The handling is so close to being good, but yet again they missed the mark

While many people have pointed out other issues with GRID Legends (the AI being too slow, the career mode being rather plain, bugs and crashes, etc.), I'd like to shine some more light on the issues with the driving physics in this game.

One could argue that the reason why not many are talking about the handling is because it isn't bad, but the ones that do talk about it seem to have a pretty negative opinion about it, including me.

Before I start talking about GRID Legends's handling, I'd like to explain where I'm coming from. This may apply to others too.

I grew up with the earlier NFS titles everyone loves and keeps going back to and many other arcade racing games (including Codemasters' games) that had a very simple but effective approach to arcade vehicle handling.

On one hand, you had the games where drifting wasn't the way to go fast, in most of them it was pretty much impossible to break traction.

In the ones you could start losing grip, you weren't too badly penalized for it, and, most importantly, these games made it clear when you pushed too hard, making it pretty simple to understand how to do better next time.

The recipe here was tons of grip, tons of downforce, and braking is just for slowing the car down, rarely with downsides.

On the other hand, in games where drifting was the fastest way to go around, the games were designed taking drifting into account.

From the controls to the roads, they were designed to be fun and intuitive for that driving style allowing players to experience cars in a completely different way.

Now onto GRID Legends's driving physics' issues.

GRID Legends is clearly arcade, but, instead of making the driving more accessible and easy to understand, it has quite a few quirks that not only make no sense for road racing, they just don't feel nice and intuitive.

The first problem happens when in many cars pulling the handbrake around a tight turn, or to combat understeer, can be faster than approaching a corner with a clean racing line.

Emphasis on “can be”.

Not only is this unintuitive for asphalt track racing, it is also not quite clear when to do it.

While most, if not all, AWD/4WD cars benefit from this, some RWD cars may or may not, and FWD cars are usually a pretty clear “don’t drift”.

While one may argue that for understeery cars a bit of power sliding can help even in real life, in GRID Legends it’s close to a full-on Gymkhana style drift which makes no sense.

So, the handling becomes unintuitive and inconsistent, but another problem surfaces when racing on the track.

Pulling the handbrake can be used as a crutch when you miss the braking zone, you can also deliberately use this for a dirty overtake on someone without losing much, or any, time at all.

The quality of racing, especially online, suffers because of this. Once people realize the potential of this driving style, online races are going to be mayhem and may keep people from playing.

And then there's the braking.

The best way to approach corners in this game is to quickly flick the car towards the apex, stomp on the brakes without steering, and hope the brakes carry your momentum just right which will rotate your car perfectly into the turn. After that, just stomp on the throttle to exit the turn and you're done. This is not how asphalt racing should be.

The grip levels when the tyres are skidding, from wheelspin, brake lock or going over their slip angle, are too high for asphalt, making driving fast in this game very unintuitive and strange.

The driving physics in GRID Legends (and even 2019) almost feels like the development team was pitched an arcade rally game, but then they quickly had to shuffle around to make it road racing instead.

However, keep in mind that I don't want a game that harshly punishes you for going over the traction limit, but I also don't want a game that rewards you for doing so.

Like the older games that I mentioned, I simply want the clean racing line to be faster and the punishment for pushing the tires too hard to make sense, without being far too punishing for an arcade game.

If further proof is needed to show that skidding tyres have too much grip, there's the drifting.

Carrying long drifts is basically impossible. Long gone are the days of smooth and flowy drifts from Autosport and GRID 1.

All cars feel extremely underpowered because you get too much grip when sliding, and to drift you must be on the throttle to cause oversteer.

It looks ungraceful, feels unintuitive and extremely clunky, and I just can't believe someone tested this and thought it was good.

The drift scoring system is also terrible, since the multiplier increases the moment you start a slide and there's no incentive to keep a long drift since the points don't go up faster the longer your drift.

The best way to drift in this game is to start as many drifts mid-turn as possible to increase the multiplier quickly. Don't bother with extending drifts.

Now for the good part of GRID Legend's driving.

While I so far only said bad things about the driving physics, I can see glimmers of hope and an extremely fun and intense arcade racing game here.

When taking proper lines around turns, not abusing the skidding grip or the weird braking quirks, this game feels really good. It can feel better than any GRID before it, and potentially even beat many other arcade racing games out there, new and old.

The cars have this amazing weighty feel to them without being too stubborn, the cars are eager to turn and the weight shifting (while it can sometimes be too sensitive) feels great.

Unlike GRID 2019, the cars no longer feel stiff and planky, they feel alive and like they have suspension and tires that work. And, unlike GRID Autosport, the cars don't have way too high slip angles, making it easy to understand where the traction limit is.

Sadly, this is all overshadowed by the fact that you need to be over the traction limit, not on it.

When a car understeers mid-turn, you need to slam the brakes or pull the handbrake. There's no finesse or flow to how you drive, it's all very "on/off" with your inputs and it's very disappointing.

This is a very long post, but I feel like I need to go this deep to really show people how this game can be so much more and last a whole lot more time when everyone gains from a change to the handling.

For this game to be better at the highest level it just needs to have these weird quirks fixed, which consequently will lower the skill floor for people who are newer to the game, or racing games in general, and make the learning curve much more linear.

I truly believe everyone would benefit from a more intuitive and less clunky handling model, and GRID Legends has the potential for it.

Thank you for reading.