The road to Assetto Corsa EVO has been anything but a clean qualifying lap. A troubled Early Access period marked by unstable servers, multiplayer lag, and repeated roadmap delays ultimately pushed Italian studio Kunos Simulazioni into one of its most controversial decisions yet: scrapping the career mode, a feature many considered central to the game’s identity.
It’s not easy to defend that call and it probably wasn’t easy for them either. But what has emerged from that crisis could, paradoxically, be the best thing to ever happen to EVO.
To understand why any of this matters, you have to look back. The original Assetto Corsa is still alive today, years after its release, largely thanks to its modding community. Tracks that don’t exist in the base game, cars from any era or racing category, circuits recreated with near-obsessive fidelity AC’s longevity is, in large part, the work of its modders.
EVO launched with a different philosophy: controlled modding, with community-made content going through an official validation process before being published. The intention was legitimate protect manufacturer licences, prevent stolen or low-quality content from slipping through. An orderly, corporate, understandable approach.
But that’s no longer the plan.
In an interview with Traxion, we learned more details about what Marco Massarutto said.
Marco Massarutto of Kunos has been unambiguous on this point. “We are going to provide all the community with the modding tools with no limitations,” he stated, acknowledging that uncertainty around modding had gone on far too long. The removal of the career mode, he explained, was precisely what unlocked this possibility: without a complex in-game economy to protect, the main obstacle to fully opening the tools simply disappeared.
Those modding tools originally planned for after the v1.0 release will now arrive during Early Access. It’s a meaningful change of pace, and a clear signal that Kunos has decided to bet on its community before the game is even finished.
What I find genuinely thrilling and what I think many people haven’t fully grasped yet is the terrain editor that Kunos plans to share with modders.
This is no ordinary editor. It’s the very same tool the studio used internally to build EVO’s open-world mode set in the Eifel region surrounding the Nürburgring Nordschleife. A project that, according to Massarutto, took years to complete with 60% of that time spent developing the tools themselves rather than the content.
What makes this editor remarkable is what it’s capable of: automatically generating terrain meshes from LiDAR data (laser-scan surveys), complete with vegetation, buildings, and environmental detail.
“Imagine a situation where instead of modelling the mesh from scratch, you can use the terrain editor to read the LiDAR data and automatically generate that same mesh,” he explained. The time previously spent modelling every curve, every tree, every building can now be redirected toward enriching and detailing what the engine generates on its own.
And the most ambitious part: LiDAR data is available for vast portions of the world. Mountain roads, cities, street circuits, historic routes the possibilities are, quite literally, endless.
There’s something beyond the technical tools here, too. Massarutto hinted that Kunos wants to actively collaborate with the most talented modding studios not just release tools and step back, but work side by side with a community that, in AC’s case, proved capable of extraordinary things.
“If they did those incredible things with AC, I can’t imagine what they are going to do with EVO,” he reflected and in that sentence there’s something that sounds more like genuine excitement than a PR talking point.
EVO arrives at this promise carrying a complicated track record. Trust among parts of the community has been damaged, and words however compelling need to be backed up by action. The tools need to actually arrive, work properly, and be accessible to modders of varying skill levels.
But if Kunos delivers on what it’s promising, EVO could become the most powerful simulation platform ever placed in the hands of a community. Not because of what the game is at launch, but because of what that community will build on top of it.
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Great News! I for one never cared about the career, Alot of other games that do that already. I like a pure driving and racing simulator.
Literally the whole premise of the game is gone. Why the heck would you buy this when you can already have the original with 10+ years worth of mod history? This is gonna flop so hard.