- 1,565
- United Kingdom
I’ve yet to do anything in single player that I would classify as a ‘race’. The AI is incapable of it so they try to work around it with this weird lap countdown mechanic
Mindblown! A racing game that DOESN'T teach you how to properly race.
- Thread starter 93integraRS
- 63 comments
- 5,595 views
- 13,859
- Adelaide
- Neomone
But you can learn meaningful flying skills from a flight simulator, and similar things apply to most serious simulations. Just because not all games teach you meaningful real life skills, doesn't mean that none do.
- 677
- Austria
@3integraRS
Maybe we all undertstand your OP wrong...can you give us any example of a racing game, that actually teaches you how to drive ?
No starting you 30 seconds behind the leader of a race forces you to drive like a lunatic because you are never sure if you will catch him or not until maybe lap 3.
The game also does not penalise ramming the AI or penalise the AI for ramming you. Again this makes the player think dive bombing jnto corners and using other players as braking zones is acceptable.
Add the two together and you create a single player experience based around desperately trying to catch a rabbit and using any means to do so.
How does that teach good driving?
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dabz343
(Banned)
- 950
- United States
- dabz343
I'm not aware of any game that actually dedicates a focus on providing an onboarding for new racers. PD does offer licenses, some explanations on physics/tuning/performance, but there could be more depth for sure.
I'm thinking of the recent Porsche expereince I had in Los Angeles...very valuable to receive personalized coaching. Can you imagine GT7 offering an Experience Center, with licenses and other events within it?
Yes me neither for the most part.
But how do you think casual players do? New players?
What teaches them or incentives them not to (apart from the clean race bonus?).
Do you.not remember hen you first started GT and it was all offline and players would put on phat tyres, 800bhp and simply wallbang and ran their way to victory?
Well that's what gt7 seems to recommend. Or it doesn't suggest any other way.
whizzbang66
(Banned)
- 105
- United Kingdom
if Ai cars can push you off then thats what it teaches others
- 108
- California
- DarkRedGT3
I've only ever played it with a wheel unfortunately. It is very much a racing sim and so the dev team will be focusing more on wheels than controllers.
jrbabbitt
Premium
- 2,694
- Charleston, SC
- TCR_JimyBee
Playing this since day one, I've noticed that the AI drivers are not cut from same pattern, their driving lines and braking points are very different from each other. Also doing a small test I decided to be billy badboy and really get abusive to the AI and come to find out after a lap they started getting abusive back, the AI does have some limited learning ability.
- 108
- California
- DarkRedGT3
The problem is that GT is a mainstream video game, it's meant to appeal to a broad audience. A broad audience typically just want to jump into a race without having to deal with the logistics of actual racing, or even learning racing etiquette. A good example of this is all the people complaining about how pit stops work and about weather and tire changes. Qualifying would allow players to start at the front of the grid, but to a broad audience, starting at the front of a grid to make zero overtakes in a race is boring. Even qualifying mid pack to make only a few overtakes in a race but still improving your position by finish is considered a good result in an actual race, this too would be boring to a general audience.
But the game does facilitate learning to those that want it. A causal player can simply settle for bronze on all their license tests to progress, while someone who wants to learn proper car control can put the time in to get golds. Track experiences are there to challenge more serious players to find the proper line around a track. And while it is possible to just bounce off other cars instead of using actual braking points, as you point out there is a clean race bonus as a reward to players who don't do that. But the game doesn't force any of this on players, so people can play as they want to.
The GT series is a really good entry point to those that want to get into sim racing, but because the game is obviously aimed towards a more general audience, that's all it ever really be. People who want to take the hobby more seriously should graduate to something more representative of actual racing.
I started out playing GT and had a lot of fun with it. It's the cars and details and the nostalgic feelings the games bring up that keep me coming back to it. But after playing ACC for so long, GT really can't compare to an actual racing sim outside of fundamental car control skills.
dabz343
(Banned)
- 950
- United States
- dabz343
You are exactly right, and that is why this question, 'should GT7 provide a greater focus to help those starting out?' is an interesting one. An AI (Sophy) that races you clean is one thing...but an AI Coach? That analyzes and gives advice? Now that sounds like something completely new...and we are just trying to figure out if there is a audience for it.
Like I said above, if PD can provide a virtual coach who can ride along and give me a crit, then I'm never paying for the Porsche experience again.
Some racing sim features are a little silly -- like getting the clouds right in weather or raytracing for those perfect reflections. Don't get me wrong, improvements are improvements, but pursuing pixel perfect, incremental progress isn't an effective strategy...long-term especially.
