I've been playing Driveclub for a few days now and while my initial impressions were a little lukewarm I'm now really starting to like it.

The handling is fantastic, it sits somewhere between Forza and PGR in terms of realism and mostly provides the best of both worlds, the nuance of Forza and the sense of speed of PGR. The handling does allow for a bit more sliding without loss of energy than I'd prefer but overall I find that it straddles the arcade/sim line quite well.

The visuals are amazing... about half the time, the other half it only looks so-so, which is mostly a result of having such dynamic lighting and weather systems, no track environment will ever look the same way twice. Also the dynamic range of the lighting is unlike anything I've ever seen in any other game, the difference between dark and bright conditions is huge, when it gets dark, it truly gets DARK and things can become difficult to see. This might sound like a terrible thing but in practice the effect it creates when your race starts in the middle of the night that takes you trough the sun rising in the morning is immensely powerful and provides a unique sense of realism, I applaud the developers for being so bold.

The game can feel barebones and bland at times but I appreciate the focus on competition and racing. In games like Forza you never know if the guy kicking your butt is doing so because he is indeed a better driver or if he simply has a better tuning setup, or is using easier handling settings, or is using the suggested line. This is not a problem with Driveclub, there's no racing line, no tuning, no handling settings, you can only select manual or auto and that's it, truly driver vs driver.

Driveclub isn't for everyone, it's a racing fans racing game, it may not be the most realistic, nor feature laden but it nails the essence of racing and it does so while pushing technical frontiers in impressive ways.

I still haven't really played it, did some AI races, but I find it hard to remember the tracks. Mostly because some of them are really long or not made of laps, but more A to B rally type stuff.
To me learning the track is not part of the fun, mastering the track is. So now I have to learn all those fantasy tracks to be able to start having fun with it. Then I rather have a game like Gran Turismo or Forza, which do have some 'real' tracks that I already know.
What also didn't help is the fact that the game was broken for a week. Not being able to play online, while that's the whole point of this game has been a good enough reason for me not to play it. When they released a patch, I got an error that said I couldn't download the patch.
Once I was able to login and immediately created a club; designed the badge, a car livery and invited some friends. Later I saw the game did not save any of it. Fuck this game.

Wake me up when it works properly, then I'll give it another try!

I really like the track design, and like how you come to improve on each one the more you play it, learning new techniques and finding the right driving line on your own.

I hate the AI with a passion though. It is unbelievably bad. On the one hand, it's awful when they tap your rear on the last bend and send you spinning out because they are stuck to their driving line. On the other, it creates a real sense of rivalry. It's just a shame that the other racers are so bland.

@dussck: There are a fair share of circuit type tracks as well which are, in general, shorter and easier to memorize. The point to point tracks are very long and neigh impossible to memorize but they feature fewer demanding corners and can be more or less managed with the minimap. I think the P2P tracks provide nice variance to the gameplay and they also tend to better show off the awesome environments.

As to the state of multiplayer, it is undeniably a disaster that two weeks after release it takes ~5 attempts to join a multiplayer match, it does seem to be trending in the right direction though which, hopefully, is more an indication of backend improvements than of waning interest in the game lol.

@gerrid: Yeah track design is definitely pretty good I haven't really yearned for any of the staple realworld tracks yet.

I agree that the AI is lacking, however my problem with it isn't so much that it doesn't react to your presence, it does, it's more the obvious rubber banding that occurs. It usually goes like this: you start a race in last place, work your way through the grid in a lap and then all of a sudden everybody can keep up and they stay on your butt till the end of the race. It keeps things interesting and the need for it is clear given that they decided against having difficulty settings but observing it still bugs me, a problem exacerbated because online is mostly non-functional at the moment.

@toelessfoot: The rubber banding works both ways - for whatever reason you always start at the back and you can see everyone nicely keeping pace just ahead of you in a neat line just within your reach. Then of course on the back end it means they all keep pace with you if you're in p1. I don't mind that so much although it is strange that you can't ever build up a sizeable lead.

I have seen in the higher end races one or two cars will just race ahead and be almost unreachable sometimes, so your only hope is to jump 6 positions on the first corner in order to keep them in sight.

@gerrid: Yeah the rubber banding isn't so bad I guess and I'm not totally against it, it's imo just a little too strong here.

I played again last night and I'm really starting to notice the AIs tendency to stick to the line. In one instance I came up to a challenging driving line faceoff section where you pretty much had to stick to the blue line the entire time. There were a few AI cars right in front of me and midway through the challenge, at a tight corner, the AI car at the front of the group crashed and ended up on the driving line sideways. Instead of attempting to drive around the crashed car the other 3 or 4 AI cars just waited on the driving line, in a queue, and since I wanted to pass the faceoff I was forced to stay on the line as well, made the AI's simplicity pretty evident.

I have seen in the higher end races one or two cars will just race ahead and be almost unreachable sometimes, so your only hope is to jump 6 positions on the first corner in order to keep them in sight.

Well good to know the singleplayer does eventually get challenging at least :P

Worst game ever. 0/10. Can't stop playing it.

I've gone off it with the servers still being kinda crushed. Its losing whatever momentum it had with me.

@toelessfoot: I saw where a lot of people said the handling was actually the worst part about the game, including a lot of Twitch streamers. I am a pretty big racing fan, more so than other genres, and I am kinda skeptical about this game. When I watched people play it, the cars looked like they have very little weight in that you don't have to slow on curves. Also, visually, I am just underwhelmed. Forza Horizon 2 blew me away, but Driveclub just looks like it's halfway between a PS4 and PS3 game. But I haven't played it, so idk.