So glad you mentioned sound. The most ignored aspect to most games. They will pick graphics apart down to the smallest detail you will never notice but skip over the sounds.
To be fair, some cars do sound better than others, as if they put in significantly more effort to get the sounds right. But that’s where being able to test drive any car before buying is a great feature.
Nice summary! For me personally RaceRoom is still THE GAME when considering circuit racing multiplayer and now with the tire model update it's even better. Mainly racing MX5, BMW 235i and Tatus F4 lately. Very good quality multiplayer racing in general; the ranking system together with time penalties works well and promotes fair racing. You can take a big hit into your ranking/safety rating in a single race if you crash and are not able to finish the race. But that also makes you more careful in the starts and makes you think twice your moves. Some of my other favorites are - Assetto Corsa for hotlaps when friends come to visit - Assetto Corsa Competizione for GT3 multiplayer if I have some extra time to work on setups, - Automobilista 2 if I feel like racing (against AI) without risking my multiplayer ratings, open wheelers particularly, (- and EA WRC/DR2/RBR when I want to get dirty)
A year ago, Traxion interviewed the developer of RRE. They confirmed their need to renew most of RRE's engine/code. RRE is clearly old, rightly so of course - it approaches its 12th Birthday. Let's hope that KW Studios finishes the new engine rewriting ASAP, so we can have a modern sim. We have differing opinions, but since I got rain/night in other titles - I grew tired of dry-lapping in the day. I supported the RRE dev, and own most DLC packs. I bought their DLC, despite not keeping the game installed. Yeah, a dumb move on my part I know. With all the new sim software around the corner **AC Evo **GT Revival **The Last Garage **LeMans Ultimate **RennSport **Mavericks/Grassroots American Racing Let's hope RRE/KW Studios can bounce back and drag their platform kicking and screaming into 2024.
I love Raceroom, and i fully agree with all your comments. Raceroom however is being affected by the work of LFM in Assetto Corsa, making it cheaper, easier and better than Raceroom! I will keep on returning to Raceroom, but it is taking away some of the playerbase!
The drawback of lower graphics might be a positive feature for those with older or lower-end pc's . My pc is older than the game but it still runs smoothly with graphics at max. The only complaint I have that after 6 years of searching google and steam for a free racesim, it only showed up as a result in 2020. Almost like it was blocked to show up in the search results.
AC still hits for me coz of variety and things you can do, sounds might not be good but there are really good mods with amazing sounds, and i feel like AC is more versatile as u can do any sort of motor racing, but i might say Race room experience looks good too
AC has problems with physics that can't be fixed via mods sadly I like Raceroom much more, sadly it doesn't have mods because (especially) graphics overhaul like u can do with AC would be miracle but I've heard some graphics improvements coming really really soon
I love the speed in RaceRoom. Their FRX 22 and GT rides are a blast. It's my understanding that RaceRoom is looking for some mean programmers to upgrade the sim! I can only hope it happens!
As someone who spent a good bit of time on both RaceRoom and AC the point of the video falls flat for me. I've raced both online and offline and did commentary sessions (not boasting just giving context to what I'm about to mention). "RaceRoom is free" has always been a mute point. Yes you can test drive the cars and do lapping sessions but as soon as you join any league/community (or even the official ranked sessions) be prepared to open your wallet (unless you buy all the content at once). Let's not forget that because they don't want to deal with Steam's 30% cut all of the cars, liveries and tracks are sold in an in-game store with an in-game currency that everyone will tell you to buy on a third party site to save money. This is the most disliked part of the game by many people and for good reason. For an example they can first announce a specific class of cars, get people to buy them and then announce the same cars but for a different class. They did this with the Ferrari 488, first it was part of the DTM class and then they announced it as an addition to the GT3 class. Those who bought the DTM variant couldn't use them in GT3 leagues and they'd need to buy the car again. In comparison you can buy all of AC's content once and any additional cost is optional. AC has a few dedicated modding groups that make paid mods for the game and if you don't want to get those there are often free alternatives out there. Not saying the quality is better, I've come across some terrible mods too but generally it's a more okay situation. Cars usually sound nice in RaceRoom with a few exceptions, I do agree with that. AC's default audio is a mix for sure but saying "You just don't get this AC" is an odd way to discredit all the great sound replacements that exist for AC. Some of those packs like Fonsecker's packs been around since 2015 and is a