Poor Wheel Force Feedback?

I've been an avid consumer of CodeMaster's rally games, eg. Dirt, Dirt 2, Dirt 3, Dirt 4, Dirt Rally, Dirt Rally 2.

Last racing game I played a lot of, at all, was Dirt Rally 2 and although it took a little bit of time to tweak the settings to where I was comfortable, I never felt like it was just wrong out of the box. Maybe too intense for me, maybe not well calibrated for my cheap wheel, but not wrong.

To clarify, I have a Logitech G29 w/accompanying pedals and H-shifter as well as using an older Logitech wheel's pedal box with a rod from a microphone stand taped to the brake pedal clamped into a snare drum stand as a handbrake solution (great repurposing of equipment, eh? love the fact I could even accomplish such things since the games allowed multiple input devices and lots of configuration)

I hadn't played DR2 in a while, didn't know Dirt 5 existed or that EA WRC was coming out either - I don't get much time to game lately but saw Linus' video about the game and my first thought was "Ooo - new codemasters rally game? yes please!" (while crossing my fingers the whole "EA WRC" part hadn't ruined anything)

I wanted to support CM after enjoying many of the last games quite a bit and immediately bought it on Steam, pulled my wheel out of it's box and hooked it up.

Started up the game, spent a while going through all the options and trying to optimize the graphics settings for my setup - while my GPU(s) [2070S primary, 3060 secondary] aren't overly ancient for the game, my screen is a Neo G9 with a 5120x1440 resolution which can present some challenges for good FPS in some games but I always ran racing games like all the Dirt series across 3x1080p screens using Nvidia Surround to make it appear to the game as a single 5760x1080-ish screen (probably more like 5600x1080 after bezel correction) and figured an extra 1.3MP-ish shouldn't be too bad.

Immediately ran into graphical bugs/issues when changing LOD settings - I've created a bug thread for that, but changing LOD profile to a lower setting would result in many textures not loading and just being replaced by a fuschia/black checkerboard placeholder. Fine - I'll leave the graphics on high/whatever the default was when I loaded the game. FPS is definitely lower than I wanted, but I already saw the post about the immediate PC patch so figured I'd wait for that.

Next, onto control setup. Map out a few buttons on the wheel as I'd prefer and then I start a race. All FF settings at this point were default.

Once I got into the first turn, I was worried. It just felt terrible. I should note that I'm quite aware that the wheel I have is not that great, especially compared to anything direct drive and I'm only objectively comparing the feeling to using the same wheel with a previous Code Masters game, DR2 specifically.

It was insanely stiff with a mushy feeling dead zone in the center around the stiffness. I've driven (on the road and doing rally) plenty of vehicles without power steering, with more than a few of them where I've deleted the power steering by choice. With my cheap and torqueless non-DD wheel, it was as stiff at 30-50km/h as you'd expect a car to be without power steering at standstill, dry turning on asphalt. Didn't feel any looser on gravel as you'd expect and in most vehicles by the time you're over 30km/h, powersteering isn't doing much if anything anyway in many cases.

Even in DR2, I had to tone down the force for a lot of settings to get a comfortable feel and make the most of the little dynamic range my wheel does have instead of maxing it out constantly. I do prefer a bit lighter wheel when gaming/simming than IRL but I'm far more aware of how cars steer in real life than in any sim situation - I've done rallying, with and without power steering a fair bit but I've also never used a direct drive wheel personally - though as someone with electrical engineering experience particularly with brushless motors and who has fitted an EPS column on to a traditional hydro-PS car, I don't at all doubt the common consensus that even crap DD wheels are miles better - so again, I'm not expecting miracles from any Logitech wheel, even their new supposed DD one.

I did however expect it to not feel just 'crappy' and 'wrong'. It's hard to describe a bit, but just doesn't feel right.

I spent about an hour going through each slider of the force feedback settings, clearly identifying what each setting does and how it affects things. I ended up with the sliders much lower on all settings than I ever had them in DR2, and even once I got it to a 'comfortable' level, it still just felt undriveable.

I struggled to get through even a few turns in EA WRC everytime. I was worried that perhaps I was way out of practice or perhaps my settings were still not ideal but fired up DR2 and it felt way better and I was able to complete a stage first try without much issue.

Between the graphical issues and trying to get the wheel to feel right, I'm already almost at 3 hours playtime according to steam and haven't even applied the PC patch yet to see if it helps any of the graphical issues I've had.

I'm not sure that any amount of time spent tweaking the FF settings will result in it feeling right or like DR2.

I should say that it's not all negative and there are some aspects of the FF I've noticed that do seem to feel like major improvements over past games like DR2, like a bit with how suspension/tire grip feels which I would love to experience properly but overall I still find it undriveable.

I also noticed that in previous games I was able to calibrate my wheel for the whole 900 degrees (or less, if I wanted) with it perfectly matching 1:1, however calibrating in EA WRC, I'm only seeing like ~850 degrees after calibration, even with being sure to go full lock and trying calibrating in both left/right directions. The degrees representation in the menu looks like it should be a changeable/configurable option, however it's greyed out and only changes after a calibration unlike, IIRC, previous games where you could set this manually aside from calibration. Just to clarify, the range of motion/degrees calibration thing is not at all related to the issues of the FF just feeling wrong - just something I noticed while trying to get things going.

I'm worried about spending more time trying to nail down the settings as I'm already over the 2 hours for a refund; I'm worried that nothing I do will fix it, other than perhaps buying a proper DD wheel.

