In my tens of hours playing the career mode, I've found AI traffic to be very lackluster in some key areas. First of all, all trafic sticks to the speed limit. This is incredibly unrealistic and causes cars to often run parallel to eachother, especially on highways or multi-lane roads.. And whenever there is a decrease in the speed limit, AI simply slams on the brakes to slow down to the new limit. When it comes to responding to emergency vehicles, AI is again very unrealistic. All it does it default to "slam hard on the brakes and turn right until the emergency vehicle is out of range". And it doesn't care that the emergency vehicle is in the oncoming lane or even above or below it (as it can happen in the Italy map, on the overpasses on the highway). I won't even get into changing lanes and other types of maneuvers. Because this AI isn't programmed to look in the mirrors. It doesn't have any spatial awareness whatsoever, besides of what's seeing in front of it. Even then, it is hopeless at navigating obstacles. It takes a good while for AI to try (and fail) to overtake an obstracle. Police cars are also really stupid. Sure, they can give a good chase, but there are a few instances where they are an outright danger. Example: I am being chased by police and I am speeding on the bridge that is connecting Belasco to the industrial island. The bridge has a large concrete divider in the middle. Police car spawns 50 or 100 meters in front of me with sirens on, stopping all traffic around it (including cars that are in the oncoming lanes) and procedes to do a 3 point turn in the middle of the highway, in order to respect the "find the quickest path to this moving object" task that the game gives it. If we were in a real situation, that would be outright dangerous and would probably result in death. Also, police behaviour should be region-specific. EU cops won't try to ram your car like US cops. In a game with licensed cars, this would be understandable: no brand wants its cars to be portrayed as speed demons on public roads. But it should be free choice in a game where all of the official content is original work. Traffic density is also a huge problem in the sense that it's not at all aware of the roads the player is on. Why is there a traffic jam at a drag strip? Why is AI traffic commuting through a race track? Why are secondary roads so overpopulated? Besides all other fixes (that are probably in the works, because I don't think I'm the only one complaining about this), I suggest making a sort of driver behaviour system with a few randomly chosen modifiers, like "aggressiveness" for example. Some drivers stick to the speed limit, others don't. Some drivers might run a stop sign or hurry on a yellow traffic light. Some drivers may be patient and wait for the road to clear up, while others would want to pass the obstacle right away. Random police chases with AI, random roadside events (like a car billowing smoke on the side of the road with the hood up, or just having a flat tire). I would gladly trade in a few more fps for a more realistic traffic.