generally well regarded option for anyone who doesn't like the default sounds. Onto the multiplayer. Believe it or not there was a time when numbers where higher on RaceRoom and you didn't necessary had to join a league to just race in a big field. I used to race weekly on the Ranked servers and commentate on Community races on the weekends. Then RaceRoom decided to split up the lobbies based on driver rankings and essentially made things worse. You have a buddy you want to race with? Better hope that the two of you have a similar rating otherwise you can't join the same server. While I'm not against the idea RaceRoom just didn't have enough players to make this move a good one. With a third party add-on you can spectate any race on RaceRoom. I believe this same add-on is used for the official broadcasts too so what I'm about to mention is in no ways a rare thing to see. Basically every server that has more than one race set up in the schedule will produce a bug where some people will just disappear from the timings. So for the 1st race if you had 15 people and everyone stays around for the 2nd race there's a chance that: - Your timings will freak out or stop working - People who are clearly still racing just not gonna show up on the timings or being acknowledged There were so many times when I'd follow someone in the mid-pack entering the pit lane only to not be able to select them for the broadcast after it because they've fallen behind the cut-off point. While AC has it's own problems too and has no official ranked system there are a lot of free alternatives for it too. Most recently LFM became of of them but even before it we had systems like WSS that even allowed players to connect to a practice server that was connected to the races they signed up for. Overall I feel RaceRoom is definitely a good place to start with if you are getting into Sim Racing or just to have fun. The car and track list is great. Sounds are good both for the cars and for the tracks. (Note: They use real life race commentaries for the tracks similar to ACC which is just a cool addition.) But that doesn't mean it's without major flaws either. RaceRoom is entirely online-only so you can't even do offline AI races in it if the servers go down for maintenance which does happen. I feel tagging on this message of "Hey AC fans! Play this too!" kind of taints this video especially when the intro mentions that it's based on someone's first impressions. AC has a massive and split up community from racers to drifters to highway racers and when you compare the two tittles in that way AC is more appealing. RaceRoom has one fictional Hill Climb while AC has lots of Touge and Drift courses, Mountain roads and Highway maps with traffic that you can drive on offline or online. I've even seen servers that take speeding ticket screenshots of users on highway maps. I know it's a long text so sorry about that. :) For me AC and RaceRoom are my 2 most played sims but there's a big gap in the amount of time I've spent in them.
It's great to hear your insight on Raceroom! I was trying out the cars the other day and was wondering why there was a 488 DTM and a 488 GT3 and now I know the answer. Thanks for letting us know the possible pitfalls when using Raceroom for more serious racing, it's always great to hear feedback from the sim racing community.
Fair points! Considering the value of content in R3E, I think it's money well spent for me. Comparing for example to iRacing might be more accurate than comparing to the free content in AC. The pricing in R3E is quite close to almost any other sim title; you can get all the content for maybe 60 EUR if I remember right. Or buy the "starter pack" for about 10 EUR plus maybe 2-4 tracks individually for 10-20 EUR. I didn't want to spend too much time finding the best cars/tracks, so I bought everything at once. I think I've used about 0.25 EUR per hour in RaceRoom content so far, not very expensive hobby. Price per hour for AC is much cheaper, but I've also spent several hours browsing and installing the mods. :D And yes, I think R3E should get rid of their own monopoly currency and make their pricing simpler. It would be nice to have a single package for all the ranked content maybe. And yes, setting a MAX limit on your rating in some of the lower rating ranked races sometimes means you are not be able to join the same race with your friend. Or if there's a low rating race starting, you cannot enter with too high ranking even if you don't care about the risk you might take. It would be fine, if the player base was bigger, but with the current player base it's not working very well in the quite hours of day.
If you have a car (like the 488) in one class, you get a discount when buying it in another class. You only pay for the new liveries in the end. And if you buy packs, raceroom is not expensive at all. (And you even get some discount on the packs, in case they include content you already have bought.) I mean, all hundreds of cars+liveries and 50+ tracks for 64,99 EUR (that is the price for 10.000 vRP, which, yes, you have to buy on their website if you don't want to pay regular 99,99 EUR). And even cheaper on sale, around 50 EUR, I think. And they give you the sim, a few cars and a few tracks for free, forever.
