I was just wondering if anyone has tried this yet and is it worth it? Looks like it's around $80 and then they have more addon's? And I'm not sure you can use a steering wheel for the PC version.
Nascar 25 for PC
- Thread starter Steve Witucki
- Start date
I have it. I’ve been playing with my G 29 wheel. Once I got the wheel settings right, I’ve been having a blast with the gameplay. I haven’t jumped into career mode or anything like that but it’s been fun making laps. The AI is very fun to race against.
There are some negatives however. For example
1) There are no DNF’s. If you wreck bad you can repair back to 100%. The AI will wreck and often not pit and maintain their position.
2) AI logic needs some tweaking. They don’t pit when they should, or pit when they shouldn’t. It’s easy to manipulate the game to get yourself up front strategy wise. So you almost need to just do what they do to make it fair.
few other minor things with the AI. They can absolutely fly getting in and off of pit road. Or they absolutely destroy the player on restarts.
4) obviously not as many paint schemes as NR2003. Most drivers have 2 or 3 schemes if you get the DLC. 23X1 for some reason only have one each.
For me it’s been worth the money. It’s fresh. And I suspect iracing should be able to tweak some of the AI logic stuff. They have been very quick in putting out patches. The game has lots of potential.
I give it 7.5 out of 10 for now. But I bet they improve upon it if not this year, future iterations.
There are some negatives however. For example
1) There are no DNF’s. If you wreck bad you can repair back to 100%. The AI will wreck and often not pit and maintain their position.
2) AI logic needs some tweaking. They don’t pit when they should, or pit when they shouldn’t. It’s easy to manipulate the game to get yourself up front strategy wise. So you almost need to just do what they do to make it fair.
few other minor things with the AI. They can absolutely fly getting in and off of pit road. Or they absolutely destroy the player on restarts. 4) obviously not as many paint schemes as NR2003. Most drivers have 2 or 3 schemes if you get the DLC. 23X1 for some reason only have one each.
For me it’s been worth the money. It’s fresh. And I suspect iracing should be able to tweak some of the AI logic stuff. They have been very quick in putting out patches. The game has lots of potential.
I give it 7.5 out of 10 for now. But I bet they improve upon it if not this year, future iterations.
I’m in Canada. I bought the gold edition it was around $100.00 CAD. The gold edition gives you the season pass which is all the DLC ( add ons). The DLC gets dropped monthly in October, November and December. You can also buy
the DLC separately on a monthly basis but you would spend more in the long run.
There are setups. You can choose from neutral all the way up to 100% tight or 100% loose. You can also tweak the setups. There are online tutorials for this on YouTube.
the DLC separately on a monthly basis but you would spend more in the long run.
There are setups. You can choose from neutral all the way up to 100% tight or 100% loose. You can also tweak the setups. There are online tutorials for this on YouTube.
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Full disclosure, I've never had the means of being a serious sim racer, nor have I ever raced online with iRacing. So I'm not judging the game on that level.
After a couple months playing casually on controller and only in career mode, my impression is the game is rather enjoyable for what it is.
The lazer scanned tracks seem very authentic and up to date with the exceptions of Sonoma, which seems to be a Frankenstein's monster from the Infineon Raceway days, and COTA with its hilariously wrong shortcut.
Being able to run different grooves is fun. The setups are simple enough for someone like me who just wants to race the car. The paint shop has enough customizability to provide a myriad of options without seeming too overwhelming.
My biggest grievances though are with the pit stops, and with the requirement of RD points to upgrade equipment. The pit stops are the spawn of Satan. Did a drunk nutless monkey come up with how these work? Absolutely zero action on cautions except for deciding on fuel/tires when there could have at least been a cut scene where you see your car being serviced with the other cars, followed by the race off pit road. Green flag stops include decelerating onto pit road, but then surrendering your car entirely until the stop is completed, then sitting for a few seconds for some inexplicable reason, then driving off pit road. Given the horsepower required to run this game on full settings, WHY was this so horribly mangled??? I can't go 2cm under the curbs on road courses or I'm penalized, but I can't even be given the chance to stay under pit road speed or face a penalty?? It just screams of "Wellp, we're out of budget so can't have that, can't have that, can't have that."
