TG’s Assetto Corsa Rally diaries: stop caring about the crashes

Assetto Corsa Rally is a special kind of game. It’s so good at convincing you that you are, in fact, inside the rattling innards of a rapidly moving prototype that the usual driving game rules don’t apply. Career mode? Customisation? Multiplayer? Pah. Mere frivolities. It doesn’t matter that this earliest version of the Early Access release isn’t decked out in the usual finery, because the joy of it is simply the feeling of driving the car. 

Which is all very well to write down, but the thing is: it’s also really, really, really hard to drive the car. Any of them, from the utterly unworried Lancia Stratos, which if anything seems disappointed that you’ve chosen to wear a seatbelt, to the sophisticated engineering of Hyundai’s i20N Rally2, which could probably drive the stage perfectly well by itself if you let it. 

In this first in a series of diaries, then, we’ll chart the process of becoming in some way competent at the best and most mercilessly difficult rally sim for years. 

Lesson one: learning to stop caring about the crashes. What’s clear so far from our time behind the wheel is that one might as well rage against the setting of the sun when one becomes angry about sending their car into a ditch, tree, hay bale, building, or inconsiderately placed sheer drop. It’s not a matter of if, but when. 

A few factors contribute to this inevitable vehicular mutilation. One is that the pace notes seem to be delivered into our ears at a pace that Eminem himself would find impressive. It’s not that Assetto Corsa Rally does pace notes differently, in fact it’s notably malleable in that regard, letting you choose the exact timing with which your co-driver announces his notes. It’s that you really need to listen to them all the more in this game, because unlike the likes of EA WRC, you can’t style your way out of an optimistic entry speed into a correct one. We find to our minor dismay that in order to actually take in this freestyle rap of topographical information, we simply have to drive slower. 

Second: the physics model has really nailed momentum in this game, which means there’s an agonising beat between the moment that you make a mistake, and the moment that mistake reveals itself. In other words, we find ourselves forced into thinking a couple of seconds ahead. Like a chess grandmaster, or those morbid high schoolers in Final Destination.

Ironically, it’s in that pause, between making the mistake and watching its effects, that we find the most learnable moments. It requires a kind of ego death to actually learn from them, too – forget the stage time, forget the state of the car. Just think about why you’re upside down now. 

We’re sticking with one car for now – the Lancia Delta HF Integrale EVO – and the gravel surfaces of Hafren. Next week, we’ll get into weather effects and setup, but until then, there’s a lot of embarrassingly slow, patient driving ahead of us.