Spending over a year in Steam’s Early Access format, Bugbear’s spiritual successor to their much-loved FlatOut series entitled Wreckfest received its first update in eight months today. And according to reddit user smudi, it broke the game.
The entire thread can be viewed over on r/SimRacing and provides multiple sources for every complaint listed. Bugbear’s Wreckfest originally delighted driving game fans as Bugbear promised the game would be the FlatOut we always wanted to make, yet after a string of early updates and staggering financial success, the game sat dormant for eight months.
It’s a shame this new update appears to be less than stellar, as the base product is quite good – and like all Early Access driving games, it just needs more content.
All the people moaning about the physics have never driven a car in real life. I had the luxury of purchasing the game right before the “big update” and have seen both physics models. The old one was… well, a thing. The cars actually handle like cars now. In a massive twist of irony, the game is also running better than the last build — avoid the 64 bit build though, it’s garbage. Of all the things people are complaining about, the shifting is probably the only one that’s legitimate, apart from any technical problems people are having. Trying to shift sequentially is borderline impossible and spinning out is a death sentence — going from 4 to R is pure insanity and you’re better off simply resetting the car.
For the record, I don’t have any issues with arcadey car physics — the old PSX games did it best, games such as Driver had car physics that were an utter blast, but not particularly realistic. With that being said, the arcade physics from the previous version were atrocious; games such as San Francisco Rush had more appropriate car handling and Lord knows that trying to keep your car stable in the Rush series was like nailing yourself to the Cross.
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I spent the bulk of my day off playing it.
The punchline is this: Everyone that is not a wheel user is going to get demolished. As someone who only has a gamepad — sacrilege around here, I know — the keyboard users usually couldn’t keep up with me baring a mistake on my part, and I was incapable of keeping up with the wheel players. Didn’t stand a chance. Still, the car handling feels better than the previous version; everyone keeps saying how they preferred the previous car handling citing that it was very forgiving. Every time I drove a car in the previous version, the cars either refused to turn or spun out.
Personally, I’m not too sure what to think. BB has seriously alienated their fan base and the NCG discussion page on Steam is practically a war zone right now. As someone who thinks that all modern arcade racers have terrible handling that can’t hold a candle to games such as Daytona USA or the original Ridge Racer, anything that isn’t the old handling system feels like an improvement. Then again, I doubt I’m BB’s target audience.
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IMO Wreckfest isn´t a simulation where cars need to act as realistic as possible. This is the wrong approach for such a game where gameplay tends to be fun and intensive and players want to create chaos and not just being busy with fighting the cars. ATM all the challenge in the handling model takes away any action on track for which the series is known. And this is bad.
I´ve used a gamepad for now which is fine and feels fine IMO. Not any disadvantage compared to wheel-users. But the handling model is just unpredictable and that sucks.
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You haven’t try the first Flatout, right?
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I played it until the disc stopped to rotate. But tell me im which way Flatout 1 was a sim or had sim-like handling model? It was still fully arcade while offering a challenging, but controllable handling model which had nothing to do with the quite mixed and fun- taking handling model Wreckfest has now.
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I like the new update. I mean, its broken as fuck and you randomly explode, fall through holes in the track, and get sent into the stratosphere but when it /does/ work the new physics feel really nice. I use a wheel though so I cannot comment on the gamepad experience.
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