I would rather see features that advance the gameplay...remember when Nintendo came out with that silly console called the Wii? It had poor graphics, internals, didn't measure up in any spec sheet, but it was wildly popular -- because of the gameplay. Imo, racing sims are all melting together into a repetitive goop, and before long someone is going to pull off a Wii...you could argue that Kaz did this a long time ago with GT1
- 674
- United States
I'm more annoyed theres no test and tune. Like where can we test these settings? And the ability to test on the fly.
How they forgot to put this is beyond me. They've made a GT game I think at least 8+ times now (including psp version and prologue). And forgot one of the most important parts. But here we are, in the screensaver it has news that has NOTHING to do with racing/automotive world. Like they spent time on that crap and not give us a way to test and tune from garage, or even a shortcut button in main menu to get to it.
How they forgot to put this is beyond me. They've made a GT game I think at least 8+ times now (including psp version and prologue). And forgot one of the most important parts. But here we are, in the screensaver it has news that has NOTHING to do with racing/automotive world. Like they spent time on that crap and not give us a way to test and tune from garage, or even a shortcut button in main menu to get to it.
- 817
- Brazil
every other racing game: so this is our world, those are the cars, take one and go. Have fun!
Gran Turismo: you can learn racing lines in Circuit Experience, there's challenges with variable weather and you can test your skills on License Tests. You need to know your car, learn brake points and racing lines to go faster.
The only other game I can think that actually teaches you to not drive like a maniac is DiRT Rally.
Gran Turismo: you can learn racing lines in Circuit Experience, there's challenges with variable weather and you can test your skills on License Tests. You need to know your car, learn brake points and racing lines to go faster.
The only other game I can think that actually teaches you to not drive like a maniac is DiRT Rally.
- 13,859
- Adelaide
- Neomone
You'll find that the Codies F1 games also have learning the track, managing tyres, etc as part of the practice session for each track. See this video by @PJTierney.
It's actually pretty good, and even if you're good enough to one shot all of them it's almost always worth doing the full practice as a warm up and because the information gained from doing so is useful even if you're an excellent driver. There's also one off challenges if you're into that sort of thing.
As an aside, the F1 games are handicapped by being restricted to only F1 (and now F2 I guess) cars, but outside of that they do a lot of stuff really, really well. The race weekend, weather and such in F1 is basically what everyone hoped that GT7 would be.
Ferrari Challenge had a great little guided hot lap at the start to help people get an appropriate amount of assists and learn some skills. It's pretty primitive, but the game is almost 15 years old.
Shift/Shift 2 had a Circuit Experience type thing where you had to mark off corners on the track by getting the correct apex and speed (I think? It's been a while). I remember it being a reasonably nice way to learn tracks as you could just go round and round until you found your groove while still having some feedback as to whether you were getting it right or not.
I seem to remember RBR having some training as well, but it's been a long, long time since I played so I wouldn't swear to it.
There's probably more, there's an awful lot of racing games out there even if you limit it to the simulation/simulation-adjacent ones.
Gran Turismo isn't the only game to have features to try and help players gain skills, it's just that for a reasonable amount of games the help ends at a dynamic driving line. Which to be fair, is a decent amount of help when you think about what was available in the early 2000s. If you can reliably follow a dynamic driving line you're probably above average when you think about the entire population of people who play these games.
The one thing that I'm not sure I've ever seen taught in a reasonable manner is racecraft. Games can throw up videos and the like, but actually having an in-game active participation tutorial is another thing entirely. Missions/challenges are the closest most games get, but because of the design it's usually "figure out what the developer wants you to do here and do it" rather than "understand this complex situation and learn to make a reasonable decision quickly and execute it cleanly".
To be fair, the only way I can think of to train that is to have decent AI that can be tuned to behave like human players of varying levels of "respectfulness" and let the players figure out how to adapt to that. Games like F1 and ACC do all right there, the AI is a reasonable approximation of clean human racers a lot of the time and you can learn some good basic racecraft playing against them. Gran Turismo's AI unfortunately teaches players all the wrong things - they're so slow that it's correct when against them to go for massive dives and be incredibly aggressive.
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- 143
- Greece
- Zalera9999
Step 1 : Learn to go around the track as fast as possible.
Step 2 : Make it your mission to not touch other cars like your life depends on it.
Step 3 : Combine these 2 and you' re on the right way.
