NintendoLife dropped news on us today that we all knew was coming at some point – Project CARS has been cancelled on the Wii U.
The Wii U is a gimmick console and hasn’t been taken seriously since launch, so again, I’m really not surprised. It’s a console meant to capitalize on the popularity of tablets overrunning the casual gaming market with bogus titles like Angry Birds, so you sort of knew that even with Nintendo behind it, there is only so much a gimmick can do when it comes to running software on the hardcore end of the spectrum.
But the biggest problem I have with this news is the way how Slightly Mad Studios have handled the Wii U “launch” since the initial announcement.
First, the Wii U was “more than capable” of running Project CARS:
Then, it was “it feels amazing and runs in 720p at 30fps”:
A few months later, it struggled to hit 720p/30FPS:
Then came the famous “we really dislike Nintendo users” comment within the WMD forums:
And now the game has been cancelled on the Wii U:
This is absolutely amazing for all the wrong reasons. Even the most brain dead idiots knew the Wii U was underpowered at launch and served to be a gimmick console for the younger crowd of gamers looking for the next Mario or Zelda title. Why you’d spend months years hyping up the title, only to continuously backpedal and then outright say you “dislike Nintendo users” before cancelling the game, is beyond me.
Was it really so hard to come out in 2013 and say “we’d like to have it on the Wii U as well because there are a lot of diehard racing sim fans over there, but we know there will be challenges?” And then once you get the title in a playable state that consumers will be happy with, formally announce it? Cause all this backpedaling does makes us look credible and totally not insane as SMS leads others to believe:
I’ll admit to being a longtime Nintendo fan, dating back to the NES.
My son and I both do the majority of our gaming on PC. For console stuff, we have the Wii U. I don’t buy into the Xbox/Playstation platforms because a lot of the gaming experiences for those are similar to what’s on PC. Also I’m not made of money.
In addition to the Wii U, we also have the Wii, a couple of 3DS systems, a DS, a GBA, GBA SP, and a GBC.
I even took my kid to the Pokemon World Championships in Washington DC last year.
When pCars was first announced for Wii U, I actually considered picking it up there as opposed to PC. I’ve been mostly committed to rF1/rF2 leagues on PC over the last few years (though I’m taking a break for now) and thought it’d be fun to have something approximating a sim on the Wii U for when I just want to be more casual.
I never bought into pCars, and given the issues it’s had, I’m glad I didn’t. My time and money are limited, and I don’t want to waste them on something like this.
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You would never had a such great experience on the WiiU. If you have a PC there’s no sense to go for anything else. This is not supermario kart, it’s a simulator. It’s like pretending to play iRacing or AC on the WiiU.
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I never planned to buy it for PC, for the reasons I stated above.
Your argument has no merit.
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The fact that we have people mature enough to father children reading our website is actually pretty cool.
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Probably more than you think.
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Married man and a father of two reporting in.
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You’d be surprised the number of “olds” that read this site and have kids.
*checking in*.
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Downsize this masterpiece to fit that console isn’t going to work IMO.
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Oh please.
Fix the goddamn code first, then start talking about hardware. As it stands, pcars is a mockery of software engineering.
They lied, that’s all. They didn’t target a single platform correctly. Of course they can’t handle a truly performance constrained environment.
Better studio/developers could, no problem. They would probably want to change some of the more idiotically inefficient shaders and remove things like PhysX track-trash pop-in edition, though.
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I think the game could run “as is” at around 25 fps on the WiiU, and with some other aspects “nerfed”. Even doing this, I don’t believe it will be convenient to release it on WiiU (you do something to have a return.. not for the glory?).
I don’t know what you mean with “better studio”.. they are the first studio who deployed a simulator (at the same time) on: PC, PS4 and XB1 … the competitors didn’t have done a third of this.
WiiU is a ded platform (for it’s own Nintendo admission), you must be dumb to invest money for it at this point.
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“they are the first studio who deployed a simulator (at the same time) on: PC, PS4 and XB1 … the competitors didn’t have done a third of this.”
Well, I’ll ignore our differing definitions of ‘simulator’. Instead, I’ll just point out that technically releasing a game on one of the platforms would be at least 1/3rd of the ‘work’.
Even If you ignore reality and all the problems with pcars, your math still doesn’t add up.
Get it together.
