I really don't understand the appeal of this game

[120 BPM]

What is it for? Drive and crash into a wall at 100 mph and repeat?

Environment is low quality at best - you don't really do much sighseeing while driving.
Traffic is either non existent or very low - spawn more than 5 cars at once and your pc will fry.
Your tires squeak at EVERY single turn, like what the hell - wasn't the game supposed to be realistic?

I finished the tutorial which was kinda fun and then tried some lifeless free roaming, it was awfully boring and I gave up. Is there anything I'm missing here before I refund?

[Kirby]

there are campaigns and scenarios you can do, and loads and loads of mods in the repository. the amount of traffic is really just dependent on your cpu, more cores the better.
what input device do you use? a keyboard, controller a wheel? because if you drive a road car and turn all the way, the tires will squeal.

[games library]

not really you summed up the game pretty well refund it and get it when it actually gets something to do

[Retro Plus]

In this game you get out what you put in, it's a vehicle sandbox game with realistic physics. Do with that what you will, if you were expecting a dedicated racing game or something else then i would look elsewhere because this isn't it

[Midnight]

this game pretty much depends on the player being imaginative and creative so if they lack those then yeah the game will be pretty boring for them

[HamBunger]

Originally posted by 120 BPM:

Traffic is either non existent or very low - spawn more than 5 cars at once and your pc will fry.

its early access for a reason and plus a game like this complex always has this

Originally posted by 120 BPM:

Your tires squeak at EVERY single turn, like what the hell - wasn't the game supposed to be realistic?

if you steer sharply and and fast around every corner it will do it will do the same in real life

[Poison Dart Frag]

There's tons of skills you can develop, drifting, rock crawling, learning to drive at greater speeds without crashing, learning to identify jumps your car can survive, driving on two wheels, tuning cars for different purposes, and the list keeps going.

[Derpboi]

skill issues :/

[KodeMan]

Download BeamMP multiplayer mod and join a server

[Poison Dart Frag]

KissMP is another alternative

[CunkFeatures]

Originally posted by 120 BPM:

Your tires squeak at EVERY single turn, like what the hell - wasn't the game supposed to be realistic?

No when using a KB/M.

[Denisbl_]

I personally played like 500 hours and lots more on the cracked version before buying it. At first it might look like you dont really have anything to do apart from crashing few times and you're done, but this game has lots of cool features and things to play with and explore.

For starters, you got some scenarios and campaigns to play, I havent spent a lot of time on these but some of them are pretty challenging and fun.

You also got a huge mod repo where you can get mods with just a clic, you can also try mods that are not on the repo (most likely real branded cars such as BMW, Nissan, etc but dont expect these mods to be nearly as detailed as in game content or mods from the repo)

Also there's two multiplayer mods, one of them is called BeamMP and the other one KissMP, pretty fun to play with other people.

And lastly, my personal way of having fun relies on playing with the physics, when I was new to the game I started making some crashes, maybe a small car vs a big truck, a van, a sedan, then I started playing with the props (such as walls, a cannon, a car crusher, a giant hamster wheel for cars, etc) sometimes I even would take a truck and completely load it with heavy rocks to see how much weight the suspension can withstand.

Later on, when I learnt more about the game I also started learning different disciplines such as rock crawling, drifting, lap times on a track, offroading, rallying, etc. The physics are really good, they are so good people have developed mods such as planes or helicopters or boats that use the bare physics of wind and gravity or water from the game. You said the tyres squeak at every single turn, thats what happens in real life too, if you drive fast and turn the wheel too much the tyres squeak and you'll understeer, in fact there's an official BeamNG video that explains why that happens, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPX2qRQAnBo

These days I like making car builds, this can be pretty appealing specially for car enthusiats where you strip out all the components of a car and remain with the bare frame and you start building it choosing the suspension components you like, brakes, wheels, steering, body parts aswell as paint and liveries, engine and engine upgrades and so on, then you tune it and test it or crash it, you can do whatever you like, a drift pickup or a trophy truck, turn a little FWD hatchback into an AWD drag racing monster, or turn a sedan into a rally car, etc. And remember, everything can be modded, from entire cars to parts and accessories for the existing cars or new maps, new scenarios and campaings, etc.

Also the recent update that included PBR materials made the game look way more beautiful, maybe maps dont have the highest detail, but I dont think BeamNG looks bad considering its graphics engine (Torque3D) was launched in 2001, also the dev team is not a big company like EA, Ubisoft or Rockstar, they are a group of people who like cars and physics and wanted to build a soft body physics engine, a car sandbox where you can do whatever you like.

In fact, here's what the game looked at first when they tried using CryEngine as a graphics engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppTmsNFneg

It looks waaaaaaay better now, its also one of the cool things about this game, see how it grows, how it evolves, how it gets better and more optimized and gets more content overtime, it started like just a game with no UI at all with just a basic pickup truck and now its a complete car game, and its still in alpha so we still have plenty more content to get.

Currently you cant like spawn 20 cars because its pretty heavy on the CPU and your frames will drop due to having to process the physics on every single car, but if you have a decent modern CPU you should be able to handle around 6 cars which should be enough. They are working on it and trying to optimize it even further.

I think this game has a lot of potential if you take your time to explore it, you can play with the physics and see how brakes can overheat, how your gas tank can break, how your engine can overheat too, how you can starve the engine of oil or break the oil pan, etc. It has a lot of small details that are so fun, I find looking at all the suspension components compress and expand and bend so satisfying to watch, maybe Im just a geek but idk, I like physics and Im a car enthusiast so maybe thats why I like this game.

But not everyone likes and enjoys the same, maybe for you this game is a boring crash sim, for me its an amazing car physics simulator, not only for crashing but for everything else, every crash is different, nothing is predefined, nothing is preanimated, which makes it awesome for me, and dont get me wrong, I dont just crash all day lol I do all the things I stated before, I sometimes even got bored of it and stopped playing for a while and then come back, check out mods, updates, new content and spend some time with it.

Finally I'd like to mention that BeamNG has a collab with another game called Automation where you can design your own car, from ground up and then export it to BeamNG and test it, there's also Automation mods on the repo, some of them are cool.

I hope this "little" answer helps you out with this game.

Have a nice day

Cheers

[Alex]

people will argue but youre correct, theres not much to the game other than free roaming currently

[Azael]

Go and trawl the website for mods and build a low power drift car on skinny tires, or maybe a 6 second drag car. Maybe build an offroad car and do some rally stages, trophy truck laps or some competition level rock crawling. There are hundreds upon hundreds of currently supported mods, many of them high quality.

[BBWarrior]

You haven‘t even touched the surface when it comes to things to do in BeamNG.drive.
so please before you refund give it another try and try more things, its really fun once you get the hang of all the things.

[sirvictorious]

Sounds like you just have a pretty ♥♥♥♥ PC.