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Yeah, you have described the essence of the problem. The game was quite realistic, enough that rookie Cup drivers would use the product to get familiar with tracks they'd not yet raced on, but that level of realism made it not so fun for the casual gamer. (It turns out that racing cars at the top professional level is actually hard and not something you pick up in 15 minutes.) We would go to NASCAR events, weigh and measure car components, talk to the crews/drivers, and most of us even got the first level of competition license (typically 3 full days of classroom and on-track instruction and then 3-6 more days of individual mostly track time) so we understood what driving a racing car near, at, and slightly over the limit was like. The PSX product introduced a feature that later made it back to some of our PC titles, called "Arcade Mode". It was still racing (in that skill mattered), but arcade mode gave the cars far better braking, allowed them to slide and pivot more but spin out less (by changing tire slip curves), and gave drag reduction to cars that were losing the race. We also introduced the smoky burnout/donut ability which immediately made it into the PC title (but had a bug that caused a smoky burnout to be the fastest way to launch the car from a standing start, which critics [rightly] hated). At the end of the day, fairly few people are interested in very realistic racing. (Many of the ex-Papyrus team are over at iRacing now and they're on the ultra-realistic side of things.) If you want to sell a mass-market game, ultra-realism doesn't sell as well as fun and engaging gameplay. The end state of this drive for realism was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_Legends which I worked on some of the early code for, but left before it shipped. Even in the early stages, with the best computer and graphics card of the day, a full set of physical controls (including force feedback steering), it was difficult to drive the car around for a single lap at 9/10ths pace, let alone race them in traffic. |