SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: RACE: The WTCC Game

Utilizing the ISI gMotor, the first big surprise is sprung on you as you realize that Race only supports DX9. DX8 and DX7 have been relegated to the sim-bin, if you’ll pardon the pun. While the DX9 API certainly has been around for a few years, I would have liked for SimBin to offer at least DX8, simply because it is a good way to quickly prioritize the eye-candy for the frame rates or vice versa in one quick sweep for the lazy and for the not-so-suave-optimisation-gurus.

I am very much a late-comer to the Steam-scene as this is my first experience with this particular software. If you’ve managed to live happily until now not knowing about it either; Steam lets you download and activate RACE without ever leaving your home. It was developed as a way of managing payware mods for fps (first person shooters) I believe, and this explains why I am so new to this: in spite of some attempts to get into the genre I must conclude that I’m just not an fps gamer person at all.

Steam is required The nice thing about Steam is that it automatically takes care of updating RACE with new patches as they become available. Additionally it lets you play your game without having to pop the disc into the drive. Those were the good news.

What I like less about the inclusion of Steam, is that it thoroughly and utterly complicated the installation for me to the point of leading me to total confusion. Seemingly, I had to browse to the CD and start the setup program repeatedly. When I thought that RACE was installing, in fact the Steam installation took over. Then Steam needed to update some platform files. When RACE finally started installing, after about 20 minutes, a dialogue box in the installation procedure led me to think that DX9 would be installed if I clicked on the “next” tab. I had to click it anyway in order to advance the installation though, and it turned out that in spite of the dialogue box, the next step did not include the installation of DX.

To top it all off, RACE was installed per default in my Steam directory in a sub-folder called "steamapps", and I couldn’t tell it to install to any other folder. This, to me, is totally unacceptable.

Being a fairly experienced PC-user, I really believe that the installation procedure as described above is sub-standard and consequently will result in exasperation for some less-experienced and more innocent users. What I find quite incredible is that the only place steam is mentioned in the whole package is in a very small and inconspicuous text-box on the back of the DVD box stating that the product must be activated by registering a Steam account and that the user must accept the Steam SSA (Steam Subscriber Agreement). It is not mentioned in the manual at all, not even in the section about installation. This, in my opinion is simply not good enough.

Set-up and First Impressions

SimBin have had some differing luck in the past when designing intuitive menus and controller setup menus. The menu for going online has also in previous titles led to some customers scratching their heads before finally giving up and posting on various boards, asking questions as to how exactly to get force feed-back working, how exactly to log on to multiplayer amongst other questions.

This is why we’ll take a relatively hard eye to WTCC’s menu system and calibration routines to see if anything has been changed and how the new title fares in this department.

The menus are fairly intuitive in most cases, and follow the standard of presenting the options in a regular and straight-forward manner and in a design which European television viewers will recognize from the Eurosport transmissions:

Main menu

Setting up the force feed-back wheel didn’t prove too problematic, I just selected the pre-defined profile in the controller menu in-game for the Logitech G25, although my wheel at the time was actually a Driving Force Pro. When I connected the G25, I did have to fiddle a bit with the in-game calibration and assignments of buttons but I solved it eventually, and once set up properly with maximum effects and 99% strength (remember to tick the box that gives you reversed effects), the force feed-back equaled that found in GTR2. Superb.

I find that setting the steering sensitivity to 0 feels most intuitive to me but this is up to personal preferences.

RACE is heavily co-branded with Eurosport, the European sports television channel, and at first glance this seems to be a nifty feature.

Taking a step back, I'm asking myself if this a simulation of a motorsport series or of a television show? What is the real event? The racing driver experience or the TV broadcast? Things such as panning along the grid before the start, TV-overlays and instant replay as the race ends, really isn’t something the driver experiences. It is something the broadcaster presents to the audience and if you are aspiring to become a racing driver, even a virtual one, your bubble of immersion is potentially at risk everytime the game, or any game for that matter, forcibly removes you out of your car in order to “admire” the broadcast-like atmosphere.

When a race is finished you are abruptly removed from your car and although it spells Race Over on the screen it might as well read Game Over. (Ugh).

I know, it has been done this way before by numerous games and for many years. But that still doesn’t make it right, does it?

Navigating to the track, a couple of surprises greet you: The small window or screen that in GTR and GTR2 enabled you to follow other cars around the track is gone. You are placed in your car with on-screen menus detailing the options to drive, follow the timing and the other cars, tune the car, adjust options or watch the last 20 or 30 seconds of your latest excursions on track. The r-key which in most ISI-based sims lets you view this type of replay is not supported in WTCC.

Track menu

You can monitor the other drivers however as the function has been treated to a menu item all its own and this I suppose is actually an improvement because only the ISI-veterans know such secret codes as "r" and "crtl+f".

The menu above is reused in several instances which is great. What is not so great is that sometimes some of the menu options switch places which is not so good for consistency. Watch out for that.

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