Neat Features

What kinda Pit Crew do ya got there?

Just like any hardcore gamer or techie, a racer will spend weeks trying to eke out any kind of performance out of their respective hardware. Again, striving for utmost realism, Papyrus is promising to allow an incredible array of adjustments, so you can tweak the car's settings to fit your driving style. NASCAR 2 had a fairly wide, confusing variety of adjustments including cross weight and camber, but N3 goes way beyond. Among the new settings are spring rate, shock resistance (springs and shocks are now separate!), horsepower, track bar width, tire coefficients, engine power curves, weight distribution, sway bar, and we've heard rumors that you'll be able to make carburetor settings as well.

What does this mean for the driver? Well, the majority of racers will touch only one or two of the settings and leave the rest alone because they're just not sure what to do with them. These cars are incredibly complex in real life, and N3 is getting pretty darn close to that complexity. Hardcore racers will love tinkering with all these little gadgets, but most racers will just be scared of them.

Display

N3's dashboard will look much the same as N2's, but it will be rendered in 3D, as will the driver's arms, hands, steering wheel and shifter, all of which will move according to your control input.

Another feature meant to increase realism is how the driver's head will move relative to the car, bobbing as you go over bumps and being thrown sideways as you hit a wall. Papy may feel that this will add to the realism, but I think it will also make driving harder - one of the first things Quake players do is to turn off the player bobbing and rolling because it makes it harder to focus on what is in front of you. If Papyrus allows the player head movement to be turned off, I expect that many serious racers will do so immediately.

These added graphical features certainly don't come cheap, though. You'll need a lot more than your current P166 to get you through the day...