I wouldn't mind even if PCars does turn out to be a sim-lite. I can still enjoy that.
I've tried out a couple different sims during my vacation from here.
GSC2013
Pretty good. UI is disasterously bad, but I like the few cars and tracks I've driven and while I initially had little interest, I really like the Brazilian stock cars. They're far nicer to drive than V8 Supercars or American stock cars, so that was a pleasant surprise. Reminds me of DTM but with less downforce. Its also my first time driving the old Interlagos, which is a lot of fun.
All in all, it feels like an extremely high quality rFactor expansion. I'm not sure if its gonna be a mainstay in my regular sim racing playing, but it should be great for a chance of pace here and there.
How is the multiplayer in it? I'm definitely not practiced enough with it to jump in yet, but if its good, I could actually find some more time for it.
iRacing
Figured it couldn't hurt to spend $15 for a few months of it and see what its all about. Except well.......what they don't tell you is that the base content isn't much more than a glorified demo in terms of what you can actually race. Still only tried out the MX-5 and it seems I can only race it on one of the four road tracks per week, so that's pretty shitty. Yea, there's regular races(1x per hour), but its always at the same track, which is pretty boring.
Only got this the other day, so I'm still gonna play with it some more, but I'm 90% sure I wont be continuing with this after the subscription is up and I'm damn sure not gonna spend any money on the ridiculously expensive content, of which you have to buy quite a bit of to get any good use out of this game(unless the 10% of my mind wins out). I reckon you need to spend about $70-80(on top of the subscription fees) just to enjoy one additional car, and even then, the variety available to you is still pretty limited. I'd venture at least $150 or so to get any sort of variety going, and $200+ if you want a *good* amount of variety. Which all goes away the second you stop renewing your subscription.
I mean, the racing does seem pretty good. Not a total fan of the absolute realism they're going for in terms of penalizing drivers(really, even in testing I cant go off-track and make mistakes?), but I do respect that it keeps things cleaner than normal. It also makes drivers shit-scared of contact from what I've seen so far too, though. I'm not a timid overtaker or defender, so it was pretty easy to pick my way through positions, which actually isn't a ton of fun for me when I don't think others are putting up a fight.
Physics seem ok, but I've only drive the one car. It didn't seem any more special than GSC or Assetto Corsa, though. It was nice that it felt good to drive right from the get-go, no painstaking efforts to tweak settings to get it feeling decent or anything.
