BeamNG.drive

This game has been the best thing I've ever played since 2015.. BUT... Please… PLEASE release a patch or allow us to officially downgrade to 0.38. I never thought I'd be leaving a negative review for BeamNG.. but it's done complete 180. I've been a huge supporter of this game for years, but this is truly the worst state I have ever seen BeamNG in. It is genuinely concerning how many game crashes and glitches came with 0.39. From seizure inducing light flickering and insane lag to broken interface layouts and literal Blue Screens of Death, the game is simply unplayable right now. I'm not being dramatic I really wanted this update to work out but I am in absolute shock that they released a version in this condition. I’ve been playing this game since 2015, and not once have I gotten bored or run into major issues with it. Literally not one. Over the years, it evolved from a basic car crash sim into something truly unique. I've been so impressed with the incredible halogen and LED lighting updates through v0.38. That attention to detail was honestly my favorite thing about the game. I was always completely content with whatever updates the devs put out, and I never felt like the base game was missing anything, largely thanks to the incredible modding community. To me, BeamNG always had immaculate performance for what it was. It never felt glitchy or problematic, just a clean, rock solid simulation sandbox. That’s what made it stand out from the slop racing games you see everywhere else. Modders created some of the most detailed, realistic models, from ordinary daily drivers to crazy exotics and the freedom the devs gave us to customize, mod, and play however we wanted was unmatched. So when 0.39 was in development, I didn’t think too much of it at first. I mean the game has technically been a work in progress for over a decade, so I understand there can be growing pains. I was absolutely not prepared for what was to come tho. When announcements about graphical and performance overhauls were made, I wasn’t particularly excited about the PS5 version of BeamNG. I assumed that BeamNG would remain PC oriented, preserve its unique identity, and continue to be as playable as it has been for the past decade. I was wrong, oh was I wrong. Proper clouds and beautiful sunsets aside, the game has degraded massively. Night driving is still atrocious, the auto exposure looks like you're viewing the world through the blown out lens of an iPhone camera. I understand that might be "realistic" in a photographic sense, but I don't want to view the game through an iPhone camera. Honestly don't want to view anything from an iPhone camera at night.. Vehicle lighting has also been completely ruined, which breaks my heart because up to v0.38 it had one of the best vehicle lighting systems in my opinion. With 0.39's revamp, vehicle lights are completely dim and invisible during the day, and overly bright and washed out at night. To be fair, the devs tweaked vanilla vehicles so you can actually see them in daylight again :) Good luck getting proper lighting on modded vehicles now. It makes me genuinely sad, because vehicle lighting and overall stability and performance were literally perfect in 0.38. I dream of getting it back one day... BeamNG had literally been the most consistent game, until now... There's more wrong with the game I'm leaving out but just wanted to get this out after the game crashed for the 5th time today. I don't understand why this version was quickly released without any testing or consideration. At least give us the option to update or not. I guess the money is worth being sellouts and reduced to being just another pointless, soulless car console game. RIP it was fun while it lasted. Sad.

[h1]Currently not a good time to buy this[/h1] The gameplay itself is really good. Nice clean physics sandbox, and it helped me understand how the clutch and engine stalling works when I was just starting to learn driving along with getting the license. Now, the latest build/update (0.39) seems to have [b]quadrupled[/b] the hardware requirements with almost no payoff at all. The graphics look precisely the same, the physics engine don't seem to have gotten any more accurate, but the framerate dropped significantly. On my main rig (Specs are down there) it still runs fine on Desktop mode in 1080p, but I read that many other players with different setups, whether weaker or even stronger, seem to be suffering under severe framerate drops. Also, I rather like to play this on VR with a Quest 3, which is very experimental here. It has fixed the shadow problem, but introduced the very same problem with blooming now. And here's where I'm having the same fps drops as other players, to 1/4 from before or less, forcing me to crank the graphics down to a visual very much comparable to GTA 3 on the Ps2 back then. Even worse: On the Steam Deck, it used to run with relatively low, but still stable, fps on low settings. Okay, I understand the Deck is probably not the best device to play this game on. [b]Also, mind that I play vanilla, no mods at all.[/b] But now with this "update", the game not only tends to get softlocked while loading any map or game mode, but if it loads everything correctly, the fps are constantly on single-digit AND stutters/spikes about every 300 ms, effectively making this game no longer playable on the Deck. The devs don't seem to bother adding the previous branch (0.38.x) on the Steam settings, making us use the command console in Steam to download the package manually. I kinda understand that this way, they might collect more usage and crash report data, in order to fix the game quicker, but now it's been about two months with a few hotfixes that haven't fixed the main issues yet. If you're considering getting this game, and think your PC setup is up to the task, then do as you please. Otherwise, you might take a look at the most recent player experiences, and maybe just hold back a little, until the engines get fixed again. And that's also, where I'm going to revise this review once it's done.

I adore this game, its one of the most fun driving sim i've ever played and i absolutely love driving and racing in the game HOWEVER The recent 0.39 broke the game I can freeroam but ALL challenges, races or anything else is completely broken and crashes the game If or when that is fixed, i will change my review currently, many users reporting performance issues and with the crashes and game breaking bugs, avoid this until its fixed

I love it, I love the philosophy behind it, it's made for car nerds by car nerds. So why do I not recommend it? I gotta be honest, you really can't tell this game has been in development for over 10 years. Playing BeamNG means a constant barrage of technical issues, textures refusing to load, "no texture", texture corruption, inconstant performance, constant stutters, constant FPS drops, and even when you manage to run the game properly, even when you're not having any issues, it's impossible to justify how heavy it is. Being CPU heavy because of physics simulation is one thing, but why is 8gb of VRAM necessary to run this game properly? How am I constantly running out of VRAM when I have 4gb over the recommended? Why is it so GPU intensive, when the graphics are good at best and the textures are so simple, to say the least? So, unless you're fine with having to fix some new problem that started out of nowhere every other day, I'd suggest you don't bother, instead of porting it to PS5 they should deal with all the issues the PC version still has after over 10 years in development.