Beside X Rebirth, AC is the one of only two titles I am waiting for this christmas season.
It seems we are close to release of the beta, which will be available form Steam for 35 Euros, I forgot. That is a 20 or 25% money saving compared to the final price. You have access to all later updates and the final version.
This will be an early access beta, featuring the main architecture of the program and including 8 of the planned 16 vehicle classes and 11 of the planned 35 cars, so far there are 11 tracks, but I do not know if they will all be featured in the beta already. Damage model, multiplayer and AI as well as other content will be added in updates that they plan to release every two weeks. Also, once the game has been released in full 1.0, there will be (payware) expansion packs.
Beside that, community mods can be expected - AC has been designed with heavy modding friendliness in mind.
Car brands incldued are BMW, Ferrari, Abarth, Lotus, McLaren, KTM, Pagan i and Tatuu
. Among the so far confirmed tracks are Imola, Monza, Silverstone, Nurburg GP and Nurburg Nordschleife (!), Magione, Mugello, Spa Francorchamps (DLC), Vallelunga.
The sim comes with nVidia 3D vision support. It is optimised for multicore-processing. It has DirX12.
video:
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a
(they do a n outstanding job in recreating the looks ands views of the cars they include).
More videos to be found at Youtube.
Steam. I hate it. The dfownload will kill me, no doubt, blockig my computer for 20 hours or so. But AC probably becomes the second exception from my rule, after Skyrim. I played the technical demo earlier this year, and imediately realised that the driving sensation here is different to other racing games I have played. It has that special something, convincing you of being subjected to correct physical handling, while featuring a tremendously joyful experience to drive. Plus: it looks gorgeous!
So, high expectations. The only thing that I am concerned about is how they do with their AI. netKart was a simulation with superior physics, but no AI, that's why it never became really widespread and well-known. Implementing an AI that convinces and does not look like pearls lined up of a rubber-line, is a first for them, and one can only hope that they are doing a good job there.