As for the RD points, I won't go into the full details of how career mode works. If you've played the game, you'll know what I'm talking about. While I understand R&D is part of how things work, the mechanism of requiring RD points is completely broken. It's as though someone asked "Hey, what if the player somehow wins every race and earns the max winnings. He'd then be able to buy Level 9 equipment pretty fast. That might lead to the player 'beating the game' pretty fast. What can we do to stop this?" with the answer being, "I know! Let's throw a completely arbitrary 2nd currency in with the cash and WP, and the player can only earn this currency by hiring staff that we'll randomly introduce at various points in the career path. That way the player can only progress as fast as we allow!" So even though I have millions in the bank because it turns out I'm a halfway decent driver even with AI at 100+, I can't upgrade my equipment because of these absolute horsesh** RD points.
But the biggest, most unforgivable problem of all is the damage, or complete lack thereof. Often times while racing this scenario unfolds. Let's say I'm in Truck Series race. I'm running 4th and Corey Heim is in 1st with a sizeable lead. Suddenly Heim spins out, slams the outside wall, and the caution comes out before I've passed him. The game asks if I want to pit or not, everybody pits, and the game comes back with Heim's truck showing no damage at all whatsoever (he's allegedly had repairs done) and he's in front of me! What's more, after the green flag falls, he'll be even faster than he was! This is obviously a huge problem. I just can't honestly believe it got past Beta testing unaddressed. The only logical explanation was it was found too late in development, would cost too much to fix, and probably take so long that iRacing would miss its release deadline. OK fine. But OMG this better be fixed in Nascar 26.
And then there's online racing. Seems like a lot of people bought this game to race online, only to find out that most humans are only slightly more evolved primates. Given a virtual environment, these primates will very quickly demonstrate their average IQ is roughly that of a used crayon, and turn stock car racing into 200mph bumper cars, or hurr hurr let's drive backwards, or some other dumb sh**. That being the case, it looks like the online racing aspect is rapidly drying up with good drivers giving up finding lobbies that aren't filled with the aforementioned primates. That's a shame. A franchise needs dedicated players who are serious about what they're doing or it won't last.
I hope this does become a franchise because the seeds are there. It needs some fixing. The pit stops need a complete overhaul. RD points need to be banished back to hell where they came from. Damage needs to be a thing, including DNFs. But other than that, this seems to be a great platform to release a yearly update for, as long as the demand is high enough to bring in enough revenues to keep the lights on.
After a couple months playing casually on controller and only in career mode, my impression is the game is rather enjoyable for what it is.
The lazer scanned tracks seem very authentic and up to date with the exceptions of Sonoma, which seems to be a Frankenstein's monster from the Infineon Raceway days, and COTA with its hilariously wrong shortcut.
Being able to run different grooves is fun. The setups are simple enough for someone like me who just wants to race the car. The paint shop has enough customizability to provide a myriad of options without seeming too overwhelming.
My biggest grievances though are with the pit stops, and with the requirement of RD points to upgrade equipment. The pit stops are the spawn of Satan. Did a drunk nutless monkey come up with how these work? Absolutely zero action on cautions except for deciding on fuel/tires when there could have at least been a cut scene where you see your car being serviced with the other cars, followed by the race off pit road. Green flag stops include decelerating onto pit road, but then surrendering your car entirely until the stop is completed, then sitting for a few seconds for some inexplicable reason, then driving off pit road. Given the horsepower required to run this game on full settings, WHY was this so horribly mangled??? I can't go 2cm under the curbs on road courses or I'm penalized, but I can't even be given the chance to stay under pit road speed or face a penalty?? It just screams of "Wellp, we're out of budget so can't have that, can't have that, can't have that."
As for the RD points, I won't go into the full details of how career mode works. If you've played the game, you'll know what I'm talking about. While I understand R&D is part of how things work, the mechanism of requiring RD points is completely broken. It's as though someone asked "Hey, what if the player somehow wins every race and earns the max winnings. He'd then be able to buy Level 9 equipment pretty fast. That might lead to the player 'beating the game' pretty fast. What can we do to stop this?" with the answer being, "I know! Let's throw a completely arbitrary 2nd currency in with the cash and WP, and the player can only earn this currency by hiring staff that we'll randomly introduce at various points in the career path. That way the player can only progress as fast as we allow!" So even though I have millions in the bank because it turns out I'm a halfway decent driver even with AI at 100+, I can't upgrade my equipment because of these absolute horsesh** RD points.
