Assetto Corsa Evo's Free Roam Mode: A Sim Built for Driving, Not Just Racing

Marco Massarutto, the head of Kunos Simulazioni, noticed something odd while watching players in the free roam servers made by the original Assetto Corsa community. They were using their indicators. They were driving the roads the way people drive roads, not in the flat-out style of a Need For Speed game. That detail, he says, is what caught his attention.

It told him he wasn't the only one nervous about being the sacrificial lamb in an online race lobby. Plenty of sim racing fans, he realised, wanted the fantasy of owning and driving rare, exotic cars, but wanted to enjoy it as a joyride rather than a hunt for purple sectors.

That realisation became the free roam mode in Assetto Corsa Evo. It drew partly on the non-competitive creations of the original AC community and partly on Massarutto's own vision of a different kind of in-game driving. The mode covers a large swathe of Germany's Eifel region and lets you loose in it, solo or in co-op. Activities such as time trials and sightseeing are scattered along the roads, but the idea is that you set your own missions.

The scaling is what stands out. Roadside kerbs are the right height. Parking spaces in the towns and villages are tight. Lanes are narrow enough to trouble the seat of your pants, and you have to squeeze past when a lorry comes the other way.

Top Gear sees this as the end point of an idea Gran Turismo began in its PS2 days, when it introduced oil changes and the car wash. On the face of it those chores were busywork, but they fed an ownership fantasy: you weren't only racing your cars, you were looking after them. Free roam feels like owning the car and simply deciding to take it out. Picture a Ferrari F40 you don't lose sleep over putting miles on, parked near the Nordschleife.

The mode could have looked very different. It had been on Kunos' minds for years, but the location wasn't settled. Massarutto says the original plan was Italy, somewhere visually beautiful with sea, hills and mountains together, and the team picked Argentario in Tuscany. Then came the problem. As he puts it, you go from the restaurant to a pizzeria, you see the seaside, and then there's nothing. There was no gameplay.

His trips to the Eifel mountains settled it. Based in Rome, he says it takes 45 minutes just to get out of the city and onto driveable country roads. Near the Nordschleife it's nothing but views and twisties. His first thought was that he should move there, calling it paradise, with a cold winter but unbelievable roads. His second was that it was the ideal free roam setting: the only place in the world with beautiful roads everywhere and, in the middle of it all, the best track ever made.

To capture it, the studio gathered 1,600 square kilometres of Eifel data. Not all of it made for enjoyable driving, so after refinement they built a 1,100 square kilometre region, of which 400 square kilometres is playable. That is bigger than Manhattan, or in Massarutto's words, two and a half times the size of GTA 6.

The first version of free roam is already playable in Evo's Early Access release, with more territory and functionality still to come. Top Gear's reading is that Kunos understands the best racing sim isn't only the one with the most accurate brake temperatures, but the one that makes you feel you're inside a car, living an ownership fantasy as well as a racing one.