There are better ways to make a car feel like it's unique and yours than making you spend a long time getting it. I'd argue what makes a given car feel like it's yours is that you've spent a long time doing things with it.
A car feels like it's mine when I bought it, ran it through the Clubman Cup, upgraded it, ran it through the FR Cup, detuned it to go through Normal Car, maxed it out to go through Megaspeed, and took it to some endurance races.
It doesn't feel like it's mine when I had to grind for 10 hours to buy it from the Legendary Dealer only to find there's no races it's eligible for. Nor does it feel like it's mine when it's one of ten cars that I got for free in the last hour.
Making a car hard to get is just annoying. Making cars too easy to get dilutes their impact. Making a car useful and unique to you is how you create attachment.
Just want to give an extra +1 to this bit.
Particularly in Forzaland in the past, for me a car feels "special" to me because what I did with it, which usually means choosing a class for it, making a build/tune on it, and making a fitting livery for it and then actually racing it for hours... Which usually means making changes to the build to find the sweet spot and evolving the car here and there.
Admittedly, nowadays I do organized racing 99% of the time in Forza, so it's a little different. That means what makes a lot of cars "special" to me is that it can be built and balanced well with other similar cars and made into a cool racing series, and then used for a whole season of battles with other drivers and all the regular ups and downs any season of racing has. By the end of a 10 race season you definitely "bond" with cars and I've certainly had cars I've run kind of reluctantly at first but ended up quite liking them and looking back at them very fondly. I still have a bunch of cars in my FM7 garage, in their season livery with their history reflecting how many races they did and podiums they earned and stuff, that I don't sell when I need space or won't rebuild into something else.
They also keep mentioning more serious multiplayer, and a bunch of locked cars or timed exclusives are not good for multiplayer, whether it's public hoppers, public lobbies, or organize leagues.
It's a big issue I have with FH4/FH5, which I hope FM8 doesn't take the "Playlist" thing from with the time exclusive cars and all the arbitrary nonsense to get them. I'd personally feel much more attached to new cars we got if I could spend the 30mins jumping through hoops to get it on building it and driving it at the routes that I like or taking it into multiplayer or whatever.
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Nurburgring GP Circuit (Reverse)?
Glad I'm not the only person who noticed this and thought it was weird. While the Nordschleife is run in reverse for a rally event, I've never seen the GP layout run in reverse before... Wonder if it means we get a reverse layout, or if they just thought that angle looked cooler for showing off the pit buildings and stuff.
You could probably add the Ginetta brand as a while, because apparently all of their cars at the factory got scanned.
I certainly hope so, they make some really great little cars. The G40s are fantastic fun in PC2, and the LMP3 would be a cool addition to the game as it represents a class we have never had before and they are super nice to drive in PC2 as well, excellent power to handling ratio that makes for a prototype experience without as much death as trying to drive P1 and so on.
On the subject of small boutique race car manufacturers, would be cool to see Ligier in there as well with their LMP3, and the JS P4 and JS2R... but I guess that's getting into wishlist stuff.
Hundreds of cars, but almost nowhere to drive them. 45-50 locations like in Project Cars 2&3 would be far better
