New Vroomies; Le Mans Ultimate First Impressions
About a month ago, I was in a voice call with some friends when Raycevick (yes, the YouTuber) joined in the call and started streaming to the Discord chat. He was playing Le Mans Ultimate, a game I'd had my eye on but heard mixed reactions about. At first, I wasn't completely won over; it looked like your typical racing sim sandbox without much to separate it from its competition. As I continued to watch him play, however, I started to notice the tiny subtleties that really pulled this game ahead of the others. The biggest factor that got me excited was the simulated opponents he was racing against.
In racing sims, one of the most frustrating stagnations in racing games by far is the lack of development in simulated opponents. These days, singleplayer racing has seen itself take a back seat to competitive multiplayer environments, which frustrates me as someone who likes to relax by playing against simulated opponents by myself from time to time. Simulated opponents have not really seen any significant improvements over the past decade, with most of them following the same line around the track and hardly deviating from it. When you watch real-life motorsports, drivers tend to take varying lines through a corner; they'll have different braking points, different turn-ins and different driving styles. In racing games these days, the simulated opponents all drive in one particular fashion. They brake at the same points, turn at the same points, and don't have any personality.
In Le Mans Ultimate, I was watching Hypercars divebomb GTE's from dozens of feet away like they would in real life. I was watching everybody battling each other hard as if it was a real race that meant something. Each car behaved noticeably different from each other, with some drivers backing out of risky overtakes while others courageously sent a dicey overtake in the mail. Some drivers would be fast but make a lot of mistakes, others would be a bit slower but more consistent. The pace of each driver on track was different with the pace floor and ceiling being fairly big, allowing the player to get some good battles in even if the battle was for last place, rather than being in no-man's land ahead or behind the field.
This convinced me I had to give LMU a shot, but I was still worried about its accessibility on controller. Hardcore simulation racing games tend to favor realism over accessibility, which results in most sim racing players investing in fairly expensive wheel and pedal rigs just to play those games properly. I have my own wheel and pedal rig, but my crippled body isn't always able to handle the physical strain of sim racing. Taking a look online, it seemed like LMU had a few assists that allowed controller players to get around a race track fairly consistently - most drivers complained that it was eating into their laptimes, but they also figured out that a file in the installation directory could be edited to make micro-adjustments to the various assists and inputs to create a personally-tailored controller experience. This gave me some hope, especially since Le Mans Ultimate is built on the isiMotor game engine. I'd had experience in the past with much older versions of the isiMotor engine with games like rFactor 1. While I'd had to make quite a few attempts at trial-and-error adjustments in those older isiMotor titles, I did eventually find settings on rF1 that satisfied my craving for track racing without needing to break out the wheel and pedal rig all the time. So, I decided to buy LMU and give it a shot.
Quite frankly, I'm pretty fucking impressed.
While I've yet to give this game a proper try, the first hour or so of gameplay is promising. It's still a bland sandbox without a proper championship mode yet, but an endlessly adjustable singleplayer Race Weekend mode allows me to take part in a WEC race event from practice to qualifying to race in varying weather conditions. I decided to take the Aston Martin GTE car to Sebring for about an hour or so against simulated opponents. This would be a big test for the isiMotor engine; I've always found that the game engine struggles most on really bumpy tracks, and Sebring was the bumpiest track on the WEC calendar. I got out on track for practice and was immediately stunned by just how good it felt on controller.
While LMU has some fairly intrusive assists that negatively impact lap times and the game engine really benefits from more precise inputs you can get from a wheel and pedals, the game was still pretty fun on a controller. The Aston GTE car felt bulky but direct like a tin-top racecar should, and the assists made driving the car fairly straight-forward. While LMU doesn't take advantage of the Xbox controller's trigger vibration motors to help communicate tire slip on acceleration or braking, I could still feel the car's behavior through the main vibration motors and generally get an idea what the car was doing. It would be nice to see LMU's devs take advantage of these extra feedback motors in Playstation and Xbox controllers to give even more information to players using a controller, though.
During practice, I saw Hypercars blow past me like I would in an iRacing multiclass lobby. They'd make some sensible passes, with the occasional aggressive divebomb or two here and there, just like I would see in real racing. It was fairly easy for me to understand what my car wanted me to do, so I got up to speed fairly quickly. In qualifying I seemed to struggle a bit for pace compared to the simulated drivers on track, but I was fine with that; a "last to first" challenge was an intriguing idea to me because it would put the innovations made on the simulated opponents in full focus. In the race, I was sold. Cars were realistically taking it easy on the first handful of laps as everybody sorted themselves out into single-file, and it only got better from there. Rather than watching them follow each other like robots as I have done in other games, I saw small deviations here and there that made our single-file line look a bit more natural. Overtaking felt incredible as the drivers fought back for their positions rather than letting me by without a challenge.
About twenty minutes later I'd fought my way into 4th place, chasing down the driver in 3rd as the race timer ticked down to four minutes left. I pushed the car to its limits, right up to the final lap where I made a critical error in turn one, slid off track and spun the car around. I put the car back on track, but was now trying to hold onto my position as the Ferrari behind me pushed to try and get past me. I defended my position hard, but on the straight just before the final corner the Ferrari got a good run on me, peeked to the inside and managed to get door-to-door with me. To combat this I tried to brake early for the final corner, turn in early and get the wheel straight as soon as possible to focus the car on a fast exit speed. As the Ferrari lunged in the first part of the corner, it ran wide on the exit and couldn't quite maximize its exit speed. It was a cutback; the Ferrari had overtaken me on the inside at the beginning of the corner, but had to slow down more to complete the rest of it. Because I'd slowed down earlier, I could straighten my car out and get on the throttle earlier. As he cleared my bumper and continued slowing down while he ran the corner wide, he opened a gap for me on the inside that I could then accelerate into. I matted the throttle, poked my nose to his inside and managed to get beside him. It was a drag race to the checkered flag as we drove out of the corner side by side, but I didn't have enough track to get my nose ahead of him by the time we'd crossed the finish line.
I finally have a track racing game I can play when my craving for controller-based multi-class racing hits, with simulated singleplayer opponents who know how to overtake and controller assists that make driving these rapid vehicles a cinch.
I still need some time with the game to fully unlock its potential, but for now? Studio 397 should be proud of the work they've done here. While I'd like to see a championship mode that sees the player progress from GTE to Hypercar over a handful of seasons, the game is currently in Early Access and thus will receive some mercy. I'm sure the game will grow old fast without any features to keep the gameplay fresh with each boot of the game, but I don't think I'll regret adding this game to my library.