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Yeah……..dog shit physics and FFB that is so bad they added a buttload of adjustment sliders so they could blame it on the end user but yet they could not trouble themselves to add a few sliders to independently adjust the volume levels of engine, scrub, skid etc.
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I find it superior to AC and more rewarding than iRacing to be honest.
AC physics is (for whatever reason) inconstant, and iRacing … it looks like it’s harder to drive a car there than in real life.
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I am not a big fan of AC or Iracing. The best physics and ffb can be found in Rfactor2, Game Stock Car and Raceroom Racing Experience.
Pcars is easier to keep the car on the track for sure. You would have to be a 9 year old retarded monkey to lose control of a car in that softsim with training wheels.
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I believe that a simulator must have: physics, sounds, and graphics.
Rf2 is a dead product, GSCE is like playing on a calculator.
pcars is the only sim that is offering all those aspect.
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If you truly believe Pcars has good physics and sounds then you have never driven a car on track at speed and have something wrong with your hearing.
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“I find it superior to AC and more rewarding than iRacing to be honest.
AC physics is (for whatever reason) inconstant, and iRacing … it looks like it’s harder to drive a car there than in real life.”
You find pcars superiors to iracing???
Next please
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I think you lost everyone at “masterpiece” 😐
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Hey guys this is crazy. But I like all of those games. OMGZ bUt Project Currs So Bad durr. I enjoy it for what it is.
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The master baiter prize for you.
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The prize was for the masterpiece dude on the first comment… this is such a confusing comments section. I always miss my target here.
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Very true anon SMS shill #203 as I’ve heard the expression 10 pounds of shit (pCARS) won’t fit in a 9 pound bag (WiiU). I’ve used parentheses so the SMS shills understand my comment.
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It could probably work if they cut dynamic weather, cut dynamic night/day and reduced the grid size to about 20 cars.
More cars, variable lighting and dynamic weather are all big killers of frame-rate. Heck, even Forza 6 isn’t going with dynamic time/weather as it wants to hit a rock-solid 60fps.
If SMS decided that cutting those features would make it not worth producing a WiiU version, then fair enough, I can accept that. They can barely get the game running properly on the other consoles, so trying to make it fit on something with lower hardware capabilities was always going to be a challenge.
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I believe it’s the overall: you need to cut down feature, you will have a game that isn’t representative of the original product (if we look at the PC version compared with the consoles version, they aren’t that different), and you need to have profit from all of this.
If you look at the big studios they have all abandoned their initial projects for the WiiU, because concretely they were not profitable.
I admire the effort the put to do this… but if you have to release a sub-pair product, it’s better to not release it at all.
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The tire model is too heavy for the CPU of the WII U, they would have to use the old brush model.
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Right..more tales from your shill arse.
The dogshit level APU’s found in both consoles are amazingly underwhelming. Of course both consoles are more powerful than the WiiU (which manages to run NFS: Most Wanted at 30fps with PC textures) but nowhere near as powerful as the most basic i3 from Intel or the FX series from AMD, let alone their more recent APU’s. 8 cores means fuck all if they are slow and lack processing power.
The tyre model from SMS is hardly a revolutionary as claimed – it’s another way of doing the same thing Kunos, ISI, iRacing, LFS and others already do. SMS didn’t like the ISI tyre model they’d used up to NFS: Shift and worked on what they feel is better.
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The Tire mode is pure PR BS, there is barely one feature in the “SATA” tire model that appears to make it in game, No tire deformation, no flat spotting, no real dynamics what so ever and even the fucking temps are all to fuck, the temp simulation is so bad it actually feels scripted, cant even take temps from outter middle and inner, you know so I can actually know like IRL what the setup needs by using those temps.
The only question is, is did they leave it because they are fucking useless cunts? or what I think they scraped it for performance issues, and to insure “parity” across all systems (woefully underpowered consoles) and poor AMD performance, why do you think replays were limited? maybe so I cant see thetire deformation they claim to have? fucking cheese knobs.
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Hey fucking twats, stop calling me a fucking shill. I said that there tire model is cpu heavy, not that it is good or anything. You can all go fuck yourselves.
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If I sau that the game is GPU heavy, am I fucking saying that it is the most beautiful game ever? Fuck no.
James tou created the most stupid community I’ve ever fucking seen. The IQ here is too damn low.