Now for more techical things like overtaking and defending position PD could have some vids or demos to show us I agree.
Step 2 : Make it your mission to not touch other cars like your life depends on it.
Step 3 : Combine these 2 and you' re on the right way.
Now for more techical things like overtaking and defending position PD could have some vids or demos to show us I agree.
If they are stupid and the game don't like it I don't understand why you spent money to buy it.
License centre should have morphed into an actual racing academy several games ago, probably when they started with GT Academy in real life. That sort of thing should have been implemented into the game, so you had a virtual teacher in the game teaching you the basic driving techniques and then taking you out on laps where they tell you live "You braked too hard, too early" or "You're turning in too late" or "You're braking whilst turning". It really shouldn't be too hard, the game knows all your inputs, it knows the correct line, it knows the braking points.
The current licenses give you basic instruction on what to do and then force you to work out yourself where you're going wrong. Whilst there is technically nothing wrong with that way of learning it's been proven quite conclusively that we learn better with clear, real-time instruction and guidance.
They also mostly focus entirely on solo driving, they don't teach you clean racing techniques. This is something that again a real racing instructor would do.
Heck, they could even have a short written test before the practical one to get your racing license, give you 10 or so basic multiple choice questions about racecraft and rules.
But no, instead we've just got the same soulless, empty license tests that we've had in every other game where you come away knowing the optimum way to drive a Clio around three corners of a track under 23.4 seconds, but not much on the fundamentals of car dynamics and most importantly, race craft. You can complete a number of those tests "accidentally" without understanding just why your rear was sliding around most of the corners.
Does any other game do this? No, but that's exactly why GT should. It already started 25 years ago, time to move the idea on.
The current licenses give you basic instruction on what to do and then force you to work out yourself where you're going wrong. Whilst there is technically nothing wrong with that way of learning it's been proven quite conclusively that we learn better with clear, real-time instruction and guidance.
They also mostly focus entirely on solo driving, they don't teach you clean racing techniques. This is something that again a real racing instructor would do.
Heck, they could even have a short written test before the practical one to get your racing license, give you 10 or so basic multiple choice questions about racecraft and rules.
But no, instead we've just got the same soulless, empty license tests that we've had in every other game where you come away knowing the optimum way to drive a Clio around three corners of a track under 23.4 seconds, but not much on the fundamentals of car dynamics and most importantly, race craft. You can complete a number of those tests "accidentally" without understanding just why your rear was sliding around most of the corners.
Does any other game do this? No, but that's exactly why GT should. It already started 25 years ago, time to move the idea on.
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- 1,174
- Phoenix, AZ
- MonyB
Need? No. But for a beginning player, the extra detail and reasoning given by a narration are helpful for the newbie to understand how and why you do certain things.
Granted, it is much quicker to watch a demo without the narration - lord knows I needed them for a few license tests. I guess in the best of all possible worlds, we could have demo options with and without narration.
- 52
- United States
Some of y'all didnt get that GT5 collector's edition Apex book and it shows. 🤪 But no, I agree the game definitely leaves a lot open for the player to discover on their own[if they're lucky]. And honestly considering how lazily the AI chase the rabbit races are constructed they could've easily had some instructions on how to methodically win those types of races.
As far as actual races...I dont have a suggestion. A lot to factor in there. shrugs
As far as actual races...I dont have a suggestion. A lot to factor in there. shrugs
- 1,465
- Indonesia
The text bubbles in the game, which happened at the end of the License if failing or not getting Gold, is already rage inducing, the 'encouraging' text can feel passive aggressively insulting the player, causing rage quit or even wanting to punch the tutors themselves (or potentially breaking things out of rage). Let alone it happening in the middle of race constantly, all those psyche effects happening at the middle of driving instead.
If there can be actual property damage done players by implementing this, then PD is responsible too.
Yeah but those bubbles are generic based solely on you failing, I'm talking about a system that recognises where you're going wrong via it's own telemetry.
"Try a little harder next time" is, as you say, rage enducing and useless feedback.
"You're braking a little too late on the 2nd corner" is good feedback. That's what they should be providing.
- 813
- United Kingdom
- 817
- Brazil
I didn't know about F1 Cody games, mainly because the last one I played was F1 2014
Funny that you remember about Ferrari Challenge because i'm still playing that game to this day!
In NFS Shift you could "master" corners in racing or time-attack. The problem with this mechanic is that you can do it with any car, so to "master" Nurburgring, you can take a very slow car and just have a nice and relax walk around the ring and "master" it.
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