I was viewing some posts about racing games last night and someone listed a bunch of racing games that they enjoyed playing on Steam, and their list included Project CARS 3, but not 1 and 2. I was going to comment on that but declined. This got me thinking about how I felt about PR3 versus the first two games.
When Project CARS 3 came out, I avoided it for some years because I knew it was a departure from the previous two games in the series. I eventually did play it and didn't hate it nearly as much as I expected, but I didn't agree with the title. It would have been fine had it been given a totally different name. When they name it "Project CARS 3," one would reasonably expect it to be more along the lines of 1 and 2, but it was not; not at all. It was less of a simulation and more of a "simcade," and the gameplay was totally different, more like a casual racing game than a realistic race weekend structure. That is fine, per se, but the problem for me is that they gave it a name shared with predecessors that were something completely different. It's sort of like making another Madden game, which has always been football, but making it women's volleyball. There's no problem with having a women's volleyball game, but don't give it a name from an established football franchise.
Project CARS and Project CARS 2 where more of a simulation. In fact, on consoles the only other game I know of as simulation-y is Assetto Corsa. Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport lean more in that direction but aren't true sims, hence being known as "simcade." I really liked 1 and 2, although I didn't care so much for the developers' attitude towards players that bought their games but were frustrated with bugs. Mainly, the original was terribly buggy, and players rightfully voiced concerns with the bugs and wanted solutions and fixes, but the developers were rude and disrespectful towards them.
Personally, I had terrible framerate issues on Xbox One, with the original game, sometimes with frame rates dropping to single digits like a flip book. I found a workaround, as using the resume function seemed to somehow cause it so it was better for me to completely close out the game and load from scratch, but I had to find that solution for myself, as the developers were no help. Worse, I lost my entire game save due to the developers having to idea how to develop a game. I like race replays, enjoying making videos of them, so I save them often. What we didn't know was that if the game save exceeded a certain size it became corrupted, and somehow the developers didn't make race replay saves separate from the other save data, but instead lumped it all together into one massive chunk of data. The developers knew this would be a problem but neglected to warn anyone.
I quite liked 2, as I recall, because it felt like a more polished product. 3 was fine, once I played it, but it had no business being called Project CARS 3. It was more like a hypothetical Need for Speed: Shift 3. Had they called it that, we'd have been golden.
I haven't just ran into this with Project CARS 3, though. I generally like Codemasters, as I've really enjoyed and respected many of their great racing games over the years, but they really let me down a while back with DiRT 5. Codemasters can't make up their mind on what exactly DiRT is supposed to be. Forza diversified, going from something more akin to Gran Turismo to something more casual and open-world, but they branched it off as its own side series, running Forza Horizon along side and independent of Forza Motorsport. Codemasters sort of did this by having DiRT: Rally running along side of the mainline DiRT series, but the mainline series still bounced around all over the place without direction.
The original DiRT was actually Colin McRae: DiRT. It was a sort of successor to a previous string of Colin McRae Rally games that were highly respected by rally fans. DiRT kept the rally racing but branched out to other offroad series as well, and it was a really good product. I even loved its presentation, like it's nifty, stylistic 3D menus. Colin McRae: DiRT 2 deviated further, leaning a bit more, as I describe it, X-Games-ish. Okay, whatever. It was still fun and did some neat stuff, and at least it was still motorsport. Then DiRT 3 dropped the Colin McRae name and really wandered far from home, relying more heavily on fluff like pyrotechnics and also throwing in a lot of nonsense like Gymkhana. I get that some people like that stuff but give it its own game rather than cramming it down the throats of people that want motorsports.
Well, Codemasters did just that. They had DiRT: Showdown, which was more bullcrap. Cool. I know to avoid it. I know others enjoyed that and that's great, but it's not what I wanted and I knew to avoid it. They also had DiRT: Rally, which was highly-praised by rally fans and was a classy product, but it wasn't for casuals. It was serious rally racing and not forgiving. Then came DiRT 4, which felt to me sort of like a serious rally game but not quite as simulation-y, so it's more playable for people that aren't diehard rally fans with racing wheels. I felt like they took the series back to its roots and was rather content.
Then came DiRT 5. It was as much of a 180 as they could possibly have taken. The only way it could have deviated more from 4 is if it became a basketball game or Minecraft clone. Don't get me wrong; I love Minecraft, but it's a totally different type of game. 5 had no actual motorsports depicted in any way, and it was casual nonsense and vulgar colors barfed all over everything. It was a glitchy mess, more buggy than anything I can remember playing, and Codemasters didn't offer solutions for me. One update literally made the game unplayable, with it bricking the console at the start of every race, including races that worked prior to the update. I had to find my own solution.
My issue isn't with the bugs, though, as much as the complete slap in my face by making it something so unrelated to the rest of the series. They had to nerve to boast that it was a real racing game for real race fans, even though it had no real racing and was obviously meant to appeal to people that don't normally care about racing. They also went all-in on Donut Media, who filled the game with tons of dialog that was entirely inane drivel. Not a single line of dialog positively contributed to the game, and I eventually turned the dialog volume to 0 so I didn't have to suffer through it any further.
Look at that eye sore. Look at it! You can hear the Fruity Pebble vomit.
I'm fine with making a different type of racing game to appeal to different gamers. That's fine. Give it a different name. Don't slap an existing, established franchise name onto something completely polar opposite from the rest of the series.