This is my personal opinion so I don’t expect that everyone will agree but I do really like this idea.
So basically… I dislike the vehicles in 3.0 and I do know that Nelson has alreay changed them but since I am a car guy there are some things that I really want to get off my chest.
By the way, I saw this other post by @anon73161152 about different types of cars, wich I liked and if you haven’t read it I recommend it.
The cars in UII should be based off real cars and be as similar as possible to their real life counterparts. Nelson obviously doesn’t want to feature the name of the car company but I have an easy way to get around that: If he wants to feature for example the Honda S2000 he just calls it “the S2000”. Or the Ford Transit, “the Transit”. Or he doesn’t specify the name at all and just makes it look and act like the car in question.
But now to my main point: How the cars handle. In high speed cornering and turning in general rear wheel drives tend to suffer of a thing called “oversteer”. This makes the car itself turn but the tires slide and there is a big chance of you spinning out with the back or the side of the car facing the direction you’re going.
Front wheel drives on the other hand have a tendency to suffer from a thing called “understeer” while turning. This means that the front tires wont grip and the car doesn’t turn enough. This easily results in driving off the road headfirst. Four wheel drives also suffer from this but not for the same reason.
Skill is reqired the counter this problem and this should also be the case in UII. If you want to drive fast you sholud have the skills to back it up.
If Nelson doesn’t keep these things in mind he might be facing the same problem as the gta franchise. They first had realistic cars but the community, who didn’t know anything about cars complained that thet were to hard to drive and Rockstar gave up and made all the cars all wheel drives, regardless of their real life counterparts, wich really pissed off people who liked cars.
So simply put: the cars should be based on real cars (preferably from the 90s and early 2000s) and the RWD:s should handle like RWD:s, the FWD:s like FWD:s and so on. Driving should be a fun experience.
It already does. Unreal Engine uses Nvidia Physix for vehicles, wich uses this information to calculate how the car handles. It is a really complex system, used in AAA games. Here’s a demonstration:
RWD becomes trickier to handle at higher speeds than FWD or AWD, but at slow-regular speeds there isnt much difference without a keen eye.
One thing that the drivetrain could affect is the effectiveness on loose or wet/frozen surfaces. In the rain, FWD would handle better than RWD. On ice and loose surfaces, AWD would handle better. RWD doesnt really prevail on any particular surface other than plain dry asphalt, so it could be made more common or cheaper to repair in return.
