When it arrives later this year on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, driving game Project Motor Racing will not be in early access. Nor will it be in open beta.
That’s refreshing, following a spate of recently released part-finished titles, somewhat disappointing (for now) in their partial forms.
But, that doesn’t mean sim racers can’t drive this upcoming sim title before it’s released. It’s called the Factory Driver Program, and it’s trying to do things a little differently.
“When it comes to feedback [from traditional early access releases], it’s all over the place,” explains Project Motor Racing’s Game Design Director, Austin Ogonoski, to Traxion.
“It’s people making YouTube videos, it’s people sometimes posting in the forum, it’s people sometimes posting to Steam, or sometimes on Reddit. It’s all disjointed and not a lot of fun to participate in.”
To combat the myriad of platforms to leave feedback for an in-development game, creator Straight4 Studios has created a dedicated online portal.
Here, users will be invited to test a specific car and then provide a review. While longer, qualitative answers can be added, it will primarily lean on an easy-to-navigate Likert scale for quick responses.
In the examples Traxion was shown, there were five main categories (Setup, Authenticity, Finding Speed, Endurance Racing and Weather) and within each, a series of 10-12 questions.
When discussing the Audi R8 specifically, there is the following question about front tyre authority. As you can see, there are five simple answers to select from, alongside an entry to submit something freeform.
This methodology is claimed to filter through general sentiment among testers, helping the development team react accordingly and swiftly, accordingly to Ogonoski:
“Historically, when running early access programs or WMD [World of Mass Development for Project CARS], or just any time a sim developer wants feedback, the process of actually reviewing a sim car is a pain because you are asking people to write essays in their spare time, and that sucks.”
Other elements discussed so far include whether or not a car is replicating lap times in line with real-world counterparts, does it portray an accurate sense of weight and inertia or its fuel usage rates.
In our demonstration, aside from taking time to drive the specific car in-sim, clicking through the best pre-made response should be a matter of minutes, and certainly less taxing than writing a 1,000-word monologue about turn-in understeer.
Also built into the programme, according to Straight4 Studios, is an AI-powered synopsys of recent responses – so while each can be viewed, at a glance, there will be a general summary for the developers to catch up on, alongside bug reports.
Leaderboards will make up the FDP feature set too, for some sense of competition, but also potentially help upcoming mod teams see if their content matches the pace of existing cars.
“Where the magic happens, of course, is inside our developer control,” continues an enthused Ogonoksi.
“We can score the responses for every single question and receive an average rating for each individual trait of each individual car.
“For example, our handling team signs in at 8:30 am, and yesterday they just launched a new build of the Audi R8. The first thing they see is that a bunch of people didn’t rate the default setup highly, there’s a brake bias sensitivity issue, but the tyre pressures were ideal.
“They know this without having to read the forums or watch a YouTube video.
“Instead of waiting six months for a car to be updated, we can potentially start chasing all these fixes in an afternoon.”
What happens next has not yet been confirmed, other than the program will start opening up to more people ‘soon’ as part of a ‘structured roll-out’ pre-game-release, and there is an application process.
“This is an application-based program that lets people test our game and give feedback in a very quick and easy way,” explains Ogonoski.
“We are absolutely [going to be] vetting people. The reason we’re doing that is because, historically, we found with initiatives like the WMD programs we ran for Project CARS, and plans like early access programs or closed betas, it can be too much of a wild card.
“Sim racing requires really experienced testers to make sure stuff doesn’t slip through the cracks.
“We’re dealing with race cars, where the handling can change depending on how talented a driver you are, based on your driving style. There might be characteristics that people can catch who are at the top echelon of the hobby, and you might not find those people with a random beta key lottery.”
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