Career / Story Mode in Sim Racing – For or Against?

[Sun Levi]

A "story" is not necessary, but a properly structured championship is. Which is lacking in most sims.

Give me actual structured seasons, a custom championship mode, proper rules, SC etc and some sort of special event/hot lap challenge. In these special events maybe include some rewards to give players extra incentives, special liveries, special car editions etc.

Plus some sort of race opening/ending info, stats, cinematic (showing the grid order, track layout, temp, weather etc) would be nice as well. Most sim titles are certainly lacking overall racing weekend presentation/information.

And a stat page tracking my overall progress & my results during the season.

Something similar to F1 2018, which is the overall best packaged offline racer right now.

 

[apex11]

F1 career mode should just be "is your dad rich enough" if not your 'career' is sat at home playing racing games...
Life imitates Art etc etc...

"Welcome to F1 2019, your name is Lando, your Dad is worth 200 million and friends with Zak Brown... you will be racing for McLaren this year as an up and coming rookie through hard work and toil...good luck and if in doubt say something got damaged on your car..........."

 

[Metla]

mod-edit: don't edit moderator adjusted messages

 

[michelforest]

The career

Funny that, My son asked me a few years ago how he would go about being a driver in a real series, I told him in the first instance me and his mum would have to get divorced and she would have to marry a millionaire.

Just stick to games son....

Not all F1 drivers come from money. Ocon, Hamilton and Ricciardo come to mind.

Also, F1 always had drivers from wealthy families. Even in the early days.

 

[Bruno Iwanczuk]

I'm against it, they waste too much time creating career modes instead of paying attention and improving the most important features, and of course fixing bugs.

 

[Dobermann92]

As a simracer you need xtra motivation through different game modes?
Get outa here!

Is there a joke I don't get or you just insulted me?

 

[Deleted member 151827]

Some people take this way to serious! It's all about the fun so yes include career mode.

 

[ozm8ey]

I remember i think it was a racing game called jucied 2 that actually had an online career mode

 

[Boby Kim]

No, a simulator should be focused on test results. Only if the career mode is a completely different software running as a module within the sim it could work.

 

[krusti]

I don't mind if a sim has a career mode or not, For me there is nothing better than a real career through simracing and real people, once you are in, you will find racing vs AI really boring and pointless.
Racing in the right leagues, meet people, making friends and knowing your opponents, working to beat them... This is real, not a scripted story mode

 

[mr Sw1tchblade]

If it's not online focused game like r3e or iracing when yes, put career mod in.
One more vote for Pcars2.

 

[NikiGouda]

Is there a joke I don't get or you just insulted me?

Joke or not, the intention seems clear. You are not worth to be called
a proper, real "sim racer" in his eyes. But maybe i just don't get it as well.

 

[Ghoults]

I think a proper career mode which would offer different paths with wide variety of content with their own set of rules could be really fun. On idea level I like the idea of progressing from the ground up. Buying car parts and buying new cars. Doing my own paintjobs and picking the weirdest cars to get into a certain class. But the career mode really needs to be good. It can't be just grinding to get better parts and cars. Or to just grind to get to the next event. If the ai is not competitive or fun to drive against then it just a treadmill where you are just annoyed how slowly you are moving forward instead of being happy to finally get that next thing.

That being said I think career mode is not really important for a racing sim. The driving and racing online in itself is already enough on its own if done well and you have people to race against. Occasionally you may want to race against the ai with your choise of cars and tracks and you don't need career mode for that. Of course I'd love it if a modern sim had a good career mode with car parts, career paths and buying, selling and renting stuff (not dlcs ) and realistic car tuning aspects but even then (as a player after you have done it once is there any reason to do it again? And how long does that take?

Online racing can be an endless activity where you can race even the same cars for very long periods of time so for the developer it offers a lot of bang for the buck whereas career modes don't really have very good cost/return ratios. Of course every developer nowadays uses offline career modes to sell microtransactions so it is not charity by any means. But even then sim racing games tend to have pretty long life and when a sim comes out it tends to sell for years to come. Ac came out in 2014 and rf2 in 2013 and neither is being forgotten or never played any time soon. Focus on career mode might actually shorten this because once you are finished with the career mode the game is basically done. But if the game has good modding support and lots of people playing online then you can get years out of it and with traditional sims we tend to play one game for very long times before the next sim comes along.

In a way asking if racing sim needs a career mode is a bit like asking if counter strike, hearthstone or world of tanks needs a career mode. It could be fun to have it but there are always those others things we expect to be as good as it gets before we focus on these secondary objectives. And in a sim racing game career mode is very much a secondary objective because if the racing the physics are not good then even the best career mode is not very good.

 

[Omer Said]

To those praising Project Cars career mode: Don't you think that it was ridiculous as the AI drivers changed seats randomly between each season? It broke the immersion heavily. If there was consistency and logical AI progression at PC, that game would have had the perfect career mode.

 

[Patrik Marek]

only reason I bought F1 2010, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18 is the career, if it wasn't for career I would probably only buy 10 and maybe 16 or so

career is what makes me interested, making it more role playing where it's me the driver , going through career of motorsport

not to take away anything from simulators, trying to pursue perfection for certain car x track combo, that obviously has also it's great rewards

but at the end of the day, if the game has nice graphics and good career mode, I'm much more likely to buy it, then if it's just pure driving

as great example - LFS, arguably one of the best driving model , but wrapped into un-appealing package, with no career / SP, so I never bought it

 

[aklru]

I'd love to see a mentoring/training mode, where you get live feedback on your inputs and lines.
I'm actually amazed this hasn't been more of a thing, or maybe I just overlooked it somewhere.

Rather than just progressing through levels of AI weakness, career mode could be more like real life, where the focus shifts from car control via situational awareness into chasing split seconds.
Therefore becoming a more driver centric, and essentially more rewarding, progression.

 

[liby88]

in race sims no need for something else than pure racing, i hated this story modes.
if i want to play storys i play everything else but no racing game^^

 

[Sky]

i just want to race the cars and tracks not be locked out of all the content until a gurning scottish guy made of cgi ham lets me use it.

 

[Joseph Wright]

How'd you do that?

I have created my own custom rfmod which includes all the drivers and teams. That way they wont be crazy random names all the time. I then use rfactor 2 log analyzer to track results. Its hard to explain, as it took me hours upon hours to work out myself. I might make a tutorial video if its something you might want.

 

[ARNOULD]

No interest in career mode.