Can't really run with a Crew right now...

...Because my laptop can't handle it.


It can probably pump out about 14~20 fps while I'm driving, but it's not enough. I can't even get to the second checkpoint during the first mission because of that. And because of the poor performance, I can't get to the free roam aspects or even to the damn story. Oh, and Alex? Voiced by Troy Baker. I heard the voice and it was just "...Troy? Freeman? When did you learn to talk?". ...I had looked up what I was missing since I couldn't get past the intro. He sorta looks like a weird Gordon Freeman. Or to some, Walter White/Heisenberg.

From what I've played though, I did have some fun with it. You begin by driving a truck offroad onto farm land with the police on your tail. It would be fine and all, considering that you have access to nitrous boosting, and the charge rate isn't all that bad. Looks to be some vehicular damage at play as well since the police also attempt to ram you from the sides. The "track" was definitely slippery, and I'm not too familiar with offroad driving, so I don't know how to deal with dirt as opposed to regular asphalt. It was a little annoying sliding around, drifting when I didn't want to. But that can probably be attributed to my lack of experience with that sort of racing.

The driving physics did feel rather familiar though. Turns out I wasn't completely crazy. Ubisoft Reflections is one of the studios collaborating on the project, with Ivory Tower. When I looked up who everyone was (didn't do any prior research before signing up for the beta; go me!), no wonder. Ivory Tower was made up of devs that worked on Test Drive Unlimited. Reflections did the Driver series, and also worked on Watch_Dogs. Adjusting to the somewhat slippery, arcade-y, controls was easy enough. Adjusting to the input lag though? Way worse than the missed input polling while playing WD. At the very least in WD, I had other ways of dealing with the objective (unless it was chasing a helicopter, but that was one time). It doesn't quite work when you're dealing with checkpoints and the timer be global rather than tied to actual game speed. I can understand some input latency when sending the signals via USB, wireless, or Bluetooth, but really? That much of a delay is unacceptable. Racers practically require tight controls.

Speaking of which... I can understand why the timer isn't affected by your fps: it's essentially an online game. An open world racing "MMORPG", with drop-in drop-out multiplayer. Everyone has to be running on the same timer or else it wouldn't work. The problem with that is it interferes with what's actually going on in-game. As noted above, my laptop runs the game rather slow. The game speed is tied to my fps. If it were uncoupled, then I could potentially compete and help out fellow teammates. I would experience a hell of a lot of stuttering and may make it an unplayable mess, but at least I wouldn't be desynced with what should be happening.

The graphics options look pretty standard. For some reason, it wouldn't let me set it lower than 1280*720, which would likely increase performance on my laptop. It did say on the requirements page what was needed to for 1280*720 at minimum, and 1080p for recommended. Was hoping that you could set it lower. Oh well. Might be possible if I had something to force it. Since I can't really do much with the graphics, no way to play around with the different AA settings. In fact, I haven't done any of that since forever anyways! V-sync was off since it would've been worthless and pointless. Can't lock my fps to 30 (or 60 if I edited a config file) anyways. For controls, it can be customized quite nicely. About the only thing I would change would be getting rid of the gear up/gear down lock to the right analog stick. Would prefer to map it to the shoulder buttons and map the view change to something else (d-pad?). I don't even remember what L1 does! Haven't tried out keyboard controls since it's a racing game. I don't do K+M when it comes to certain types of games. I don't have a wheel either, so can't provide feedback on that. But all the options present to tweak it? Nice.

Reading on the forums, there were a few strange things going on. Some weren't able to complete the first mission because of having too many input devices plugged in. That's a rather strange reason to fail... So they disconnected whatever they had and went with K+M, passed the initial mission. Didn't help my case, and quite a few others, since our problem was game speed. TXAA is apparently broken. Textures are messed up. Loading to a black screen. Amongst other things. Hopefully they're reading all of the feedback and working to fix things. I'll have to check back a little bit later to see if they've updated the build for the beta. Maybe I'll have something better for another testing session. I do want to play it with a couple of friends. I know that one is a racing enthusiast, and another expressed interest by asking for my impressions.


About the only thing I want is an offline option... Just cruising around the USA without any outside interference. And if I want to jump in with a crew, then I'll just do that.



Gotta ask though. Why is there a story...?