I haven’t put that much time into Assetto Corsa and I don’t think I’ll ever be the kind of sim racer willing to do lap after lap on all of the well known tracks. Even so I bought all of the DLCs for the sake of convenience and I’m messing around with all kinds of cars, tracks and mods just for fun without really caring about being competitive. I have to admit some of the mods have been too complex for me. I don’t really understand how AI traffic works and some of the biggest mods come with requirements beefier than what my system can handle. A lot of the mods also seem to be incomplete and their quality varies greatly. I’d had to moderate my expectations but I still had a lot of fun just messing with things and not taking it too seriously.
Like everyone else, I started with variants of the famous Toyota AE86 and the Akina track (in reality Mount Haruna). It’s great and it’s funny how horribly underpowered the stock version of the AE86 is. The tuned version is much more reasonable and fun to drive. However I couldn’t get the AI drivers to work correctly in the uphill direction and the narrow road seemed to confuse them even when the AI did work. Plus there’s not much in the way of scenery on this track. I also tried out a few other tracks which don’t seem to appear in the career mode such as the Scottish Highlands. It seems to be a completely made up location but it looks good and I really enjoyed driving on it. The Black Cat County map is similar I suppose though I liked it less. It’s pretty and you can get up to really high speeds on it but it looks too fantastic to be anything like a real world location. Finally there’s the Trento-Bondone map. Most people consider it low quality and indeed it looks incomplete and lacks detail. For me though I found that I really like these hill climbing tracks, because they feel more like rallies I guess, and this one in particular is a nice, long, winding track that passes through trees, houses and other buildings. It made me wonder how the people living there cope with a road like that!
Moving on to maps that weren’t made by Kunos Simulazioni, one must try is of course the famous LA Canyons. It’s a gorgeous map to be sure but it seems more fun to drive it in free roam mode than as a race track. I wish I could figure out how to get traffic to work properly on it. Next, I ventured into the many, many tracks made by Sim Traxx. I found that their older tracks Monte Erice or Pikes Peak don’t look that great but work fine and so I enjoyed them anyway. By contrast the newer ones look amazing but seem impossible to learn without the use of rally-style pace notes. There are even false turnings along the paths that lead to dead ends. I’m not sure what players are supposed to do here. Just memorize the tracks and discover for yourself where the intended turns are and the overall layout? Maybe there are some other tools available that I’m missing here.
Finally as a Malaysian, I naturally went looking for Malaysian mods and so downloaded the Perodua Myvi car and the Batang Kali track. This was just for the kicks as the mods aren’t really complete or that well made. The Myvi is an underpowered and boring car to drive and the Batang Kali track is just a normal road that is too smooth to be interesting to drive. It’s cool to see that even Malaysia has a small Assetto Corsa fanbase and it’s something to show off to visiting friends but it’s not worth actually driving regularly.
As I’ve already mentioned last time, the ecosystem of content available for this game is unbelievable. Even if I restricted myself to the maps from Sim Traxx, I could see myself playing this months to come. The quality is a concern and it’s part and parcel of messing with mods as everything isn’t documented and tested as well as one might like. There are paid mods as well and I suppose they must be of better quality and certainly they completely change how the game looks. I’m sure I’m going to venture into all this as it’s still technically quite daunting and I could always wait for the next version of Assetto Corsa which would incorporate many of these features out of the box. As good as this game is, I can also see the limitations in the game engine including how so many of the objects that are back of the background are just static images.
I’ll need to get myself a better gaming PC soon because even the more complex mods for this very old game is starting to tax my old system too much. For now, this more than covers my racing game needs and I’m pleased that it can even offer a rally-type experience with the right maps.
