great sims make for a compelling experience

Accessible racing is the name of the game, so the first four (out of five) difficulty levels lean toward the easier side of things: If you want to change your own gears as opposed to letting the computer handle that for you, you need to pick Elite, which also turns off the traction control and racing line.

At first, I thought that might be a little daunting, but I was mistaken. While I don’t claim to be anything like a sim-racing alien, as long as you are progressive with the accelerator and don’t just treat it like an on-off switch, the cars are actually extremely controllable, and you don’t need to be Max Verstappen to catch a car if it begins to snap sideways.

“What we actually found, quite naively, was that there was actually a subset of people who really, really wanted to push their skills to the next level—no driving line, full manual gears, like all that kind of stuff,” Williams said. “And because of the way that we built the underlying system that runs rFactor, it was quite easy for us to add that new skill level in like a week.”

The Vesaro sims shake you around in your seat, and there’s good feedback from the steering wheel, although force feedback is dialed down quite a lot, in deference to the wide range of players expected. “There are some boundaries that we have to abide by to make sure that people don’t break their wrists and stuff like that. You can’t put force feedback up to like 100 percent in rFactor and then 100 percent in Moza [the wheelbase] to give you like 200 percent force feedback—people would not have a good time,” Williams said.