The concept behind Drive MCII is to make the game mature with its audience by making the handling more realistic. This was done with the assistance of one of the game's original developers, whom I was lucky enough to be able to contact and ask questions.
I've tried to make each car's handling closer to its real life counterpart and made the oversteer/drifting less exaggerated and more natural. Steering inputs have a little delay to give the cars a sense of weight. In the case of two cars being based on the same model, like the two Civics and two Supras, they originally drove like completely different cars, so I rebuilt their handling from a common base, and then tweaked each to be unique from there, while still feeling related. I removed nitrous from the Saleen (and weakened the SlipStream Turbo) so that it has less of an unfair advantage. I've also sought to fix some annoyances with the game, like removing a function that made the regular brakes act like a handbrake, and adding landing damping so that cars don't lose control as easily when landing large jumps.
Motorbikes have been made more nimble, so that you don't need to use the weight shift special ability. They were originally very cumbersome and of course a gimmicky special ability is not realistic.
Finally, this game is notorious for its high difficulty level. My single biggest frustration was with the number of large buses that were scripted to block your path, and even timed so that no matter what your speed, they’d get right in the way. Luckily, I was able to delete these scripted obstructions. The races are hard enough without them, trust me. Some of the missions also had so much traffic on the road that trying to dodge cars was nearly impossible, especially when it forced you to drive against traffic. You would have to have the reaction time of somebody on speed to weave through that much traffic at the speed the AI does. Simply reducing the amount of traffic allowed the races to be challenging without being next to impossible.
Unfortunately, there were two things I couldn’t change. One was the nitrous boost being so powerful that you can’t really control the car, and the other being the transmission shifting into first gear and the wheels locking up when you brake hard or land a jump while not pressing the throttle. These behaviors are hard coded into the game engine and can’t be changed with simple edits. The issue with the wheels locking up can be extremely frustrating because it will grind you to a halt in the middle of a race and let everyone pass you. My only solution is to avoid using the brakes and simply let off the gas and use drifting to shed speed in a corner, and when you need to make a jump but don’t want to overshoot the landing, slow down before you hit the ramp and then hit the gas on the ramp and in the air.
For installation, see ReadMe file. Includes Vista patch for compatibility with modern PCs.
Credits: Rockstar San Diego for making the game, and one of the game's developers (who I want to protect the identity of) who helped me understand the game's driving mechanics.
