Hello I have been looking for a good sim racing game and i am wondering what the best game is in your personal opinion.
Rigs of Rods isn’t necessarily a racing game, but it can be used as one. Free, good fun, and it’ll run alright on pretty much anything.
Really it depends from definition of "best", they are all different and it depends from what you want that best fits to your needs. I guess you are looking for online racing? One that is missing is Live For Speed that has it's shortcomings, but racing is quite good in some leagues, or was, don't really know how it is today. Haven't tested Assetto Corsa, but have heard good things about it, iRacing might be fine if you have that much money to spend. I would not consider rFactor 2 as it is just odd how it drives to me, also first rFactor is quite dated by now. Can't comment other games.
Assetto Corsa is really pretty, sounds good and gives great racing feeling, it is like Grand Tourismo on consoles. It also is lot less simulator than many think, kinda fake like a theater play, but still very enjoyable. For example: Aerodynamics are fake, made by a middle wing. Turbo simulation is actually not a simulation at all, just something loosely representing a turbo with very few constants If you initiate a drift and hit brakes at drift, car magically straightens itself, where as in reality if you touch brake in such situation you spin out. (Ok, I admit, it was more of combination of setup of car and cold semi-slick tires, but still semi slicks had less lateral grip when sliding than street tires, so that is bit odd to me) Coasting a halt break immersion quite fast though, car just decides to go stopped mode, there are no physics involved, speed gets below set value and car is then at stopped state, there are other thing of similar kind too, so it kinda tells how game fakes many things, but it does it that quite well and enough good for racing purposes. It does really good job of giving illusion of simulated car, but it is more of a game type of racing game than really a simulator. For example rFactor2 is a LOT more simulator and still it is not simulating body dynamics with real physics, but more of faking that to give you enough good representation of such. However for racing game, where you want to race online, have downloadable content, mods etc. Assetto Corsa is really good and unlike rFactor2 which is mostly a many bugs over bugs, Assetto Corsa does work. Sadly BeamNG can't be an online racing game, if it would be, then it would be really the best, because of how dynamic car handling it has. I dare you to set up same camera position, FOV, steering wheel setup as well as make good car setup and give BeamNG a good go at hotlapping, it is perhaps most difficult of them all when pushing to limit, complicated combination of aerodynamics, suspension, body dynamics and tires is closest to reality in BeamNG, just tires could use more bite I guess, kinda miss that from 0.8, but overall new tire physics in BeamNG are better.
it really does depend on what you are looking for. rfactor 2 is considered to have the best physics and the best simulation of endurance racing, Assetto Corsa and project cars (never tried PC tho) have more street cars, PC looks nicer and PC2 seems to be spot on with many simcade and sim features for the interface and AC is still considered one of the games with the best FFB ever, although there's discussion about the physics. PC and PC2 are known for their high fidelity graphics, and iRacing is probably the most argued game about dodgy physics and delayed features promises. That being said, the fact that the game basically FORCES YOU to play cleanly and to compete instead of having most severs be free roam or single races means that there's an air of realism on iRacing that nobody else gets, and on top of that its where you are the least likely to find trolls and griefers.
Does PC or PC2 have datalogging stuff? I did read that those don't have mods, so that might shorten life a bit, but then again LFS has still racers every day, so even game is not moddable and has ancient graphics, hardly any real cars or tracks, when racing part is done right, it just works. Like in rF2 and AC you can use Motec to analyze your lap, which is quite crucial part when building competitive setups. This is downside of BeamNG at least at the moment, but I collect needed data and send to DB and let's see if he thinks it would benefit BeamNG to implement such datalogging features. Most modders are on AC I guess? So even I do like to criticize a bit of AC, for me it would be better than rF2 as a racing game, it does have a lots of simulation stuff too, just some things are bit funny, but for racing with race cars that is really nice. Best would be to get rF2 and AC both if you have a BeamNG (and you can spend that much), not sure if PC or any other has a demo actually, that would be good to try too. Thing is, they all are different, they tickle bit differently and I find that some days I like to do different kind of driving, so it is nice to have many of them, if I would have more SSD space, I might get something from Reiza too. One thing I have noticed is that AC has tracks that I like to drive, rF2 has many tracks that I just don't find so great to drive. rF2 did go perhaps bit too far in tire calculations, not many modders really can put time and effort to research all that is needed, so it kinda shows up in amount of content, that engine might have potential, when they get it working, but you need team of engineers to build a good quality mod for it and still BeamNG does physics part better, ok rF2 might have more accurate tires, but other physics BeamNG has those.