@@jorn-jorenjorenson5028 I feel you missed the point I was making. I didn't say that RaceRoom's content is expensive. I said that if you start racing online your experience will be limited and you'll need to buy content to take part in the races/events. "they give you the sim, a few cars and a few tracks for free, forever" Forever is a wishful thinking. The game is online only, you can't even launch it without internet access or when the servers are down. Going with the theme of the video if you download AC you can play AC offline and only need internet for multiplayer or for in-game apps that rely on internet access. Might not sound like a big deal but when you look at game preservation it is alarming. Recently we seen 2 online-only racing games get delisted: - "The Crew" released in 2014 - Ubisoft's big attempt at Open World racing games. - "Gran Turismo Sport" released in 2017 - A first party PlayStation exclusive racing game. Only time will tell if newcomers will be able to play them again thanks to Emulation and/or community patches. (Similar to what happened to "Need For Speed World" years ago, another online-only racing game with offline features.) To avoid confusion I agree that the price of the content in RaceRoom is good. Currently their most expensive pack includes everything (up the point of purchase) with 200+ cars and 50+ tracks in it. The option to buy everything upfront at a discount is such a nice touch that even AMS2 decided to adopt it recently.
I thought it was ok on the current tyre model, I haven’t tried the older version before but I heard that was horrible so hopefully they’ve fixed that in this current version. What’s your go to sim then?
That is nonsense, sorry. It can be your personal opinon of course, but many experienced long time sim racers love raceroom for the physics, especially since the ffb update 1.5 years ago. If you don't like it, all good. But calling it "disgusting" is nonsense.
So glad you mentioned sound. The most ignored aspect to most games. They will pick graphics apart down to the smallest detail you will never notice but skip over the sounds.
To be fair, some cars do sound better than others, as if they put in significantly more effort to get the sounds right. But that’s where being able to test drive any car before buying is a great feature.
@@play_by_ear I'm running two Mackie HR-8 Studio Monitors and RaceRoom's sound kicks ass!
Nice summary! For me personally RaceRoom is still THE GAME when considering circuit racing multiplayer and now with the tire model update it's even better. Mainly racing MX5, BMW 235i and Tatus F4 lately. Very good quality multiplayer racing in general; the ranking system together with time penalties works well and promotes fair racing. You can take a big hit into your ranking/safety rating in a single race if you crash and are not able to finish the race. But that also makes you more careful in the starts and makes you think twice your moves.
Some of my other favorites are
- Assetto Corsa for hotlaps when friends come to visit
- Assetto Corsa Competizione for GT3 multiplayer if I have some extra time to work on setups,
- Automobilista 2 if I feel like racing (against AI) without risking my multiplayer ratings, open wheelers particularly,
(- and EA WRC/DR2/RBR when I want to get dirty)
the king is on the way ,The Evo.
A year ago, Traxion interviewed the developer of RRE. They confirmed their need to renew most of RRE's engine/code. RRE is clearly old, rightly so of course - it approaches its 12th Birthday. Let's hope that KW Studios finishes the new engine rewriting ASAP, so we can have a modern sim.
We have differing opinions, but since I got rain/night in other titles - I grew tired of dry-lapping in the day. I supported the RRE dev, and own most DLC packs. I bought their DLC, despite not keeping the game installed. Yeah, a dumb move on my part I know.
With all the new sim software around the corner
**AC Evo **GT Revival **The Last Garage **LeMans Ultimate **RennSport **Mavericks/Grassroots American Racing
Let's hope RRE/KW Studios can bounce back and drag their platform kicking and screaming into 2024.
I love Raceroom, and i fully agree with all your comments. Raceroom however is being affected by the work of LFM in Assetto Corsa, making it cheaper, easier and better than Raceroom! I will keep on returning to Raceroom, but it is taking away some of the playerbase!
The drawback of lower graphics might be a positive feature for those with older or lower-end pc's . My pc is older than the game but it still runs smoothly with graphics at max.
The only complaint I have that after 6 years of searching google and steam for a free racesim, it only showed up as a result in 2020. Almost like it was blocked to show up in the search results.
AC still hits for me coz of variety and things you can do, sounds might not be good but there are really good mods with amazing sounds, and i feel like AC is more versatile as u can do any sort of motor racing, but i might say Race room experience looks good too
AC is leaps and bounds ahead of race room if you ask me! One is legendary and one is just a pretty good sim.
AC has problems with physics that can't be fixed via mods sadly
I like Raceroom much more, sadly it doesn't have mods because (especially) graphics overhaul like u can do with AC would be miracle
but I've heard some graphics improvements coming really really soon
Raceroom is great! So fun and easy to run on many PCs.
