What all sims can learn from GT7

Simple: produce a compelling single-player experience.
Way too much time has been spent on developing ranked servers, and they've turned out to be an abject failure.
There was a time when the numbers were improving, but now there seem to be fewer and fewer people in those servers.
Maybe if that time had been spent developing a decent single-player career mode, this sim might have proved more popular.
RR appears to be going backwards and I can't see a solution.
Can anyone?

 

Conserning SP vs MP then I have seen some serious surveys saying that the majority of users playing racing games prefer SP.
Such surveys is probably also the reason the originally 100% MP game iRacing began and launched AI bots for SP use.

 

So if you clicked 'disagree', why? The number of players in the ranked servers is pathetic, never more than 60 over, what 12 servers? Then there's the complications involved in starting your own server. In Automobilista 2 it's really easy, as it was in Project Cars, but in this game, you need a degree in IT to set up your own server.
I'm 100% certain that a compelling single-player experience would help bump up sales, but there's a problem: YouTubers never cover single-player modes, they're only interested in covering MP.

 

I agree with your initial statement, but not necessarily with your in-detail diagnosis of Raceroom.

Yes, sims could use a proper single-player experience with well-designed sets of challenges and gameplay loops. Yes, games like Gran Turismo, Forza Horizon, Test Drive Unlimited or Need For Speed did that much better than any serious racing sim in history. It would certainly add to the overall gameplay.

That said, I'm not sure it would help Raceroom. It may, but not for sure. Simulators are a specific niche that attracts players who care more about realism than about gameplay. If you care more about realism, you'd rather sacrifice the quality of your gameplay experience if that means that your arbitrary standard of realism is upheld. That's why simracers play racing simulators instead of racing games that are less realistic, but are better games at the same time.

Balancing that is very hard and creating a gameplay experience that would not detoriate the realistic elements is a tricky task. Some simracers don't even tolerate racing against AI, because it violates their arbitrary standard of realism. And then on top of it being a difficult task, consider that racing sims don't have a history of creating a compelling single-player experience, so the chances of nailing it are low, there's not much proven, experienced talent in that department, or even an obvious example to blatantly copy.

So there are several risks at hand. One - you may not do it well. Two - it may not make a difference anyway. Three - it will take resources that may make a bigger difference elsewhere.

I would personally love a racing sim with a proper, well-designed career mode. But I won't hold my breath.

 

Name a full, serious racing simulator from the last decade that has a well designed singleplayer career mode. ("Well designed" is the operative phrase. Half-arsed attempts don't count.) Career modes exist in arcade racers, or "sim-cades" at best. The games that feature them may have more sales or players than R3E, but that proves nothing whatsoever. Those same games are not serious sims, which means they are much easier to race in and work well on consoles and control pads. I'd put money on those latter aspects being much more of a factor in their popularity than some half-arsed career mode. More often than not, the career mode is the most complained-about part!

Would I like a full career mode in a realistic simulator that made me feel like a real racing driver, able to manage all aspects of my virtual life like negotiating with teams, gaining sponsors, dealing with the media, running test days, and becoming world champion of... whatever class? Absolutely. But am I prepared to sacrifice development time from the simulation side to create it? Absolutely not.

Simulators are for people who want a realistic racing experience, and aren't too bothered about anything else. Sim-cades are for people who want fun racing with added "gameplay" between races. There's plenty of room for both, but they should remain separate. Merging genres always results in a jack-of-all-trades, master of none type product.

(Also, if you want bigger grids and better quality racing, there are plenty of dedicated racing communities out there these days.)

 

"Single-player career modes" in racing games seem to fall in roughly three categories:

1. An endless string of single races or short championships where the players is expected to win every time and the AI is either too fast or too slow so the player has to constantly adjust the difficulty (Assetto Corsa, Project CARS 2, TOCA Race Driver 3 etc.).
2. Car buying and tuning career where you start from street racing with a shitbox and then earn money to tune the car and buy faster cars until you've unlocked everything (Gran Turismo, Project CARS 3).
3. Glorified championship mode where you pick a team and then slowly develop the car/team over multiple races/seasons to get better performance until you finally win the championship, after which there is nothing to do (F1 202x, NASCAR Heat).

None of these strike me as particularly interesting to grind unless the underlying driving is really good. Idk how many sim racers are interested in "The Sims" style game play of deciding which sponsor stickers to put on your gloves or what kind of mustache your driver has etc. In the end it's just racing against the AI and then playing some make belief game of pretending to be a real racing driver.