Even the LTT video that made me aware of the game, they test a G27 which is basically the same wheel I have, just older generation and I'm not sure if they changed any of the FF settings or tweaked it but they definitely seemed to do better and said it was an improvement over a cheap non-FF TM wheel but at the same time I don't see how anyone could drive this game with this wheel with default settings, letalone tweaked.

Has anyone else had such a bad experience with a Logi G27/G29 wheel in this game?

It's a bit tough for me to describe exactly why it feels wrong, especially since it's been a few days but I'll try and quantify/qualify a few things as best as I can.

Default settings were really stiff seeming, however, that stiffness only came on after a bit of turning from center, as if there was a bit of dead zone or the stiffness ramped up as angle increased.

Steering seemed to relatively constantly stiff regardless of vehicle speed; even on a vehicle without power steering, the steering effort/force required to steer should generally go down as speed increases as you're fighting less contact patch friction to turn the wheel as that patch is rotating, anyone who has driven a car without power steering knows that tight turns at slow speeds like parking can be tough but once you're on the road you hardly notice the lack of power steering.

This stiffness didn't seem to change, or at least enough to be noticeable based on speed or even surface - it's much easier to turn your tires on gravel or snow than asphalt, for example.

The stiffness also just felt mushy, like trying to steer quick for countersteering oversteer is absolutely impossible, even though the wheels should already be wanting to turn in that direction, it was impossible to do so, about half-way through the amount of steering required to counter the oversteer, the stiffness ramps up and you can't get all the way to the proper countersteering angle - compared to real life, where in this situation you can basically 'toss' the wheel and catch it at the right angle with little to no resistance - countersteering oversteer literally basically means your steering wheels aren't actually turning relative to the ground surface, the back end of your vehicle is spinning around them like a pendulum and you're countersteering that pendulum action to keep the wheels pointed forward, thus there's little if any actual steering angle deviation relative to the ground even if you're going lock-to-lock drifto king-san, thus it shouldn't require a ton of force (maxing out my wheels torque) to keep the wheels there, the only resistance is the steering mechanism itself - tire friction doesn't come into account here as the tires aren't changing direction relative to the road but instead halfway through countersteering the force ramps up to maximum in a very mushy way and I go off the road, 10 out of 10 times - you just can't steer fast enough to catch it and even if you could, half of that steering doesn't have huge resistance like you'd expect and then it ramps up halfway through and you just can't account for that sudden increase letalone try and countersteer fast enough through low-to-high force when there should be next to none.

It feels like you're steering through thick sticky mud, even on asphalt. And even if you were drifting/countersteering in thick sticky mud IRL, if you're countersteering properly, your wheels would still be going straight through the mud thus it not affecting the feel.

After going through each setting individually, eg. I turned everything to 0 and turned up each setting on it's own so I knew exactly what each setting affected and how it felt instead of guessing based off the setting names. Once I had done this, I was able to dial in some settings that felt quite a bit better but still not right.

I was able to dial it in where the forces felt a lot better than default, however I had to set the forces lower than I would prefer to try and counteract some of the wrong feeling, primarily what I described above regarding countersteering.

That described feeling is constant as well, it doesn't only manifest during countersteering situations, however that's where it's the most pronounced and obvious and was probably the easiest to describe especially since it's a situation where there should be very little resistance unless you're actually changing the direction of the wheels relative to the road.

It feels a bit also like in any situation, the more or faster you steer, the stiffer it becomes. And that statement wholesale is not necessarily unrealistic, but it's a dramatic increase and doesn't seem to level off at all once you are actually mid-corner after all initial turn in weight transfer has happened.

The farthest I got in any stage without crashing was when I had all FF disabled. Dialing in the settings to a level that's lower than even I'd like helps but doesn't alleviate the problems mentioned and I still can't get through even a few corners at speed without crashing because of this. Turn-in feels wrong and feels mushy with stiffness ramping up in a weird way and countersteering is absolutely impossible. I can literally countersteer better with FF disabled and tossing/catching the wheel by feel/experience/hopes and dreams with zero feedback hoping that I spin it to the right angle but still gets better results than the FF.. with FF, I should be able to toss the wheel when countersteering and it should naturally want to stop/increase force when it gets to the point of actually trying to steer the wheels relative to the road surface, (unless of course you hit a kerb or big bump while your hand is off the wheel which sends you flying, lol)

I hope I'm not alone in this; I hope that it can be fixed to be driveable whether that's a game update, specific FF settings or otherwise. As much as I'd love to buy a DD wheel, I shouldn't have to in order to enjoy the game - and as much as I want one, I'm a lot more likely to get one if I'm already enjoying the game than I would be to get one hoping it'll make the game better.

CodeMasters games have been some of the best in the last 10-15 years IMHO in almost all cases. Certain tiny things most games ignore, they haven't and as someone into cars and motorsport for real, these things are what make the experience - other than not being able to rev match shift w/out using clutch (like a dogbox or even most sequentials - while the ECU generally handles the rev matching or part of it for you, many of them still use a clutch to get off the line - I just want the same w/H-pattern, if my revs aren't matched then give me grinding noises and a broken transmission but let me do it at least, ideally w/both dogbox and synchro being options that affect timing/feel like IRL), there's not much else I could really complain about! I bought this game without hesitation only because of that (well, slight hesitation b/c EA) and I'm disappointed - I think there's a lot of potential for me to enjoy this game as long as the FF driving feel w/my wheel can be solved.