I love the speed in RaceRoom. Their FRX 22 and GT rides are a blast. It's my understanding that RaceRoom is looking for some mean programmers to upgrade the sim! I can only hope it happens!
I pretty much have left Mods. They lack a lot usually as they are bootlegged. I prefer cars manufactured by the source of the sim these days
One more thing, this game works really well out of the box with the gamepad
I love playing it with headphones on. The sound is amazing!
I prefer RaceRoom over all others..
It definitely needs to get more love than it currently does.
You sold me !
Enjoy!
As someone who spent a good bit of time on both RaceRoom and AC the point of the video falls flat for me.
I've raced both online and offline and did commentary sessions (not boasting just giving context to what I'm about to mention).
"RaceRoom is free" has always been a mute point. Yes you can test drive the cars and do lapping sessions but as soon as you join any league/community (or even the official ranked sessions) be prepared to open your wallet (unless you buy all the content at once).
Let's not forget that because they don't want to deal with Steam's 30% cut all of the cars, liveries and tracks are sold in an in-game store with an in-game currency that everyone will tell you to buy on a third party site to save money. This is the most disliked part of the game by many people and for good reason.
For an example they can first announce a specific class of cars, get people to buy them and then announce the same cars but for a different class. They did this with the Ferrari 488, first it was part of the DTM class and then they announced it as an addition to the GT3 class. Those who bought the DTM variant couldn't use them in GT3 leagues and they'd need to buy the car again.
In comparison you can buy all of AC's content once and any additional cost is optional. AC has a few dedicated modding groups that make paid mods for the game and if you don't want to get those there are often free alternatives out there. Not saying the quality is better, I've come across some terrible mods too but generally it's a more okay situation.
Cars usually sound nice in RaceRoom with a few exceptions, I do agree with that.
AC's default audio is a mix for sure but saying "You just don't get this AC" is an odd way to discredit all the great sound replacements that exist for AC. Some of those packs like Fonsecker's packs been around since 2015 and is a generally well regarded option for anyone who doesn't like the default sounds.
Onto the multiplayer. Believe it or not there was a time when numbers where higher on RaceRoom and you didn't necessary had to join a league to just race in a big field.
I used to race weekly on the Ranked servers and commentate on Community races on the weekends.
Then RaceRoom decided to split up the lobbies based on driver rankings and essentially made things worse. You have a buddy you want to race with? Better hope that the two of you have a similar rating otherwise you can't join the same server. While I'm not against the idea RaceRoom just didn't have enough players to make this move a good one.
With a third party add-on you can spectate any race on RaceRoom. I believe this same add-on is used for the official broadcasts too so what I'm about to mention is in no ways a rare thing to see.
Basically every server that has more than one race set up in the schedule will produce a bug where some people will just disappear from the timings.
So for the 1st race if you had 15 people and everyone stays around for the 2nd race there's a chance that:
- Your timings will freak out or stop working
- People who are clearly still racing just not gonna show up on the timings or being acknowledged
There were so many times when I'd follow someone in the mid-pack entering the pit lane only to not be able to select them for the broadcast after it because they've fallen behind the cut-off point.
While AC has it's own problems too and has no official ranked system there are a lot of free alternatives for it too. Most recently LFM became of of them but even before it we had systems like WSS that even allowed players to connect to a practice server that was connected to the races they signed up for.
Overall I feel RaceRoom is definitely a good place to start with if you are getting into Sim Racing or just to have fun.
The car and track list is great. Sounds are good both for the cars and for the tracks. (Note: They use real life race commentaries for the tracks similar to ACC which is just a cool addition.)
But that doesn't mean it's without major flaws either.
RaceRoom is entirely online-only so you can't even do offline AI races in it if the servers go down for maintenance which does happen.
I feel tagging on this message of "Hey AC fans! Play this too!" kind of taints this video especially when the intro mentions that it's based on someone's first impressions.
AC has a massive and split up community from racers to drifters to highway racers and when you compare the two tittles in that way AC is more appealing. RaceRoom has one fictional Hill Climb while AC has lots of Touge and Drift courses, Mountain roads and Highway maps with traffic that you can drive on offline or online. I've even seen servers that take speeding ticket screenshots of users on highway maps.
I know it's a long text so sorry about that. :)
For me AC and RaceRoom are my 2 most played sims but there's a big gap in the amount of time I've spent in them.
It's great to hear your insight on Raceroom! I was trying out the cars the other day and was wondering why there was a 488 DTM and a 488 GT3 and now I know the answer. Thanks for letting us know the possible pitfalls when using Raceroom for more serious racing, it's always great to hear feedback from the sim racing community.
