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Everything Zi said. Experiencing the game and trying to convey what it would feel like to experience the game are two entirely different mediums. Especially for something movement based. Put it in someone’s hands, before and after. You’ll get more educated feedback!

The sled also has more forgiving steering. Originally it added force in the direction of the stick so he drifted sideways a lot and lost momentum. Now it adds force along his forward Z which might make it too easy. Maybe the answer is less steering control at very high speeds to keep some chaos.

If the controls feel better to you, the player, and that was your intention in making those changes, then that's what matters and you've succeeded. You can tackle the problem of making footage that *looks* better separately. If you wanna tackle that at all.

My follow-up comment to this is that if you did the work in order to make something *visibly* less jank, then this is good feedback to consider, in that it may be indicative of work going into something that wasn't a problem in the first place.

The "top is better" sentiment could be due to so many confounding factors, such as the footage being very different. Camera movements, scenery, incidental particle effect instances, UI overlays, can all contribute to one being more appealing than the other.

The only thing I would say is that the top seems to have a heavier dust trail and that gives it a bit more juice and anchors the player character more. Not sure if that's what people are referring to or if you even changed the vfx but in the video it looks like it.

Honestly when most people can't tell the difference, I'd go with whichever one reads clearer in motion while you're actually playing. Which one do you prefer yourself?