And after that you have the online content, the time trial is fun and the daily races often enjoyable.
Yeah let's talk about the online aspect of the game.
Let's get the first one out of the way.
User created lobbies: It's a mess. You have to scroll through an endless list of lobbies with only 1 or 2 players in it (you're lucky if you find one with 4-6 players). My first reaction is...are you kidding me? Then I see that most of those "lobbies" are only free practice/slow riding. My second reaction is...hell naw. Once or twice I had the guts to connect to those "lobbies" and it was the most boring thing I've ever seen in videogame. A waste of a feature. It is only enjoyable for some who have a group of friends who are always online and like to set races how they want. Personally I don't even see the fun in it, since you won't be matched with people from all around the world (I repeat, the lobbies are always empty....this is a sign that people don't waste their time connecting)
Time trial: Samus already answered above.
Daily races: more like weekly races. Always the same. For an entire week. They don't change. No track rotation. And you're stuck with the same selection of cars. You miss the race? You have to wait
15-20 minutes (!!!) for the next one. And there are only 3 types of races. Since GT Sport.
- Race A: slow cars with BoP, or very rarely with tuning allowed, on boring tracks, mostly made by PD. I hate it. Last week was the lawn mower RX8. Could't even finish one lap of qualifying. Hard pass.
- Race B: Gr.3 or Gr.4. The only "enjoyable" race for me...to do once every few hours, because I don't see the fun and point in repeating the SAME race over and over again for a full week. People always choose the same fastest 1 or 2 cars, as the leaderboards suggest. Some are courageous and go for a third choice.... Pure madness!
- Race C: personally I can't judge because I never tried it. Too many laps for me.
I'm curious: have you ever played Forza Motorsport online? If you put aside the carnage (penalties were added a couple of year ago though), it is quite fun. Everything is organized by car classes. Endless hours of fun. Personally I enjoy A and S car class lobbies. You enter the lobby and you find something between 10 and 16 players in it, either racing a 3-5 lap race or patiently waiting for the next one, on the next track, to start ->
TRACK ROTATION. And while you wait, you can change car and setup (huge choice of competitive and fun cars to drive). And even talk to other players. Public voice chat is a thing. You don't like someone? You can mute him.
And when penalties and ghosted lapped cars were still not in place, we had marshals connecting to the lobby and checking for idiots. It was a pleasure to see them kick the idiots out. And we could also record the race, share it on our own cloud online, send the details of the replay and gamertag of the crasher to T10, they would review it and finally ban the player from the game.
Turn 10, on one hand, has
- a fun matchmaking system that allows you to use all cars in the game, all tracks in the game, on continuous rotation
- penalties-marshals-replay and email support.
THAT is how it should be done.
PD, on the other hand, has
- a very limited matchmaking (Sport mode) with a very limited number of races on a very limited number of tracks, with a very limited choice of cars (and tuning setups allowed 0,0001% of the time in Race A. It's basically all BoP)
- crap penalties never fixed. With every update they just get worse. They were way better in GT Sport (at least, at some point in time, you could improve your rating in-race and it was shown with up arrows in the HUD)
- no contact whatsoever with the players
- even removed the "report" button in the lobbies.
So what the hell....