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[cue a long rant that Wii U owners are normies]
That aside though, if we can assemble a group of modders and maybe former guys who developed Battle Gear and Tokyo Xtreme Racer, we could make a racing sim on Wii U… for real (although there will be a bias on Japanese things).
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“Hey fucking twats, stop calling me a fucking shill. I said that there tire model is cpu heavy, not that it is good or anything. You can all go fuck yourselves”.
A grammar lesson: it is ‘their’ not ‘there’ and ‘tyre’ not ‘tire’ – this is how you spell in English. Before you say something else, ‘British English’ only exists in the minds of the engineers at Microsoft; there is English and the bastardisation of the English langauge by the former colonies.
The tyre model isn’t CPU heavy as far as I am aware; wouldn’t the consoles would struggle even more than they do now? They have 8 CPU cores of shite, thanks to AMD’s APU.
That said, many of the amazing never before seen features (unless you own rFactor 2) as touted by SMS are missing, which as noted above, include tyre deformation & flat spotting so you may be onto something :)
Apologies for the shill comment.
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Fuck off. I spell it tire, ok?
Yes, there is tire deformation and yes there is flatspot, inform yourself before saying shit.
And yes it CPU heavy, what the current gen have is barely enough, what the WII U have is not enough.
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Why dont you post a replay of that awesome deformation, or find one in the release build, Flat spotting isnt there, apparently toned down to non existence on the advice of some plebs.
If you want to educate your mountain dew frazzled brain have a go with RF2 and have a look what a advanced “tyre” is, (sorry SlightMS, emigrated to the new world been tainted), even RRE has better feeling tyre model especially the deformation, which you can clearly see in the many replay options.
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So you didn’t like my apology then :)
Spell how you like; I don’t give a shit. It was a tongue in cheek joke.
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Because the tire deformation isn’t enabled in the replay.
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Dual-issue OoO across 8 physical cores and lower overhead with a far more robust system cache = significantly more compute performance than you think.
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Just because you can see tire deformation in a replay doesn’t mean it’s being simulated as an effect and vice versa.
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Hey while you two are fighting about the tire-tyre-tair model on mario karts on WiiU… i’m going to play pcars… on PC. :)
Have fun!
PS: releasing anything on WiiU is a commercial suicide… unless you receive money from Nintendo to do so, and probably it will be the same for their next console as well. It’s a shame coz they had so much success (and money) with the Wii… but their politic is just shit.
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Yeah too bad everyone else keeps crashing to their desktops.😉
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Am I really seeing someone write there are flatspots on PCARS? Jesus, shills don’t even bother playing their own game…
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Because there is. It’s hard to get one, but it’s there.
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Then it’s fucking unrealistic because it’s easy as fuck to flatspot your tires if you don’t use ABS
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Fucking niggers and pcars
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What do you mean with nigg.. ?
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While I have a WiiU and am missing a good racing game, I wouldn´t have expected a technically fine conversion on WiiU, but the same half-baked shit like on the other platforms. So an easy one to ignore and not being frustrated about the news. Not worth to waste time with their buggy game-engine.
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The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ comes to mind…
Wii U could be the most powerful platform available, it wouldn’t matter.
As you say, engine-level bugs can be observed all the way through the shift series and into pcars.
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While the whole story of the Wii U version is pretty sad and facepalm-worthy at times and plenty of Ian Bell’s comments make me cringe, I really feel that saying that Ian Bell “outright said they dislike Nintendo users” is kinda unfair. It’s pretty obvious it was meant to be sarcastic. Not saying that it’s the best way to communicate with a polite, even if a bit long-winded (with a traces of arrogance) user, far from it, especially from a guy in a position like Bell, who really should know better, but it was still a sarcasm, not a genuine statement of dislike.
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It’s a old story.. it has been said (about the sarcasm / fun comment) even on the nintendo forums (where do you expect to find only fanboys).
But this website is about trolling, it’s not we do mistakes because of ignorance.. we troll here intentionally.
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OK, fair enough. I don’t get why someone would want to post something like that intentionally, but I guess I’m on the wrong site, then. Thanks.
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^^ To bait more clicks (from people like you). And eventually monetize them in the future.
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What’s with the “Children” words in the article? Nintendo makes legit good games. Sorry it’s not “HD CAR GRAPHICS OMGZ” enough for you. Hell. Nintendo is the only one trying anything in gaming anymore.
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