Assetto Corsa EVO public unveiling worked, despite obvious pitfalls

It’s the evening before the ADAC SimRacing Expo opens its doors to the public.

While sim racing equipment manufacturers diligently build their stands, a hive of black-shirted Kunos Simulazioni team members run around feverishly.

Stress levels are high. In a matter of hours, an early, work-in-progress, build of the team’s upcoming Assetto Corsa EVO driving simulation will be shown to the media for the first time. Except, not just journalists and content creators, but the public too.

Anyone who visits the Dortmund event across the next three days will be able to test what is the most eagerly anticipated sim racing title in a generation. It’s a bold, but exciting, call. The execution has to be perfect.

Mercifully, for the most part, it was. The Traxion verdict was unanimously positive.

The day-to-night cycles are most welcome, the wet weather evolving in an expected fashion and the connection to the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car almost transcended the PC – I felt at one with the track in a way seldom seen before.

But, with the game available to test across at least six different stands, using unique combinations of hardware, it could have gone awfully wrong.

This, after all, was a specific vertical slice of something that is nearly three months away from early access launch. Meaning, that even in January after its initial release, the project is still expected to be far from complete.

Consequently, we experienced brief, but noticeable, pauses along Imola’s main straight at night. Then there was the detail pop-in, including, at times, whole cars in the rear-view mirrors.

At one point, a slight touch of the concrete running down Mount Panorama’s descent resulted in the cockpit camera becoming ‘unmounted’, temporarily moving around in the rear of the Alpine sports car.

Which is fine. This was ‘very early’ access, using a build hurriedly made specifically for an event.

Small performance hiccups are par for the course at the stage.

However, this was combined with spotty equipment setups. On one stand, while there was weight to the steering, the granular detail we’d expect to be transmitted was notable only by its omission.

On another, a formula-style wheel rim was paired with the aforementioned Alpine – in wet conditions, it loves to slide, and we felt we couldn’t catch a slide when missing the top and bottom of the wheel.

Another set of pedals had decided to give up after three days of the event, with the brake permanently applied by a small amount when driving EVO.

Even when the equipment was working and set up correctly, different wheel bases and pedal sets delivered vastly different experiences.

Team Traxion felt it drove best on the content-creator-specific Fanatec display and Moza R12 on the Cooler Master stand.

It all highlighted the risk taken by developer Kunos and publisher 505 Games to be present publically and across multiple different hardware amalgams.

Despite inconsistencies, EVO shone through. This was a testament to the core driving simulation. It could have been a disaster, but instead, its Expo prescence was lauded as a tremendous success.

It solidified my opinion that the next Assetto Corsa is set to be a bellwether for the entire sim racing industry.

Such freedom, even during its nascent stages, was a welcome breath of fresh air in the age of paid creator networks and endless NDAs.

Take note, sim racing developers…