 

We're also dealing with players' preferences and expectations, and the costs of development. Will Raceroom gain new players if it introduces a single player career mode? Yes. Will these new players justify development costs? I'm not sure about that. So I think it was a safer bet to start developing a system for open lobby experience (there's an obvious demand for such features among simracers), while a career mode makes more sense to have in a new game right from the beginning, rather than adding it to an existing game many years after its release.

Also a GT-style career steps away from realistic approach like track days/practice + race weekends, and starts introducing entertaining but artificial scenarios like "cover the most distance on X liters of fuel" or "gain X drifting points in these couple of corners". Which raises a question: what is this game, a realistic simulation of some parts of a real racing world, or a sort of amusement park with realistic physics? And can a studio the size of Sector3 pull off successfully combining it?

 

gran turismo single player is just bunch of random races with awful ai
it's completely trash so I'm not sure why even mention this game in this aspect

 

There has only been one racing sim that made a concerted effort to produce that kind of game, and if that’s what you want then get a copy of GTR2. It has lots of little championships to play and you can even race in the 2003 and 2004 FIA GT championships. It has reasonably good ai and very good physics.
Now for a bit of history on that game. The developers started working on it in 2003 if I’m not mistaken, but it didn’t get finished and released until 2006 because it was so much work. Simbin now known as Sector 3 had to refinance twice during the games development. Ian Bell who headed the dev team has never tried to do anything like it since, because it was so much work to produce. Everyone took note of the work verses profit and decided not to try and reproduce that level of commitment, especially not Raceroom they’ve been down that road.

Having said all that, I will say that I only play sp mode now and what makes a great single player experience is quality ai, and S3E has some of if not the best ai in the business imo, and I have almost all the pc based racing game made in the last 15 years. I’ve been playing raceroom since 2015 and they have invested more effort in sp mode than any other developer.
The reason for that is because until fairly recently single players made up roughly 70% of the market. Now mp mode has move up to about 50% of the market so raceroom is developing their multiplayer experience for good reason. I for one am glad that s3e focussed on the best ai they could produce rather that a bunch of arcade style championship things that I’m not interested in. My opinion.
And the most common complaint I see on all the racing forums is empty lobbies. It’s not easy to find a bunch of random people who just happen to show up to race at the same time every day. This is a small niche of gamers compared to say, mmo games, but it has and still is growing fairly quickly

 

im going to agree on this BUT the ranked population getting murdered isn't a symptom of that, its dead because of execution then a huge spate of bugs and then moving to system that puts it in competition with iracing while making it weird and disjointed. raceroom had reliability issues last year and this year theres still no 1 answer to it, plus the actual servers used for ranked were total shit house especially for us Aussies and yanks, when that did get fixed especially for Oceania region, it was moved to Saturday, a night that people go out and do stuff and stay out late. so ranked went from something that people were getting disappointed in.... to something they cant do here.
iracing has its waves of players, but something is always there, r3e ranked is about its weekly event, cultural differences getting in the way, and if you're not doing that why bother with any of it when most people are in groups and can organise things themselves with in an hour.

but yes a singleplayer mode thats got some depth is always more than welcome with me PC1 is head and shoulders above the rest, its the 1 good thing sms has done

 

Going out on Saturday is hardly Oceania specific. There was a community vote about whether the weekly event should be held on Saturday or on Sunday. I voted Sunday for the very reasons you specified, but it seems the majority actually prefers Saturday for some reason.

 

true, i just dont know what someone in Europe will be up to on that day. even leaving it on the Wednesday was better. Thursday is also bad because late night shopping.
either way ranked is in a bad place and even i dont know what should be done.

 

YES! GTR2 is still something I consider an absolute masterpiece. It is a complete simulator of a series (FIA GT) and does everything right. You have proper AI, wet weather, night driving, 24h races. This was what GT racing was about those days. And GTR2 focuses on this, does an impressive job of showing people how that type of racing works and nothing more, nothing less. It even had an excellent tutorial teaching newcommers the basics of driving, the rules and even individual tracks. In every bit that game felt as if it was designed to captivate the player with GT racing. And it was damn good at it.

Now the issue I have with modern sims is that they are just random bits and pieces thrown together without much attention to detail. It's always the usual tracks (Monza, Nurburgring, Spa...) with the usual cars (GT3, sometimes GT4) and some excuse for a championship that doesn't even try to imitate a real one. Plus some old cars just thrown in there without any focus on recreating the atmosphere of classic racing. And that's it. It's basically "Here are some modern and some classic cars and some tracks. Now sod off". Only AC Competizione makes a real effort to simulate a real championship. But after being completely disappointed in regular AC's tire model, I haven't yet gained the courage to give it a try.