Fair points! Considering the value of content in R3E, I think it's money well spent for me. Comparing for example to iRacing might be more accurate than comparing to the free content in AC. The pricing in R3E is quite close to almost any other sim title; you can get all the content for maybe 60 EUR if I remember right. Or buy the "starter pack" for about 10 EUR plus maybe 2-4 tracks individually for 10-20 EUR. I didn't want to spend too much time finding the best cars/tracks, so I bought everything at once. I think I've used about 0.25 EUR per hour in RaceRoom content so far, not very expensive hobby. Price per hour for AC is much cheaper, but I've also spent several hours browsing and installing the mods. :D And yes, I think R3E should get rid of their own monopoly currency and make their pricing simpler. It would be nice to have a single package for all the ranked content maybe.
And yes, setting a MAX limit on your rating in some of the lower rating ranked races sometimes means you are not be able to join the same race with your friend. Or if there's a low rating race starting, you cannot enter with too high ranking even if you don't care about the risk you might take. It would be fine, if the player base was bigger, but with the current player base it's not working very well in the quite hours of day.
If you have a car (like the 488) in one class, you get a discount when buying it in another class. You only pay for the new liveries in the end. And if you buy packs, raceroom is not expensive at all. (And you even get some discount on the packs, in case they include content you already have bought.)
I mean, all hundreds of cars+liveries and 50+ tracks for 64,99 EUR (that is the price for 10.000 vRP, which, yes, you have to buy on their website if you don't want to pay regular 99,99 EUR). And even cheaper on sale, around 50 EUR, I think.
And they give you the sim, a few cars and a few tracks for free, forever.
@@jorn-jorenjorenson5028 I feel you missed the point I was making.
I didn't say that RaceRoom's content is expensive. I said that if you start racing online your experience will be limited and you'll need to buy content to take part in the races/events.
"they give you the sim, a few cars and a few tracks for free, forever" Forever is a wishful thinking.
The game is online only, you can't even launch it without internet access or when the servers are down.
Going with the theme of the video if you download AC you can play AC offline and only need internet for multiplayer or for in-game apps that rely on internet access.
Might not sound like a big deal but when you look at game preservation it is alarming.
Recently we seen 2 online-only racing games get delisted:
- "The Crew" released in 2014 - Ubisoft's big attempt at Open World racing games.
- "Gran Turismo Sport" released in 2017 - A first party PlayStation exclusive racing game.
Only time will tell if newcomers will be able to play them again thanks to Emulation and/or community patches.
(Similar to what happened to "Need For Speed World" years ago, another online-only racing game with offline features.)
To avoid confusion I agree that the price of the content in RaceRoom is good.
Currently their most expensive pack includes everything (up the point of purchase) with 200+ cars and 50+ tracks in it.
The option to buy everything upfront at a discount is such a nice touch that even AMS2 decided to adopt it recently.
Why there is no gear change animation ?
There is, but the animations not the best.
🤩
Assetto isn’t really used for spec sim racing tho, iRacing would’ve been a better comparison but then iRacing would humble this game
So come to the conclusion this game is just mid it’s like comparing nfs to forza
I’ll give iRacing a shot next!
are the physics realistic?
If it’s good enough for Manthey Racing to use as their sim of choice, it’s good enough for me!
only sim that feels and sounds right to me
RR? Way better than AC. For me is one of the best.
What kind of AI generated BG is that in the start?!? looks like shelfs with futuristic shoes on it!🤣😂
I like to call it the cursed man cave. The more you look, the better it gets 😂
@@play_by_ear was that done with Photoshop? I've seen some really cool AI generated pics. Funny thing is I bet not many even noticed? Well done lol
I did it thru Canva and was wondering when someone would notice it!
Raceroom is not simulator. You can't adjust ABS. So it's basically yet another MMORPG :)
That's like saying gran Turismo isn't a sim
Ac sound design sucks lol
Now I’m worried I can’t go back to AC
raceroom physics are disgusting god no
I thought it was ok on the current tyre model, I haven’t tried the older version before but I heard that was horrible so hopefully they’ve fixed that in this current version. What’s your go to sim then?
That is nonsense, sorry. It can be your personal opinon of course, but many experienced long time sim racers love raceroom for the physics, especially since the ffb update 1.5 years ago. If you don't like it, all good. But calling it "disgusting" is nonsense.