Eager for your feedback on MotoGP 18. With Isle of Man TT and Ride 2 in my collection, MGP 18 must be very special for me to buy it at full retail, even at the discounted $50. It's a Milestone game, so I'm not holding my breath.
Thanks for compliments. I can break 20 minutes regularly with many crashes, but finding the speed and consistency for a sub-19 lap remains elusive. I'm so close -- I will get it!
My only changes to the controller settings are to reduce the steering deadzone to 0 and play with the steering sensitivity. A higher sensitivity produces more precise steering but also more sway, while a lower setting is less precise but also more stable. I'm tinkering anywhere between 55 and 80, with 70 as the default. Haven't settled on any digit yet.
I have tried sidecars for only about 10 minutes. They were diabolical! Need to dive into them more.
Nights this week have been so fun. Watch the Isle of Man TT on Velocity and then try to emulate my heroes on the Xbox! Can't beat it.
"You know why I love boxers? I love them because they face fear. And they face it alone." - Nick Charles
"First on the throttle, last on the brakes." - @MotoGP Twitter signature
19:05.363, Bruce Anstey, Supersport, 4/8/18. Six crashes, including one less than a half-mile from the finish. AAAAAAGH!
I'll get that sub-19 lap. I will.
I've found that steering deadzone at 0 and steering sensitivity at 55 is working well for me. The dead zone must go, as Terry said. And a steering sensitivity at 55 gives me the right balance of pinpoint steering while being able to pick up the bike when in trouble without it swaying into a crash.
Wish there was an option for the racing line in corners only. It's distracting on the straights.
A tip, Don: Don't obey the racing line for braking all the time. Use manual gears and downshift instead of hitting the brakes in a lot of corners. There also are many corners in which the racing line insists brakes must be used, and instead you can power right through them. Bray Hill, almost all the way to Quarterbridge, and Ballegarry are two examples.
Man, I LOVE this game, warts and all.
Last edited by pk500 on Fri Jun 08, 2018 5:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"You know why I love boxers? I love them because they face fear. And they face it alone." - Nick Charles
"First on the throttle, last on the brakes." - @MotoGP Twitter signature
Here are my MotoGP 18 impressions as my copy arrived with same day service by Brent Torrentski LLC.
After spending some time with this game, here are my thoughts. It's a Milestone bike game which means it's neither great or terrible. Graphics are average, not bad, not great. They won't win over gamers like PK after playing TT IOM. Sense of speed is average and not the freakish sense of speed found in TT IOM.
A good bike racing game for me is all down to the cockpit view and again it won't win over any TT IOM fans. In fact any time Milestone makes a game you can pretty much bet on a useless camera view like their cockpit camera. The POV is just plain bad as if your head is at the same horizontal angle as your gauges. So when you accelerate the camera lifts up and when you make a turn the camera turns with it. In TT IOM it's done properly as if the bike and rider are separate which if you've ridden a crotch rocket you can relate. TT IOM nails the cockpit view to perfection. What's disappointing is if you've played Milestone's EA Sports Superbike games, they nailed the cockpit view and since parting ways with EA they have never been able to get ti right.
Graphics performance is hit and miss on a PC. Granted my gaming rig is going on 5 years but I can play current games such as DiRT Rally or F1 games in ultra detail. With MOtoGP 18 if I want ultra settings I have to play it in window mode at a lower resolution and again the graphics look decent but nowhere as detailed as TT IOM. Again it's a Milestone game.
As far as physics, it plays more like an arcade bike racer and nowhere close to TT IOM where you get the feel of a bikes weight as your screaming down the roads. As far as sounds go it sounds like a typical bike game and if you are using TT IOM as a reference, the bikes don't sound all that realistic.
If I wanted to buy this game i'd wait for a $20 sale on Steam. I'd give this game 3.5 out of 5 stars. It's not a terrible game but not great either.
I think that's about as far as I ever got, too. You're right in that same range.
Nice job, man!
Five seconds and change behind you. You're next, and once I top you, I know you'll knuckle down again with this game and dip into the 17s within a day or two.
"You know why I love boxers? I love them because they face fear. And they face it alone." - Nick Charles
"First on the throttle, last on the brakes." - @MotoGP Twitter signature
Thanks for feedback, Rod. Your impressions mirror those on many racing game forums. MotoGP 18 is yet another gilded throne of mediocrity from the king of middling racing games, Milestone.
Maybe I'll try this when it dips below $20. But IOM TT provides me with so much fun that I'm in no hurry to get MotoGP.