I mean I like GT3 cars, but I'm sick and tired of seeing them in every damn game driving over Monza in yet another fictional championship. I get it, licensing a whole real championship is expensive. And there's the risk of people not being interested in that particular championship. But licensing so many individual cars and throwing them together in yet another game that basically looks the same as any other ain't cheap either. And people won't be interested in a fictional championship too. Plus most of these games forget that GT racing isn't about 10 lap sprints in dry conditions in the middle of the day. It's a challenging sport where endurance and adapting to changing conditions over a long race are key. GTR2 managed to give players that experience so many years ago and captivate them. And now?

And I like raceroom (hell, I'll give it another go after I finish writing this), because it has really good physics. But it simulates only car behavior and not a proper racing series and that's a bit sad.

 

ams1 also has the ability to run a full championship or 2 its still super underrated. gtr its a bit old now huh ive had a few cracks at it, ever got ffb working but yeah its a good rf1 sim same with race07 i think that expanded on what was good in it, but also lost some things like the time cycle, just give and take on resources huh.

ac is fine if you really really really really really like gt3 that only runs at spa and monza because no one uses the other tracks much and unlike real gt racing people are obsessed with 3 hour races all the time and not running real regs, which are 1 hour with driver swaps, for sro. so it ends up with a similar problem at everything else, people running the same 3 combos. i think thats what kept me in raceroom until now, like those combos are popular but itll be gto or group2 or tcr somewhere else so it doesnt hold on the same combo very long

 

For people in European time zones, I'm sure Raceroom can recover from an MP perspective and get back to where they were 6 months ago. For people in other areas of the world, R3E is always going to mostly be an SP experience.

If you look at the number of people on MP servers at any given time vs. the number of people playing the game at the same time on Steamcharts, it's clear that it's far less than 50% of the people are doing MP mode.

I agree with azaris above that sim racers aren't really looking for "career modes" as we aren't really looking for a game that we're done with once we reach some goal. But good AI and championship modes that let you look back later at what transpired and that let you make adjustments on fly are valuable. Raceroom has good AI and a capable championship tool, but they haven't really been developed on in quite a while. That would be valulable to me at least.

Right now I think what Raceroom needs to do as much as anything is give their users a sense of where they are going as a sim. Is it basically done aside from adding in new DTM/WTCR content every year? Is there some new transformational improvement coming, such a serious upgrade to the MP framework or the single-player game modes? Who knows.

 

Ok I’m going to chime in one more time. The one thing I would really like to see added to raceroom is the ability to save in the middle of a race. One of my favorite things in GTR2 is the long races. Ok this may sound a bit geeky but so what. I have basically an hour a day to play. If load up a 3 hour race, I can finish in three stints. I run my stint pull in for a pit stop and as soon as the car is stopped I save and quit. Now the next day I load up my saved race in the pits jump in my rig put my head phones on check the peddles and buttons by that time the car is dropping down off the jacks and I’m off in the heat of battle fighting for position. That to me is so immersive, and one of my favorite things to do. Single player endurance racing at its best. Please give us the ability to save!!!

 

As opposed to spending hours in photoshop to replicate cigarette, alcohol and porn-mag logos on your vehicle and then going online with other like-minded folks also to pretend to be a real racing driver?

 

Nope Sir!
I cover the SP!

 

GTR2 may have been the greatest sim ever made but in no way did it have a "career mode". It had a driving school and a couple of ready-made championships and that was it. You'd have to unlock tracks if you wanted to race them outside the championships. That's all it had, the rest is rose-tinted glasses. And the wet racing was a joke by modern standards.

My point was that no modern sim has attempted a career mode because they already fail at the first hurdle - putting up a convincing offline championship against the AI with longer than 10 minute races. As soon a you attempt this with any modern sim, one or more of the following things happen:

- The AI all pit way too often for unknown reasons and the race is a joke (R3E, AMS2).
- The AI don't suffer tyre wear or penalties compared to the player and the race is a joke (AMS2).
- The AI speed is all over the place and I cannot change the difficulty after starting the championship because the devs decided to encrypt all the files (R3E).
- The game screws up the rules and black flags the player for no reason (rFactor).
- The AI is too easy to pass in one specific corner so the race is a joke (all games).
- The AI all crash or DNF for unknown reasons and the race is a joke (AMS1, AMS2).
- The AI just drive around in a conga line allowing the player to pass everywhere and the race is a joke (ACC).

Out of a 16 race season easily 10 or more races are ruined by at least one of the issues above. And now you expect me to do an entire career spanning multiple seasons like this?

 

You make a good point, but if a game was made with career mode in mind in the first place, a lot of those issues would've been treated more seriously than they currently are. They're disregarded because they don't matter if championship mode is the most ambitious single player mode in the game and it's not even that important.