I didn’t say or imply tracks take the same amount of time and resources to make as cars do. I know they don’t. But that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that many people, like me, would prefer PD to bring more tracks (new and old) to GT7. Again, we are getting zero (0) new tracks for GT7. Nothing, at least from what we’ve seen so far in official documentation and trailers. All we are getting are 2 old tracks with a makeover and the return of HSR and Daytona. That’s very poor imo.
IRacing for example has around 100 tracks and over 350 configurations. But “only” has around 100 cars too. The difference between the cost of a track and a car is 0 to 25%. ACC has 12 circuits and is focused on GT3 with around 30 cars.
GT7 comes out with nothing new to offer in terms of tracks except 2 redesign classics, which are nice, but very disappointing considering the AAA status of PD.
And let’s not even mention the 20million cars that a lot of people never touched or drove even though they would love to. I’m one of those. If I knew I wouldn’t be able to own those cars, I’d prefer to have a new track instead.
Sure they could add tracks and not a lot of people would like some of them, but I’m pretty sure there’s dozens of cars in every game you don’t like or drive for different reasons. I avoid FF and AWD cars more than anything but even though I don’t particularly like Alsace, I’ve had some great moments in there. One of them was actually with the Audi TT, a car I don’t like, with TRL_Lightning, just the two of us on a lobby and me trying to not look too slow behind him.
Sure, it's poor. No one said otherwise. And so was the car selection in GTS, only after updates it got more interesting for the casual audience. Though, the 4 returning tracks, are still "new", as the resources needed to model them, are similar to what they'd need for any other track. So it was either those 4 tracks, or model 3/4 entirely new to the series. They weren't simply ported from GT6. Some people, who don't care much about graphics, would be fine with PD just porting over every track from GT6, and every premium car, which would add a ton of content to the game, but would hurt the general quality.
If they end up finally bringing Pikes Peak to GT, we already know that a course that big, took resources equivalent to 2 or 3 normal tracks.
The thing is, with one update, they could add one track, that a big chunk of the player base won't enjoy. Meanwhile, they could add an update with 5 to 10 cars (similar resources spent), and the likelyhood of someone not liking any of them is a lot smaller (unless it's a themed pack). I remember GTS updates, and even though not every car added was great, there was atleast 1 or 2 per update that I enjoyed.
The real question I would ask people, is if PD could only add 2 more tracks in the game until March (hypothetical question), which ones would they be? I would expect very different answers.
A cheap way to enliven the existing tracks would be to make variants. Imagine if every returned track came with at least one new layout, using part of the existing track and adding a new section. Suddenly everyone is excited to try these "new" tracks, and it's cost Polyphony a fraction of the modelling time as creating an entirely new track from scratch.
Sure, but unless the style of the track changes a lot with an alternative layout, many tracks won't be much different in style, thus remaining the problem with tracks being very similar/stale. Tracks in GTS are too wide for slower cars. Alsace would have been great if the road was tighter, like in real life.
If I recall from GT5 the estimated values were 6 man months for an average car, 3 man years for an average track. 6:1 feels about right, and while graphics have improved so have tools so I'd be surprised if that has changed substantially.
There's definitely a balance to be struck, but I think you'll find that most players will get bored of not enough tracks before they'll get bored of not enough cars. That's why open world games have become popular, because there's an enormous amount of "tracks" that can be made even with a relatively limited number of roads available.
Yeah, pretty much what I assumed it was, give or take.
It depends on the player. Sim racers are fine with driving the same car for the entire life span of the game. Dragsters and drifters for example, are happy to use different cars on the same track for most of the life span of the game. People usually don't get bored as easily from cars, because they simply are more, they have customization, multiple purposes/classes. On a 1 to 1 car/track ratio, people would get bored from cars first though, specially if the numbers are fairly low. I personally got bored with GTS until they added updates with more cars.
I never really loved the layout and it kind of lacks character IMO. I wish they had put the track on the south side of the mountain/hill its built into, rather than the north. That way you would actually get views of San Francisco Bay, Marin county, and off in the distance, the San Francisco and Oakland skylines. As it is now, it feels like it could be anywhere...kind of a missed opportunity IMO.
