NASCAR 09 Difficulty Settings

By: Mike DeVault

I’ve been reading a lot of posts on the message boards relating to the difficulty, or lack thereof, in NASCAR 09.  A lot of folks are saying the game is too easy, which leads me to believe that they might not have found all of the available game settings.  So, I figured I would spend a little time elaborating on the available settings in NASCAR 09, to help players who are looking for a greater challenge.  We spent an awful lot of time in this year’s game making sure that player’s of every experience level could find difficulty settings that appealed to them.  There are two main settings menus that players should be using when trying to find the right gameplay balance.  I’ll outline each of these below and give some recommendations for a more challenging experience.

The first menu players should be using is the Gameplay Settings menu (under My NASCARàSettings).  This menu will help the player establish the correct difficulty and feel for their race car.  Here is where you will set your Driving Style.  In Normal mode, you will only be allowed to select between Rookie and Veteran assist packages.  This was done to help keep things simple for players using Normal mode and not bog them down with too many selections.  If you are using Pro driving style you’ll have the ability to select between Rookie, Veteran and Legend assists presets.  With Pro driving style you’ll also be allowed to go in and configure the individual assists to your liking.  If you’d like to make the game more challenging, I suggest slowly turning each one of these individual assists OFF individually while in Pro mode.  The settings description at the bottom of the screen will help describe the functionality for each of these.

The second menu that players should be using to establish the difficulty level is the Race Details screen (accessed from the Select Track Screen).  This menu allows players to set race specific settings, like race length, wear factor, opponent strength, adaptive strength, damage, etc…  Adaptive Strength is a new setting in NASCAR 09 which controls the strength of the AI based on the player’s current position in the race standings.  The goal here was to keep the AI competitive with the player throughout the entire race.  Turning Dynamic Strength OFF will allow the AI to run at their original speeds with only the Opponent Strength dictating their pace.  If you are looking for a more challenging experience, I recommend Increasing the Opponent Strength (Hard will be very challenging) and turning Adaptive Strength to OFF.  We tuned the Hard Opponent Strength with Adaptive Strength Off in such a way that players would need to tweak their car setups in order to compete for wins.  So if you are looking to really make things challenging give that a try.