How do SR3 Car Physics Feel to You?

The car physics in GTA IV feel very realistic. It has Inertia, drag, suspension, and traction. Trying to turn a corner at a high speed would result in rollovers. Any form of motion would cause the car to bounce. As hills became steeper, acceleration would begin to decrease more and more, until hills became so steep, gravity and the weight of the car would prevent it from going any higher. When steering, the turning point would come from the front of the car. When braking at high speeds, the cars would stay in motion, from inertia.

In saints row however, the cars just don't feel right. Rollovers hardley ever happen, hills don't seem to affect motion, cars feel anchored to the ground, the steering point feels like its in the center of the car, cars hardley ever bounce, no matter how fast you are going, the highest breaking distance only feels like fifteen feet.

Revamped car physics fixes some of these issues. That's just me.
I just wanted to know what you all say,
 
Honestly, car handling is awful and I wish it was better, maybe around GTA SA/IV level. I couldn't help crashing against everything. :mad:
 
I found the car driving physics in GTA IV to be one of the worst things ever. While the cars themselves had nice physics (bounce, inertia, drag, etc.) but moving in them was a pain. Every car had next to no turn radius and would flip several times if you managed to turn at all. It made the car physics in Halo look good. Thankfully they fixed it in GTA V.

As for comparing GTA IV cars to SR's cars, I'd prefer the one I can at least drive without having to worry about doing several flips from a 10° turn going at 1 km/h (Saints Row)
 
Pretty much that. While I can't agree with the other GTAs being that bad, IV was awful with driving.
 
I've accepted that, for the sake of the rest of the game, they couldn't make the driving portions as sharp as they could have been. Probably similar to why they just dropped boats from IV altogether and kept the (largely physics ignoring) super powered travel instead. Now, having said that, I personally prefer driving cars around. Heck I fire up Saints Row 2 just to cruise around in my various vehicles in hopes of The Boss singing along to the stereo. In 3 it seemed that whoever was in charge of the vehicles had their favorites, and tried to make those drive as well as they could, without calling for someone to re-tweak the entire physics engine. Most of the vehicle roster seems to have just fallen somewhere on the table numerically, regardless of whether those numbers made sense for the car model or not. Now the modding community have people that go through, look at each car, and try to tweak each car accordingly, more than likely, spending more time on that single aspect than the original developer(s) had allotted to them for the same project.

Now, taking them at base, un-modded state. I think 3 had the best driving of the series. It seems in 4 some sweeping changes had unexpected results on cars and they just said, "ah fuggit, doesn't matter as much anyway, let it slide." With GOTR installed, I give non-lol-driving(lol-driving being ramming into stuff and turning the highway into your own demolition derby to score windshield cannon points) to SR2. The controls are "fixed" and the various car types handle more like you would expect them to(until you run into other traffic, and well... you just have to watch some of the car episodes of Mythbusters to know that "realistic" wouldn't be much fun for gameplay) though, even the collisions are handled better in 2, if only by a small margin, than 3. When it's time to pancake smartcars and see if you can force motorcyclists off the side of the bridge with your firetruck? 3 wins, probably due to AI changes. The other drivers just seem to panic better, or at least funnier.

I'm not even going to try to compare them to the GTA series, since I've personally never played more than a couple minutes of those at a friend's house while waiting for them to find their keys or finish a phone call, or whatever.
 
The problem I feel is we're looking at Realism Vs Gameplay here. In GTA4 they went for realism. The cars handle like real cars as noted. Pulling too fast skids or rolls, you can fishtail or swerve or outright lose control, and you can't pull tight maneuvers because you're trying to swerve a quarter to half ton of moving metal about and it has inertia. It's very realistic.

The problem is they never stopped to ask "is it fun"? The GTA series isn't about realism, it's never been about realism. Do you want a game where a single bullet can kill you (and the cops won't shoot you immediately for minor offenses, but you hit one person and it's game over), the cars have fuel and can have assorted engine problems of their own and won't take the pushing you demand of them, where a collision of any kind usually means your car needs to be towed, and where you can't amass a fortune by just beating up hookers and robbing them?

There's a reason GTA5 went back to the floaty car physics. Volition however realized that driving should be fun, and kept it the same in feel as it was in SR2 (and I guess SR1, not having played it). It can be tweaked sure with the car physics mod, but that just makes it exaggerated, it doesn't make it "realistic". People don't really want "realism" anyways, they only demand that when they aren't too busy having fun, and then they can rationalize it saying "well I didn't expect it to be realistic so that's different". In a game realism is internal and it's about self-consistency. So your game needs to be realistic within its own set of rules. In the Saints Row universe, a subset of the open sandboxy urban freeform crime game genre universe, it's like an action movie. Bullets fly all over, cars whip about corners with amazing handling, enemies can take tremendous damage before falling (which is only fair, the Boss tanks damage like, well a tank). It's the genre. You don't expect 'realism', because it's not part of how it works. Everything is a tool to help your experience and fun, and until they release Nice City* That's the way the genre works. Fun >> realism. (Sure some realism can be fun, but overall rule of fun wins, and if the realism doesn't help, it goes)


*You should read more Fox Trot.
 
In GTA IV, the only problem is that if you turn, the camera doesn't.. In SR 2 the physics was horrible. I used a mod to make it realistic. IDK about the physics in SR 3 though. Don't have it.
 
Several cars respond too well to gentle taps of my directional keys -like the EMU or upgraded Attrazione, Vortex, Temptress. It can be quite frustrating doing a highspeed chase with those cars. Other vehicles are more cumbersome, like the Criminal. I generally don't like both of the aforementioned types of car. But a Torch or Sovereign and especially the Bootlegger or the Hammerhead -and the Churhcill somewhat- are great for highspeed driving. Near Misses and otherwise skillfully weaving through the traffic is great with such cars. One thing about driving cars in SRTT: you really need to learn how to powerslide as soon as you can. You can make 90 degrees turns in a heartbeat and doing a 180 on one of those freeways -or expressways- can mean the difference between a successfull Hostage Diversion or a failed one. Car Masshole is my friend in all of this; getting hemmed in by those News Vans during Escort for Zimos is excrutiating. With Car Masshole they don't stand a chance -yay! As for realism, I don't have a driver's license, so I have no real comparison. Then again, I feel that the car handling in SRTT fits well with the rest of that particular wacky universe; cops that start shooting me when I bump into them? (when walking, not while driving, mind you.)
 
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