Assetto Corsa Evo Will Finally Let You Choose Factory Options When Buying New Cars

It’s tough for sim racing game developers to please everyone. Some players want to grow their garages through intricate, RPG-like career modes, while others expect zero friction to get onto a track they like in a car they love. Assetto Corsa Evo will look to have a little something for everybody when it arrives in early access come January, but there’s one feature in the game that was recently reported and has caught my attention.

While Kunoz Simulazioni, the team behind Assetto Corsa, may not be able to compete with more established franchises in terms of car count, the way you purchase vehicles in-game could be deeper than the experience in, say, Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. Per Italian outlet Multiplayer.it via GTPlanet, players will be able to choose from a series of factory options when buying a car, from engine type to wheels. This sort of depth is very rare in racing games—I can only recall Test Drive Unlimited and Metropolis Street Racer way back on the Dreamcast giving you that sort of freedom. But it’s something fans are often asking for, so Kunoz is planning to make it possible.

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“For each car, all the configurations and engines that you would find in any dealership will be available,” game director Davide Brivio told the website in Italian, shown here after a trip through Google Translate. “If your favorite car is sold both in petrol and diesel, for example, or in a version that mounts 17-inch wheels with a sunroof, then it will also be the case in our game.”

We don’t know the full extent of the dealer options planned for Assetto Corsa Evo. Back in the original Test Drive Unlimited, you could choose interior colors as well as exterior, and select optional wheels from the manufacturer if they were offered with the car you were buying. In my case, I always opted for Rosso Scuderia paint on my Ferraris with caramel interiors and Challenge Stradale wheels—original, I know. Nevertheless, getting to select between powertrains and even the presence of a sunroof teases a level of granularity far beyond what that formative open-world racer achieved, and would certainly help to differentiate Assetto Corsa from the rest of the pack.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say this is what modern racing games have lacked. We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to the breadth of cars in games, yet customization of those models hasn’t particularly advanced through the years. Forza and Need for Speed used to offer a plethora of licensed aftermarket parts for cars, but those have all mostly been dropped in favor of fictional, unbranded exterior parts. They’ve rarely dealt in OEM components, too, save for rare cases like letting you put a Lightweight-spec rear wing on your E36 BMW M3, for example.

Between this wrinkle to car ownership and the very highly anticipated free-roam mode, Assetto Corsa Evo almost sounds like the answer to every racing gamer’s feature wishlist going back as far back as I can remember. That almost has me worried, because the title obviously won’t have all those bases covered on day one of its early access release. But Kunoz truly seems to have a solid sense of what its community wants, arguably better than any other racing game dev working at the moment, and that gives me faith that it’ll keep its priorities in check and come through on its promises.

Want to talk racing games? Hit me up at adam.ismail@thedrive.com