Rocky AC Evo Launch Highlights More Always-Online Woes

After months of teasing, drip-fed info and glossy trailers, the early access version of Assetto Corsa Evo finally went live yesterday, and it’s fair to say things got off to a slightly rocky start. Certainly not Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown levels of rocky, especially because ACE is still very openly in early access and not a finished game, but rocky nonetheless.

First, we watched as the 3pm release window came and went with the game’s release date reverting to ‘coming soon’ on Steam, while streamers who’d cleared their afternoons had to find other ways of keeping their eager audiences entertained.

Then, when the game finally released nearly an hour later than planned, things weren’t quite as promised. Most of the features touted as being included in the day one early access release weren’t accessible. The menu tiles for licence tests, the driving academy, and the ability to buy, rent and customise cars were all greyed out, and all players could do was a free practice or quick race in one of the six starter cars featured.

This, it transpires, is a result of server overload issues that have forced the game into offline mode. What should have happened was that players would have had the choice to buy one of those six starter cars, at which point the rest of the main menu would have opened up.

As we write this, though, around 18 hours after the game’s release, it’s still stuck in offline mode. To the credit of developer Kunos Simulazioni, it’s jumped on the issue, already releasing a hotfix to make all 20 cars featured in the first early access release accessible, as well as working to resolve the server issues “as a matter of urgency.”

All very admirable, but it brings us once again to the thorny issue of always-online gaming. At no point during the game’s promotional cycle was the need for an internet connection to access basic single-player features mentioned, so it’s hard not to feel a little miffed to find that it is.

It’s an issue that’s increasingly cropping up in racing games, from the minor annoyance of Gran Turismo 7’s features being severely limited during server maintenance periods to the lawsuit-triggering controversy around the delisting of the original The Crew game. And once again it’s got us asking: why?

After all, AC Evo doesn’t even have any online multiplayer features in this early stage in its life, and the features that are currently inaccessible – buying and customising cars, creating driver profiles and so on – have been featured in games for literal decades.

Developers, when asked about the recent proliferation of always-online games, tend to give fairly nebulous answers about anti-cheating measures and preventing the editing of save files. Certainly, they were the reasons given by Polyphony Digital when pressed on why almost all of Gran Turismo 7 requires an internet connection.

But those benefits are clearly outweighed by the cost of the bulk of a game becoming unplayable if someone has a patchy connection, or especially, as is the case with AC Evo, when the issue appears to be on the developers’ end, not the players’.

To be clear, we’re not here to have a massive go at AC Evo. While we’ve not had the chance to play it yet, the consensus seems to be that while some areas like engine sounds and opponent AI need work, the driving feels top-notch and the graphics, while nothing game-changing, are more than acceptable.

It’s commendable, too, that Kunos has jumped straight on trying to resolve these issues, but the issues wouldn’t be there in the first place if the game was playable offline. It’s worked for the gaming industry for decades, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue to do so.