I’ve never been to the Nürburgring. Like most of you, it’s on my to-do list—but life, ya know. Because I’ve never been there, I’ve never driven its surrounding countryside roads, either. And I’ve heard they’re spectacular. I’ve even heard that they’re more fun than driving the ‘Ring itself. If that’s true, gamers are about to have a blast in Assetto Corsa Evo, as it’s going to feature the Nürburgring’s entire surrounding region of Eifel.
Assetto Corsa Evo is the latest entry in the fan-favorite sim racing series, set to launch on January 16. While it will include racetracks from all over the world as you’d expect, it will also feature an open-world map simply called “Eifel” with roughly 600 square miles of German countryside for players to roam. Italian developer Kunos Simulazioni LiDAR scanned the entire region surrounding the Green Hell to accurately bring the ‘Ring’s outskirts to life. That means plenty of hills, snowy weather, and distant castles—but hopefully, the game won’t emulate the traffic jams outside the Nürburgring too authentically.
Evo is a unique entry in the Assetto Corsa series, in that it appears to meld the franchise’s highly realistic, sophisticated driving physics with the RPG elements of buying, upgrading, and customizing your cars, like Gran Turismo or Forza. However, in Evo you’ll supposedly even be able to rent cars from a real-life local business in Eifel. More specifically, you can rent and tune your cars from shops like RSRNurburg and Vulcan Alpha, the latter of which is co-owned by YouTuber and racing driver Misha Charoudin. If you’re a local Eifel business who also wants in, you can apply to have Kunos laser-scan your shop into the game.
This won’t be the first time that Assetto Corsa fans will be able to free-roam in real places, though typically those experiences have come courtesy of modders and not the devs at Kunos. The Assetto Corsa modding community has lavished extensive work on the title dating back to 2014, and through it, players have been able to drive fanmade recreations of Pikes Peak, Tokyo’s Shuto Expressway, and Romania’s Transfagarasan highway, to name a few locales.
While early access to the game begins on January 16, the Eifel map won’t immediately be available. When it does finally release next summer, it won’t be the full map, either. Instead, it will be a smaller version that will slowly expand to its full size through successive updates. When that happens, though, gamers around the world will be able to get a taste of the Nürburgring’s famous back roads without having to hop on a plane.
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