Your opinion on catch-up?

[Stoumie]

The obsession racing games have with catch-up is obnoxious.

 

You drive like a pro the entire race, mess a little on the last turn, lose the race.

 

or

 

Drive atrociously and lazily the entire race, concentrate during the last few turns, win the race.

 

I get it - it's so "you can be in the heat during the entire race", with the opponents being close.

 

But why should I be punished for actually making an effort?  Why should I be rewarded for being lazy?  The only last 1-3 turns matter.  Why should it be like that?

 

I've yet to see a recent racing game where the option can be turned off.  Or better yet - with a slider.

 

For whoever is wondering: catch-up in racing games is the mechanic where the opponents are faster when you are ahead of them, and slower when you are behind them.  In this particular game, catch-up is off-the-charts.

 

 

What do you think of catch-up?

[FilmFanatic]

I’ve never heard it called catch-up, it’s always been called rubber banding. It’s annoying if you are winning but useful if you are losing. I would sooner have it gone so that it relies on your skill and car setup.

[mega-tallica]

They patched the game when they released the last DLC that added rubber-banding AI. Before the patch, the game was really easy even on the hardest difficulty and you could literally lap the field on the shorter tracks if you were good. So Codemasters, in a lazy way to make it more difficult, instead of making the AI naturally faster and more competitive, they added cheap rubber-banding AI like every other arcade racer (i.e. The Crew, NFS, etc.). I don't like it either, rubber-banding AI is cheap and the better you are the more it punishes you when I think it should be the opposite but whatever. It's the status quo and I'm surprised it didn't have it originally, I wish they kept it that way. 

 

Dirt 5 is so easy still where as long as you don't make a catastrophic mistake near the end, you should be able to hold the lead even with the AI shadowing you. The tracks repeat so much in the career that you can memorize them pretty easily. If you're decent at racing games, it's still quite easy even after the patch. The Gymkhana events are harder than the actual races IMO.