So I was online for a while last night. Many thanks to MastrGT for letting me join his event, that little Rocket is a fun car to race. I also ran with some Tunas for a while. And to top off the night, I dropped into Moose's room to see what those guys were up to.
It's kind of weird how the night transitioned for me. At first, I was super excited to be online with the new game and new physics. But race after race, my enthusiasm slowly waned. And at the end of the night I was left with the feeling that not much had changed in 4 years. I will say that I did like the qualifying procedure, although it threw me for a loop at the start not seeing the other cars on the track. But it was cool that it tells you where you currently stand as you are driving (and weird that it flashes the proximity alerts at you when you're by yourself on the track).
And for that reason, as I go up and down in my bipolar response to all things GT, today I'm feeling a bit bummed out. For years, I've wanted to see true spec racing in the game. I've wanted to simulate what those guys do around here on the weekends because I'm dying to do it for real someday. And having a simulator that allows me to pretend to race helps me get through the mid week doldrums. I even ran to iRacing for a while thinking that would be the ticket. And maybe it is. Maybe to experience a true racing simulation, you have to go completely the opposite direction and just deal with it. I don't know.
But I'm extremely frustrated right now. First of all, the one-make races ... why so few cars PD? What in the name of all that is holy prevents you from just displaying the same dealership car chooser and letting people choose a car from any that came with the game (not DLC)? What possible reason could you have for restricting it? Bimmer club wants to run Bimmers. Mazda club wants to run Mazdas. And they want to run specific cars. Why not allow them to do that? That's step one. Step two is realizing that in a one-make race, the cars from the dealer drive like ass. Allow everyone to tune the cars. I realize this is harder to work out. But it's doable. Then there's the racing liveries. I was hoping we could at least number the cars. But I guess that's not that big of a deal.
I keep coming back to the realization that this is not a racing simulator. I think I have to change my expectations. It's a driving simulator and a pretty good one. It's a car collecting game. And we can make it a racing simulator through communities like this using the same old techniques that we've used for years. It's just a shame that after all this time ... our racing options have not changed much, if at all.
End of rant. Better get back to work. I'm sure tomorrow I'll swing the other way and proclaim the game "nearly perfect" again. Meds. I need meds.
