In Defense of American Truck Simulator's Road Trip DLC.
While American Truck Simulator is certainly not the first video game to try mapping out the entire United States of America in digital form, it's the first where racing isn't the intent behind the game. Games like The Crew and Test Drive Unlimited have tackled the task of making a shockingly huge map of all or part of the United States and letting you race through it at high speeds with performance vehicles. However, ATS is seeking to map out the entire USA (and soon, parts of Canada) from the context of 18-wheeler hauling and shipping. I've owned this game for a few years now, but unfortunately, the intrigue of cruising across the USA never really hooked me like it should because of the only tools at my disposal - heavy, lumbering, torque-y trucks that were designed to get heavy equipment, resources and chemicals from one point to another.
My distaste for ATS had nothing to do with the developers at SCS Software and their creative choices because the game itself is well-built around its premise with a lot of really neat features. A fatigue system makes your screen briefly turn black as if your eyes were becoming heavier and heavier, forcing you to find a rest stop to take a nap. Gas mileage was adequately trimmed to make trips from Chicago to LA require numerous stops for diesel. The variety of shipments you could drive, the diversity of trailers and containers to haul and the complexity of parking those damn things all created a fun simulation of the real deal. And yet, it just didn't hook me because hauling isn't fun for me.
So, when the Road Trip DLC promised consumer vehicles and threw you into the role of a specialized courier delivering small packages placed in the trunk or the passenger seat, I got excited. It was finally time for me to take the premise of ATS and turn it towards sedans, pickup trucks and sports cars. While every racing game has tried to emulate the sense of speed and urgency in racing conditions, I was now being given the opportunity to take it slow while posing as a courier-for-hire, carrying packages that needed to be shipped with an urgency that couldn't be handled by traditional postal or shipping services. Sure enough, when it released a few days ago, this premise is all I can think about now.
The first car pack to be released is the Ford car pack, featuring the new Ford F-150 and Bronco, a 1990's Crown Victoria and a 1960's Mustang. There is a nice variety here in power, utility and function between the pickup, the SUV, the sedan and the classic American muscle car. However, one thing stuck out to me before the release of this pack - none of the cars selected for this Ford DLC are really designed as high performance vehicles. The Mustang itself is maybe 260 horsepower or so, while the high-power vehicles are also the heaviest with the F-150 and the turbocharged Bronco. So, my initial hesitation was regarding how a physics engine designed for gigantic 18-wheelers was going to handle the more extreme power-to-weight ratio of passenger vehicles.
Let me just say that what's here is truly impressive, despite what a few idiots have been saying. So, let me defend the DLC from these handful of shmucks.
What people have been saying is that the cars don't handle 'realistically' in their minds at high speed. As somebody who (ignorantly and stupidly) drove a heavy sedan and a mid-sized 2000's pickup truck at ridiculous speeds on public roads in my youth, I can tell you for certain that 'realism' isn't the fucking point here. Yes, ATS is a hauling sim and not a performance driving sim, but ATS also shouldn't be chasing a life-like representation of cars. Instead, I think their priority should be on the FEELING of driving those cars.
At lower speeds, each car feels unique. The F-150 and its all-wheel drive systems make the truck's acceleration feel powerful as it should, and the same goes with the Bronco. The Crown Vic and its 3-gear-with-overdrive transmission feels believably sluggish off the line and floaty when navigating intersections. The Mustang, being a 1960's pony car on stock leaf springs, feels like an angry cinder block looking for a crowd of people to hit. They shouldn't feel like performance cars because they weren't fucking built for that. They're consumer cars for fuck's sake, not racecars. Even so, there's still people out there who think performance driving should be a priority anyways. So, let me point something out.
As I mentioned earlier, I've driven ignorantly on public roads. I feel no pride in it, and neither should anybody else - and if they do, I hope they don't take anybody with them when the inevitable car crash happens. HOWEVER, this does give me the experience to acknowledge that the FEELING of driving fast is exactly the same in ATS as it is in real-life. Going that fast on hard, treaded tires and bone-stock parts that are decades old SHOULD feel fucking scary. You SHOULD be getting into frequent accidents for driving like a dumbass. You aren't experiencing the relatively perfect conditions of a race track here. in real life you have to contend with wind and dusty asphalt that wasn't designed for grip. You have to fight with the aerodynamics of the car that were designed to reduce drag and generate slight lift at high speeds rather than downforce. My IRL pickup and sedan felt like they would reach out and strangle me themselves if I didn't slow the fuck down, and that's because they were not designed to go fast. In the same vein, SCS Software's engineering on the virtual representations shouldn't want to go fast, either.
The way that SCS Software makes the player feel at high speeds is exactly how the player should feel, not the cars. I think that's the priority SCS should have when engineering the physics for these cars. The cars themselves shouldn't be exact representations of the real cars in performance driving scenarios because there are no real-life consequences for being stupid in a video game. In a racing simulator, players are often far more brave than real racing drivers are, taking more risks for overtakes and racing lines that aren't sustainable for real racing teams with finances, repairs, maintenance, a championship to win and sponsors to please. The cars in ATS should want to be unpredictable and strange at high speeds because that in its own right produces the same type of fear of consequences that you get from driving like a fucking moron in a real car on public roads. THAT'S what I think.
I don't want realism in ATS' passenger vehicles, I want realism in the feeling of driving a consumer car beyond the limits of its intended engineering. And in that sense, SCS Software have knocked this shit far out of the baseball park. It is genuinely unsettling how familiar the anxiety is when speeding through a highway in a Crown Vic, weaving through traffic as the car itself feels like it's begging me to slow down. This is what I think a driving simulator should set out to do differently from racing simulations. A racing simulator should want to make the player feel like a superhero in a vehicle specifically engineered for high performance driving, while a driving simulator should make the player feel scared to drive quickly. Performance racing in a driving sim shouldn't come naturally - it should be as fearsome as it really is.
And in that sense, I applaud SCS for making the cars drive the way they do. Please, for the love of any Gods you pray to if any at all, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE SIM RACING FREAKS. They want something the game was never and should never be designed for. Instead, focus on what a driving sim should be built for. The slow, safe driving speeds are handled beautifully, with each car accurately represented in the contexts they were originally built for. The cars feel unpredictable and dangerous at high speeds, because that's what showroom-fresh cars of this nature feel like at those fucking speeds.
Make me feel like a scared little kid who saw the boogeyman if I dare to push the throttle pedal too far. Make me sweat bullets if I even think about throwing the car through a corner beyond the posted speed limit. That's what driving like a shithead should feel like. The people being mad about the allegedly-unrealistic performance of the cars beyond the limit are missing the fucking point; they want to feel like a daredevil, but there are already hundreds of games built for that. The Road Trip DLC punishes us for being stupid on purpose with cars that weren't built to handle it, and that is a fucking good thing.
SCS Software have cooked up a gorgeous five-star-restaurant steak, and I'm enjoying it.
The people who say otherwise are the types to sit in front of the same high-quality steak and drown it in fucking ketchup.