Don't worry. This rant is going to be short and to the point. Developers and publishers of racing simulations, stop making us drift.
Every gaming genre has its obligatory mechanisms that it forces people to endure. And every gamer has a genre-based mechanism that they despise for developers to force upon them. If you've been a long-time reader, you may recall my rant about the "level run-back" that I hate in First-Person Shooters. You know, you get the end of a level, and instead of there being a door, there is a stone wall. You look about furtively, expecting to find some new door open or something, but no. The level-designer actually now wants you to retrace your steps all the way back to some ladder, make-shift elevator, or window you crawled through...back at the beginning of the level. On the way back...watch out!!!! Of course those rooms that you thought you had cleared have magically respawned new enemies that are now just lying in wait to blind-side you as you come around a corner you believed was now safe. Rubbish.
This is lazy game design. The FPS genre is probably the rifest with these aggravating mechanisms. There seems to almost always be some goofy water-based level where you are forced to engage in underwater or at least surface swimming combat. Ditto for the inevitable point in the story where you get conked over the head and captured, all of your hard earned weapons are taken, and you are forced to earn them a second time, and complete some part of the level with just a knife; if you're lucky, you'll get a pistol. Rubbish.
The RTS genre has its share as well. The inevitable timed mission, where you have to stave off an attack for a specified period of time. Or what I call the "cripple mission", where you are only given access to infantry and have to stave off an attack by technologically superior opposing forces. Perhaps my most hated is the lame-duck "infiltration" mission. Here, after being granted command of sometimes whole armies, you are reduced to controlling one individual soldier and maybe three or four other (anemic) units. Of course, the single soldier must survive the mission, while concurrently being asked to basically run into an entire hornet's nest of enemy units to grab some MacGuffin that holds the key to the whole war. Yeah...I think if it was that important, I would send in a more robust force; or at least stage a massive diversionary attack somewhere else so the base would not have, like, the entire reserve force of the enemy basically camped out on its perimeter. More rubbish.
Of late, the racing sim genre has taken to a similar debilitating mechanic. Making sure you can't complete the game by forcing you to master drifting. Here is a hint: I don't like drifting; I like racing. No one is being paid millions of dollars to participate in drift races, while TOCA Racing drivers, GT Drivers, and Formula One drivers are making money hand over fist. Just because a bunch of dead heads hopped up on beer and drugs actually paid money to see The Fast and the Furious (more serious illegal substances were required to get those same people to see the sequels), does not mean that that style of driving needs to now be mandatory in racing sim career modes.
You know, I even accept the drag racing mode from Need for Speed: Underground as legit. I admittedly drive in automatic transmission most of the time (because I don't see the realism in driving in manual unless you actually have a wheel-and-pedals controller with a clutch and an actual shift-stick...and who has the money for that?), and I did not mind NFS:U forcing you to drive manually for a single event-type. Even drifting in NFS:U was acceptable, since if you failed to win a drift event, you just did not get that money. You could still go on to other events, and you cold still achieve all of the unlockables.
NFS: Carbon was the beginning of the bad turn, and, as much as I like the game, GRiD followed suit. In Carbon, drift events are part of territory control. It does not hit you with it in the first few territories, but further into the game there are territories with multiple drift events, so you can not take control of them without defeating more than one drift event. This is nauseating to the point of projectile vomiting.
Drifting is still not a universally accepted sport. It is a fringe motor sport, at best. What really torques me off, is, if you are going to foist a fringe event into the core of the game, how the heck does drifting get in front of rally racing? I would be much more interested in playing a few dirt track events instead of being forced to drift.
GRiD almost makes the effect worse. In this title, there are three geographic areas that you have to compete through in order to receive the maximum license levels available, and move on to compete on the global level. The three areas are the US, Europe, and Japan. More than half of the events in Japan are drift-based events.
Warning - GW Analogy/metaphor segue - One of the primary reasons I do not care for college football is that, at the end of every season, there is no definitive champion. Number One and Number Two never play each other, except in very rare instances, so which of the two of them is the better team is always open to controversy. I am not saying that the NCAA Championship is controversial every year, but that it is open to controversy every year, by definition of the system in which it is decided.
When you race another car, it is very clear who is first and who is second. It is not open for debate. When you run a sprint event, your time is your time. The clock does not lie. What is the scoring system for a drift event? Is it defined? I know that there is a software algorithm behind the scores, but the point is that, in this mode, the conveyance of the scoring being subjective is what is transmitted to the gamer. I've never felt like I've broken the code. I've had runs where I thought I was performing better in a drift event than my last run, only to finish the event and see a score posted that was lower than the last time. AI performance in drift events is also frustrating, as it varies between them being completely inept and posting scores nowhere near yours, and them being ridiculously proficient, blowing your score out of the water by magnitudes of as much as 2. Inn most drift-style events in sims to date, you never get to see AI on their drift runs, so you don't how they are slicing scores twcice as high as yours. This is particularly frustrating in GRiD, since, in each heat of a track drift event, there are fewer scoring posts on the track, but yet the AI driver wins every round with essentially the same score he posted in the first round, which is about 98,000 plus.
In the hey-day of Gran Turismo, before it was broken and when it was still a truly great racing sim, I remember running races repeatedly just trying to shave a second or two off of one or two critical corners to get the time I needed. That was what a racing sim should be.
Racing has a purity about it. A simulation of it should reflect that fact of its true nature. There should be no events that you can not figure out, because racing in straight forward. Yes, tweaking and tuning your car is more art than science at the highest levels. However, the foundations of it are founded solidly in mechanical and aerodynamic engineering. In most cases, the effect of a tweak is delineated right in the rule book or in the GUI itself. The only time "art" comes into it is when you are trying to figure out how to make individual tweaks play well together as a combined solution. This inclusion of drift racing is anathema to the racing sim experience because it breaks into that purity, hence breaking the immersion. You guys need to get rid of it. Make it a side-mode, or optional, or a means of achieving certain things in the game that you can't if you don't drift. But do not make it a barrier to completing the game, or a prerequisite to unlock other cars, items, or upgrades that you need to win non-drift events. What developer's really need to take away from this is that, usually, I am having a great time playing a racing title, and then I see that the next event I have to complete is a drift event and I want to throw the controller at the TV. The flow and my immersion into the game, particularly if it has a story-based campaign mode in it, are broken, and I am snapped back to the reality that I am just a rat in a digital maze. Now, where was that cheese again?
- Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>