But the biggest, most unforgivable problem of all is the damage, or complete lack thereof. Often times while racing this scenario unfolds. Let's say I'm in Truck Series race. I'm running 4th and Corey Heim is in 1st with a sizeable lead. Suddenly Heim spins out, slams the outside wall, and the caution comes out before I've passed him. The game asks if I want to pit or not, everybody pits, and the game comes back with Heim's truck showing no damage at all whatsoever (he's allegedly had repairs done) and he's in front of me! What's more, after the green flag falls, he'll be even faster than he was! This is obviously a huge problem. I just can't honestly believe it got past Beta testing unaddressed. The only logical explanation was it was found too late in development, would cost too much to fix, and probably take so long that iRacing would miss its release deadline. OK fine. But OMG this better be fixed in Nascar 26.
And then there's online racing. Seems like a lot of people bought this game to race online, only to find out that most humans are only slightly more evolved primates. Given a virtual environment, these primates will very quickly demonstrate their average IQ is roughly that of a used crayon, and turn stock car racing into 200mph bumper cars, or hurr hurr let's drive backwards, or some other dumb sh**. That being the case, it looks like the online racing aspect is rapidly drying up with good drivers giving up finding lobbies that aren't filled with the aforementioned primates. That's a shame. A franchise needs dedicated players who are serious about what they're doing or it won't last.
I hope this does become a franchise because the seeds are there. It needs some fixing. The pit stops need a complete overhaul. RD points need to be banished back to hell where they came from. Damage needs to be a thing, including DNFs. But other than that, this seems to be a great platform to release a yearly update for, as long as the demand is high enough to bring in enough revenues to keep the lights on.
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I love your review. It should be put into a magazine! I agree with everything you said and I have about 100 hours of gameplay. I have not dived into the career mode. Mostly quick races and online.
It sounds like they are updating Sonoma this month as well as adding Portland for online Xfinity and quick races.
I completely agree with you that it’s a good base. Now I hope the can fine tune/add features like the one’s you mentioned.
DNF’s, pit stops, the damage/cautions/ai pit stop logic. You can easily manipulate the ai on pit stops so I’ve had to just accept that strategy is not a thing in this game because it would be like cheating. So I just do what they do or what the crew chief tells me to do.
Of course we are spoiled with Nr2003, this website, and all the painters, so I can’t help but be disappointed with only having 2-3 schemes for most drivers. Or the 23XI drivers only having one each. I don’t think anyone has figured out how to mod in paint schemes as the files are supposedly all encrypted.
It sounds like they are updating Sonoma this month as well as adding Portland for online Xfinity and quick races.
I completely agree with you that it’s a good base. Now I hope the can fine tune/add features like the one’s you mentioned.
DNF’s, pit stops, the damage/cautions/ai pit stop logic. You can easily manipulate the ai on pit stops so I’ve had to just accept that strategy is not a thing in this game because it would be like cheating. So I just do what they do or what the crew chief tells me to do.
Of course we are spoiled with Nr2003, this website, and all the painters, so I can’t help but be disappointed with only having 2-3 schemes for most drivers. Or the 23XI drivers only having one each. I don’t think anyone has figured out how to mod in paint schemes as the files are supposedly all encrypted.
Thank you!
That's another thing. How/why are those track updates being done but NOT available in career mode? In NR2003 it took 3 seconds to change a race in a season's calendar to a different track folder, most of that being waiting for Notepad to open. I understand it's a bit more complex now but it can't possibly be so prohibitively complex that adjusting the career mode calendars to the new tracks, or adding (restoring) Portland just can't be done.
Yes we were very spoiled by NR2003. They gave us the perfect platform for the next decade plus because they knew that was the likely future. I'm OK with only having a few schemes per driver, or with schemes being paid DLC. Making those takes work which needs ROI, I get it. If that's what it takes to have a profitable base for iRacing to build on for the future, so be it. I'll be first in line saying shut up and take my money. Once they smooth out the gameplay problems, I think the game will work very well for its intended audience. The only question will be if that audience is big enough to sustain the franchise long term.
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