Kunos Announce Assetto Corsa Competizione, Official Blancpain GT Series Game

As tweeted from the Assetto Corsa Twitter:

The wait is over, the eagerly anticipated announcement by Kunos Simulazioni has been made and it is basically a mixture of quite a few guesses that were already made in advance. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Assetto Corsa Competizione! No Assetto Corsa 2? It appears that Assetto Corsa Competizione can be considered somewhat of an Assetto Corsa spin-off, building the foundation for the “real” Assetto Corsa successor. So, what do we know then? Assetto Corsa Competizione will hold the Blancpain GT Series license and will therefore focus on GT3 cars only. Players will be able to compete against the real drivers with the real cars etc. And that is where the actual big announcement ties in: Assetto Corsa Competizione will use the Unreal Engine 4 and will therefore allow for dynamic weather conditions and day and night changes as shown in the trailer above! That is two if not three of the most requested community features ticked off the list! As a result, Assetto Corsa Compeitzione has also opened the race with GTR3 for the first sim to feature the latest Unreal Engine technology! And it does not stop there: A ranking system will be set in place for rating “individual performance and driving behavior to reward the most virtuous drivers and promote fair play in online competitions”! An animated pit crew, created using motion-capturing technology, will also be part of the package. Just as a lot of GT3 cars, from the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini and McLaren, many of you are probably already familiar with from Assetto Corsa. The previous focus on European tracks will now come in handy as well, as Assetto Corsa already features a lot of the Blancpain series calendar’s tracks, namely Spa, Monza, Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Barcelona and the Nurburgring. Assetto Corsa Competizione will be launching on Steam early access this summer! There has been no word on a possible console launch yet. A positive message for Xbox users though: The Bonus Pack 3 update has gone into submission! We are in submission!

Quite interesting to see a change in engine. Hopefully this works out for them because I can’t imagine something much more difficult for an established studio.