"You know why I love boxers? I love them because they face fear. And they face it alone." - Nick Charles
"First on the throttle, last on the brakes." - @MotoGP Twitter signature
Rodster wrote:Another personal best 21:40:247 with no crashes Bruce Ansley's Honda CBR600RR.
Nice work, Rod! You'll be under 20 before you know it.
I don't know about that, we'll see. There are several gotcha places you have to careful off. The sharp left hander I believe right before you get to seaside (there's signage) and you have to slow way down to like around 35mph or you hit the wall. And there's the road where you go slightly airborne if you're going too fast. It's the town where you see the parked cars on the left. The other place where I usually eat it is right at the roundabout, right before you get to the start/finish line.
This is a 16'41"285 lap of the Snaefell Mountain Circuit on TT Ride on the Edge, on John McGuinness' Honda 600 Supersport bike. Lap completed in "hardcore mode", with helmet view, no course aids, and no rider assists.
NASCAR Heat 2 is a very good game. Hope the developers build upon a VERY solid racing engine and continue to tweak and improve, especially on the graphics.
Eager for this one!
"You know why I love boxers? I love them because they face fear. And they face it alone." - Nick Charles
"First on the throttle, last on the brakes." - @MotoGP Twitter signature
As a side note PK recently commented on the AI in NR2003. I recently installed it and I gotta agree, Papyrus got a lot right with that game but the AI is woefully lacking even at 110% strength. They rarely pass, battle or fight for position. It's more like slot car racing in that game.
I find the AI in Nascar games prior to Nascar Heat and Nascar Heat 2 such as Nascar 2013, Nascar 14 and Nascar 15 Victory Edition more combative, and competitive than in NR2003 which still to this day is held as the pinnacle of modern Nascar racing games.
NR2003 was exactly that--you could watch the cars follow each other around, and there was one groove to each track. Once you found the right line and got a setup, every race became predictable vs. the AI.
With NASCAR Heat, even their first rebooted effort, every race was a dice roll. I had no idea what was going to happen, or which car was going to go barrelling through the field in the latter part of a race. Cars spread out, run different lines, and you can find that your car handles differently at the same track depending on the weather. Within 10 or 20 laps the back-markers were being lapped, so you had somebody to race with no mater how crappy your car was in career mode (which, of course, NR2003 didn't even have). Even when NR2003 was new, races were generally packs. Even at 1.5 mile tracks, there was the "main pack" that you'd be pushing through, with very little separation. You'd have some stragglers, but in general, the pack stayed pretty close together throughout the race. In NH2, in some races at Kansas I'd take the high line around, and others I'd find diamond-ing the corners helped with lap times. I spent more time searching the track for a better grip level, and all the while the AI would maneuver around me, and never totally punt me (at least in NH2, they did some of that in NH1). The entire time, there were cars that were faster than the rest of the field, and some that were exponentially slower, to the point they felt like a hazard trying to get around them. This is one of the greatest accomplishments that the dev team pulled off.
I have incredibly high hopes for NH3, because racing against the AI in the last game is the best NASCAR gaming has been in years, and I think it was lightyears ahead of NR2003's AI.
Now, online is a completely different animal, and they're still way behind in that respect, but I'm not an online racer with my NASCAR games. If I want that, I can go run iRacing, which crushes everything from an online competition aspect. With AI and now dirt series in NH3? I'm absolutely drooling over the possibilities.
I gotta admit that while Nascar games have taken a step forward wrt the AI, i'm not a big fan of the driving model either in Nascar Heat or Heat 2. I much prefer the freedom of movement that's in NR2003 and the 3 Nascar games prior to Heat Evolution. The cars in Heat and Heat 2 unless i'm missing a gameplay setting seem too stiff and restrictive when turning from side to side almost as if there's no physics involved. In NR2003 and Nascar 13-15 the cars appear to have a better turning range. It's almost as if the cars in Heat and Heat 2 have driver assists turned on but I have been unable to find them in any of the settings.
The always fun V-Rally series is back after a long hiatus, releasing Sept. 6 for console. The game is developed by Kylotonn, which also developed the fine WRC 7 and superb Isle of Man TT game:
So from what I could gather, it looks like Nascar Heat 3 will use the upgraded Unity Engine instead of Unreal Engine 4. I gotta admit that Unity sucks donkey nads when it comes to graphics and performance. I can run Codemaster's F1 2017 full tilt at 60FPS on my 5 year old rig and Nascar Evolution and Nascar Heat 2 with Unity struggles at the low-mid settings.
