abandoning the GPL engine in this way, they have given up on advancing the
state of the art in sim racing. Even if they had put out a sim that was the
equal of GPL in terms of physics, graphics, etc., it would have been the
best ever implementation of REALISM in the Nascar world.
It was stated in an interview on AGN a few months back that the GPL engine
was written to be transferrable to any type of motor sim. When I heard that
I had hopes that there would be a bunch of racing titles by others that
perhaps would be based on the GPL engine. It could have been like the
Doom/Quake engine which was licensed to many other software firms and there
were a bunch of other implementations of the same first person shooter
technology.
But now that the authors of the engine themselves have been unable to make
it work for Nascar and are giving up, the hopes that EA or others with the
official licenses for their type of racing will use the excellent physics of
the GPL engine are gone. If the authors of the engine can't make it work,
nobody else is going to take a risk on the GPL licensing fees AND additional
R&D dollars to pick up where Papy left off and make it work. They'll just
take the easy way out and make an arcadish game.
By giving in to what appears to be pressure from Sierra, Papyrus has done
the greatest dis-service to the sim racing community. They have created the
perception that advancing the state of the art is commercially unfeasable.
Forevermore, GPL with its lackluster sales will be percieved by game
producers as a testament to what happens when you try to push the state of
the art in realism.
The last hope we who seek realism most of all have is Geoff Crammond and
GP3. At least he had the foresight years ago to retain the rights to GP2 so
that he and only he would make the decision as to when to release the game.
Do you think Geoff would have allowed Microprose or anyone else to have
forced him to release the game instead of spending six additional months on
perfecting crashes and spins? The game may not have had everything in it
that he would have liked, but at least he never compromised on something as
fundamental as the physics engine! So what if the hardware to run it at it's
full potential wasn't even on the drawing boards at the time of it's
release. It was VERY playable at its first release and it still was capable
of growing in graphic detail as the hardware grew more powerful. I hope that
GP3 will be a tremendous commercial sucess and that Geoff's business model
of retaining full control and being the sole judge of when a game is worthy
of release and what will go in it will be validated. If having to deal with
slipped dates is the tradeoff for this kind of dedication to quality
simulations, then I say its far better than what Papy/Sierra has done.
Respect Papyrus? After what they have done to the future of racing sims with
this abandonment of the GPL Engine in the face of its greatest opportunity
to show the world that the state of the art realism in GPL can be
commercially sucessful, I can only say thanks for nothing.