It's understandable how having AI racers roaming about all the time helps establish the "racing festival" vibes of this game, but hoooooly shit, they do a great job at sucking almost all of the fun from the game for me, at least while I'm just fucking about trying to do speed traps and whatnot. It's annoying enough to have to avoid regular slow-moving traffic on narrow, curving roads that cause you to careen helplessly out of control if you have to make even the slightest adjustments to your line, but it's the apotheosis of frustration that most of the NPCs on the road are programmed to drive like gormless assholes. If they're not outright t-boning you as they recklessly merge onto the road you're occupying, they're always making sure to drive as many cars wide as the road can fit, cutting in front of you to pass traffic, doing all the worst and dumbest shit imaginable, etc.

Especially given that there's no joy in crashing in this game, unlike a Burnout game for example, the notion of cars always getting in my way, thus never actually allowing me to open up the insanely dangerously overpowered Monte Carlo I put way too much money into is such a bummer to me.

The actual racing is fun, I like the environment, it's a beautiful game, but man, I just hate that they seemed to have tried to make it as little fun as possible while you're just freeroaming.

Yeh they are annoying. Especially coupled with real damage it was a pain in the ass. I wish you could disable them or disable dmg outside of races but nope.

I have hardly had an issue with the drivatars. It can be a little annoying when doing the speed traps but so far they have not been any more annoying than the regular street traffic.

If you want to get rid of the Drivatars you can start an invite only online session, it'll despawn all of them and only have normal traffic.

I find they ALWAYS congregate in drift zones while I'm trying to 3 star them, probably because I'm spending so much time there.

Yeah they can be pretty annoying sometimes. I don't mind them most of the time, but far too frequently they break my skill chains crashing into me. :/

i really like the IDEA of them and would like to see it in other games (killer instinct has "fightatars," maybe FPSes can have shootatars?), but i get my fair share of frustration with them and they could still use some work. that said they aren't too aggravating and can provide a decent challenge.

I don't mind them too much. But I've had a couple times where one ran into me while I was messing around running up my skill score to a skills song. I got super angry the one time because I had 150k with the 12x, and this dude plowed right into me. T-Boned me. I didn't even see it coming. I was so pissed.

Never mind the Drivatars, the AI traffic is also insane!

Today I saw a Fiat 500 doing donuts and handbrake turns along the main drag in Surfer's Paradise. I followed him to catch his username and it turned out to be normal game AI.