they don't know how that works. Base handling is very good in The Crew. An indirect controller setup can destroy a lot of feel for the cars.

But this team, or at least part of them, were also responsible for releasing the HC mode for TDU1. A totally unrealistic but fun driving mode. That mode required a lot of skill.
Maybe they can release a real HC mode for The Crew in the Future. As i think they underestimate the demand for a real challenging driving mode. Even kids who have never driven a car, like a challenge, but only if it is good.
Starting with a more direct controller input and less driving "help" that usually interferes way to slow anyway and only makes it harder to control the car instead of actually increasing the cars drive ability. Real TC and SC work in a totally different way.

Time for the team in Lyon to make some clear choices and focus the different driving modes to the players that use them.