This is a bit off GSCE/AMS only had further development (and turned into AMS) because last summer, Reiza crowdfunded about $120,000 for the explicit use of futher developing that game. Without that money, you wouldnt have any "free" content that you have gotten in the past 11 months. So in fact, quite a lot of money was spent on this "free" content. However, only about 1500 people actually provided all the funds that Reiza needed, so thank those 1500 people that put up the money PC1/2 gets a lot of flack for what SMS promised they would deliver, and then decided not to release. From content such as Indianapolis (Indy 500), Oval content, to other content we actually have videos of on Youtube. Not to mention all of the features that were planned but canned, and other improvements that are conveniently being saved for the next iteration of their franchise. People didnt like being over-promised and highly under-delivered. Yep, same here definitely. Like all the sims out there and play them all too. From some of the older ones like GTR1/2, Race 07, to all the modern ones. (well, except iR because screw paying hundreds of dollars to rent content) I've always felt that the only microtransactions that R3E really has is for the liveries. The rest is much more so a modular business model. You can buy what you want so you dont end up buying something you wont use. Also, conveniently placing the content in packs so you can save some money, and also having plenty of weekly sales and holiday sales. I think much of the complaints come from the unorthodox approach taken here, since most people are used to paying for a game, and then buying dlc later. Cheers
I sometimes prefer the microtransactions. For instance in R3E when I first started I bought the Volvo 240, had tons of fun with it for $5 or whatever it was. I spent $50 on pcars, then maybe $10 more for a dlc, and probably have played less than just the time I had that Volvo or a few more cars in R3E alone. Of course long term I spent additional money on R3E, but I play it like crazy....if I didn't, I'd be out $5. And Christian brings up a great point about the continued support and development - although the continued "beta" status (becoming a bit of a joke) of R3E means this is required in theory, vs a benefit of microtransaction model. But my point is, I'm happy to pay up to see a game i love to play grow and get better, vs die off and get stale while I save a few bucks (on that particular title at least - we can speculate where that money would go instead and it's not for donuts). Prior to online content this was never possible, so it's great to be a part of something growing and evolving with no end in site, since we know business model can sustain the development.
I am in WMD which I had seen whats in the making. It is definitely not DLC content because a lot of changes are made to innovate the game further. Not sure how many of these feature will make it to release but I hope it will be similar like last time where they brought out most of them in development. My only concern is, I dont even know whether they could bring out in 1-2 years time as they are trying do implement quite a few new things or overhaul the shortcoming. The main reason for the sequel announcement is to let people who were in WMD for pcars 1 to join pcars 2. If they didnt, someone will leak it and the backlash will be even bigger. Most game developers started working on the sequel way before the game is out, where a few of my other crowd funding projects, such as Inxile with their RPGs did. Most of them did it behind closed doors. Some parts of pcars 1 codebase is messy where there is the problem with patching in pcars 1 does bring back some issues that was fixed long time ago. pcars 2 development started to fix that issue which is difficult to do it in a live game. AC did it once with the risky 32bit to 64 bit transition that broke the game for some people which is why a lot of developers prefer to these massive changes behind curtains than a live game. I had experienced similar issues when pcars 1 made the change to 64bit support too where it broke the game. My brother could not play AC months because of the 64 bit code implementation until Dreams Pack 3 because he had a rarer config that is affected by the new codes. Imagine this kind of issue happen to R3E or pcars, people will be furious but I think AC really had no choice as consoles really needs the 64bit performance boost. There is a reason why R3E takes ages to implement new features like multiple setups, custom championship and custom grid/multiclass. These changes takes a lot of time to QA in order to get them right on release.
Somewhat kind of interested in hearing why you decided to back their crowdfunding again when I have seen you somewhat critical of them on other forums. Especially since they dont have the "investment" model the 2nd time around and certainly dont need the money. Clearly they only took so much advice from their first batch of backers that the opinions arent really taken to heart as much as many people would like. This 2nd time around, the backers are actually paying more money to get the early betas, than the final game will sell for. Were you really that happy with the 1st time around that you want to back them again? Even though you wont be getting any money back? The outrage and backlash comes from how differently they are doing things in an established genre. Every other sim and their developer see their games as long term projects to be worked on for a number of years, with continual updates and improvements. SMS sees Pcars as a franchise to be released and then dlc pushed down our throats for a year before they drop the game to work on a new one that will inevitably have more dlc and "fix" a number of issues that the first game should have never had. Not to mention that there are as many dlc cars as there are cars in the base game (in Pcars 1). People look at Sector3, ISI, Reiza, Kunos, or iR and see how the games are vastly different than they were 3 years ago and how improved they are. And then they see the contrast for Pcars and SMS approach where they just drop the game and leave us with... the travesty that it currently is. This isnt even talking about the rabid fan base that had financial gain at stake when they were hyping up the game viciously before release, and few of those promises ever materialized. Of course, but it also doesnt help that they have ~3 programmers (according to the credits in game) and other studios have many, many more. What's nice about R3E though, is that it is continually improving, and the devs seem to be sticking with it. Constantly licensing and announcing new content that will inevitably arrive months down the road means that there are plans to continually develop the game further during that time span. Anyways, this isnt really the thread for Pcars and other nonsense. We could continue here if need be. Sorry for the off topics
Its not the actual cost that bothers me or the micro transactions business model, I am happy to financially support my hobby but it is the access that bugs me. The fact that I always have to be online to play. Technically the base game is free but sector 3 would be recouping these costs from the dlc pricing model. I have had no end of issues playing the game for the last 6 months with Having to log on every time I go to play and almost every time getting the 503 error over and over. Last weekend for example it took me 1 hour of trying to get on one night and then 2 hours the next. It is only because I enjoy it immensely that I have not given up on it yet. I Will try and play again tonight but will probably have to resort to rf2 and pcars in the end. Sonat tried to help me a while back but it made no difference. The irony of all this is that when I go to load the game up early in the day it works fine, don't have to log in and don't get the 503. I can't play early in the day though, have just been testing to see if it loads up. When I do have time to play in the evenings, Australian time when I would expect the servers to be quiter it is 503 after 503.
