How Assetto Corsa EVO is moving on from its “own goal” launch and preparing for the next match

Picture the scene – you’re a sim racing development team, and after five years, your third entry in a popular series launches to much fanfare and… some issues.

That’s what happened to Assetto Corsa EVO. It was simultaneously the largest launch for a ‘racing setup’ title, but also blighted by a restriction to always be online. That alone was a surprise, but then combined with server issues, it meant most people weren’t able to experience the sim as intended.

The work continued, and it took just over three weeks after the first release on 16th January for things to be back up to speed. Since then, the Kunos Simulazioni development team went back to the drawing board, removing the network requirement and redesigning the game’s structure in a May update.

“The launch has been the biggest the Assetto Corsa franchise has ever had, with a lot of users purchasing the game the very first day,” explains Kunos Co-founder and Executive Manager, Marco Massarutto, to Traxion.

“We have been overwhelmed by the attention and the response we got from the community, but this also came with a lot of criticisms when the expectations, for any reason, right or wrong, are not respected. For example, the online connection requirement was one of these things.”

The first challenge was that I, and many others, didn’t expect such an online system as it wasn’t telegraphed in any pre-release information. Now, I could have asked the question, so I failed the Traxion readers in that respect. But given the prior AC games, I just didn’t expect it.

“So there has been, let me say, a lack of communication,” continues Massarutto.

“But this is 100 per cent on us because we have clearly in mind what Assetto Corsa EVO is going to be, what kind of features, content, gameplay, the free roam and everything else. But, being an early access product, much of the content and functionality is not yet enabled.

“One mistake we made was to have this feelings that of course people will understand what EVO was going to be, and it’s not the case, because we didn’t provide a game that, at the moment, can express all of its potential and in terms of communication, we didn’t made it as clear as it should be”.

“When we combine how we communicated it and the technical problems we faced at launch, we scored the perfect own goal.”

According to Kunos, the online connection was designed to deliver some extra features for EVO players, although their full implementation was for much further down the road, at the exit of early access – the server connections being tested at launch, as the enigmatic company lead explains:

“Some of the guys in the team thought that if we have to face some problems with the servers with a back end, it’s better that we face them at the beginning

“Sadly, we were wrong, because if you have a good launch, and then after that you have some technical issues, then people may be more patient because they already have their hands on the game. Having the problem at the first launch, we prevented people from playing EVO properly, and that is not a good move.

“But, we worked in the first weeks after launch to resolve the situation, and then we had a rethink about how the online must work so you don’t need to stay connected. In the end, it’s not all bad because we now have an additional feature suggested by the community, which is in the spirit of early access.”

However, what would those always-connected features be? Well, stats and progress saving across devices, and maybe even used car sales, pontificates the Co-founder who’s been there from the start of Kunos: 

“It was designed so that regardless of the computer a user decides to use to play EVO on, they can always find their profile, their configuration, their statistics and their cars and everything else. Even more important, we can build around the sim racer an online ecosystem that can make it always connected, but not with the game, but with the community.”

“In the future, we were thinking of further ideas linking to XP points, or what you can do online with the ranking system or even, when we have our economy implemented, buying and selling cars across the community”.

As for the game as a whole, the next update – 0.3 – is being previewed at both the Spa-Francorchamps and Monza race tracks this weekend, in the real world, with new cars and tracks included. Perhaps even more pertinently, it will add in the first version of multiplayer, updated car sounds, improved AI and many more tweaks.

“We need to find the proper way to express it, but the potential is right there. The new version is improving in every single aspect,” concludes Massarutto.