But then it should be pretty clear that it's your internet connection causing those issues, specifically the load your local infrastructure experiences in the evening hours. It's not about how busy the servers are, but how busy the line you're connecting to is. I guess the only thing RR could do about that is set up servers in Australia. You on cable or regular DSL?
Again, it looked like people saying things that never happened. If they refused to listen to the backers, pcars would be a R3E ripoff with similar business model. The original plan is pcars supposed to be free to play with microtrasactions, they changed it because almost none of the backers want it. They took in a lot of our feedback in pcars 1, it just the budget and time is stopping them. I enjoyed my experience and I give zero crap on the returns as it barely covered my entire crowd funding expanses. It is quite interesting to see how games being made which is now I appreciate other developers work. And also, it changed my perception where even simple things, like multiclass or multiple setup isnt exactly a simple thing to do. I know you do not like pcars, criticizing to the point they are lying off the backers is ridiculous.They actually promised little when I first back it in 2011 which they delivered quite a bit more than what I expected. There are some stuff that was cut which left me quite disappointed though. So you want SMS to support the game with much slower pace of development? Like how reiza is taking a lot more time to release their free content(initially they promised 3 months), R3E takes ages to release new features(such as multiclass that was shown last year that is still not in the game) or AC permanently trapped in the engine limitations (such as one light source engine and largely static environment where it is impossible to do night racing). If R3E or AC has a sequel tomorrow, I'll accept it with open arms because there are a lot of limitations (especially AC) plaguing the game. I do not believe in games being supported for ages because it is difficult to do huge codebase changes. It is nice to see S3 supporting the game for years, sometimes, I rather see them move on with a fresh start with dynamic weather, night racing, or even having a 64 bit option to run the game better with a new game than sticking to the old game that take ages to implement new stuff. DLCs added about 50 cars when the game shipped with 70+, that is not as many cars as the game. More important, they charge barely anything for their DLCs. Didnt R3E has tonnes of DLCs too? Not to forget, they shipped a game with more tracks than most in the market. Most parts of pcars 1 is running fine, despite there are issues with multiplayer, I doubt its worth their time of investment to continue updating the old messy codebase when they are doing much more in the sequel. Lastly, talking about the biased view here, Reiza had announced AMS 2 as an unnamed title even in their crowd funding that no one bats an eye for it. Along with quite a handful of DLCs being announced a couple of months back that no one complained. When the name changes to pcars, then, everyone will pick up their pitchforks despite AMS 1 will not be supported for eternity like pcars.
50 €s worth of DLCs, basically the same as the base game = barely anything? Already looking forward to those in pcars2.
well said the "hatred" on pcars is a bit weird. I had happily funded the game as well, played the early builds a couple times. It didn't grip me in the end, but that's not their fault and I got the money spent actually back. A lot of people are happy with it, playing it, why not. Didn't felt being cheated on. I guess this comes from a lot of people backing having no clue about development at all, and have very unrealistic expectations. The critique on their main guys ego and some of what happened on the forum is something else imo. But there was nothing "evil" by announcing the next version public. Hell if you look at most other AAA games almost annual releases of a franchise are the norm... it should have been no surprise given SMS had done multiple NFS shifts and was targeting console early as well. One benefit of new versions vs continous is that you can make bigger technology upgrades and upping minimum requirements more easily without some folks screaming that now their old system doesn't run the game well anymore. Or whenever the car physics are improved, some people won't like it and there is no way to go back to an older version. You also don't "break" your service when you have only one frontend to play. Although that probably could be solved technically by having a transition phase from old to new and then kill old. I pretty much would expect that to happen with the engine change for R3E. Which leads to another downside, without visible major "version" numbers, you make it hard for people to reference the state of your product. Like all the R3E reviews on past versions look as valid as the newest, despite major changes. You can feel ripped off by any system, and you may have true points about any of them. However it's all about the perception of value, do you have a good time and is the time you have worth it to spend some amount of cash. Again here people have very different views independent of the money they actually posses. So there will always be some friction. Another aspect that imo is fueling a lot of controversy is that people's insecurity leads them to become more extreme. It's not longer good enough to make a personal choice (say play R3E vs X) that is not enough. The personal choice must be superior to other's people choices. Therefore X must be objectively worse. Then my personal choice has more value, meaning I am more valuable. The fun thing is that in this context the personal choice is often not rational, it just feels right (see endless discussions on FFB settings)
Dsl, i think, I don't understand much about how all this connection thing works. I do know that I don't usually have any internet issues at night usually though on anything else. See if we had an offline mode then I wouldn't have to worry about that then, lol.
Course not, the only thing that don't get is people saying pcars is cheaper/better value than RR, cause as people can see now it's not. We're always talking about early adopters here, not people who can wait for a black friday deal or a goty edition. And those who bought all the pcars content on release spent ~100 bucks, on a game for which support was dropped after one year. Now the same process will start all over, 50 for pcars 2, probably another 50 for DLCs. I'm not saying that's wrong or evil, but the appraisal it receives goes beyond my long-term judgement. Indeed.
I think for offline mode its possible to use something like in 2 step verification mode in some popular online service. While you online, you can generate several codes for offline usage. Each code you can use only once to launch service.