Until this game there was no concept of campaign. There were race with type/model power classifications which is what we have got.
Incredibly debatable. Those races, and indeed, championships, constituted a campaign. Much like how the Menus constitute a campaign.
although personally I’m not sure how you ever complete a driving game.
By reaching the signified end point set by the developers? In GT's case, that's usually been the credits gained after beating the GT World Championships in the older games, and indeed, Kaz said in the lead up to the release of GT7 that the traditional 'end' of the game was after completing the final menu and watching the credits roll. No different then 'completing' a narrative driven game, except the methods for doing so are different. And GT is no different in that regard.
I’m really really not sure what people want from these things anymore?
If GT is going to continue flying the flag of a structured, Car-PG style of game, then they absolutely should add more races right off the hop instead of cutting content to the bone to give themselves the ability to bring it back in later updates to make up the difference and be patted on the back for being supposed good guys. Really, I'm just going to quote Famine since he gets at the issue better then I can:
I'm pretty sure I could come up with a list of enough single-player races to fill up 300 hours without any repeats (or any feeling of repetitiveness) with just the cars and tracks in GT7 in about half an hour; I think pretty much anyone could triple the current offering without much thought - Kei car race, unmodified car race with 500PP cap, super-tuner Like The Wind race, stick a 90-minute or two-hour "endurance" race in (or a bunch of each; Maggiore is crying out for an enduro, and you've got Le Mans, N24, Daytona, Spa, and Barcelona which all host 24hr races, Fuji and Bathurst hold endurance races, Trial Mountain held 2hr enduros in the PS1 era, Alsace looks great at night, Monza, Brands, blah blah etc), one-make events for all the brands, VGT event... and that's just 30 seconds of idle musing.
And this is why I say there's not enough game. There's easily 300hr of offline racing content possible, but GT7 gives us only just about a half of a tenth of that... while still having the stuff to collect appropriate to a 300hr game. Yes, more will come, and more content will come too, but it could have launched with almost no grinding, just a varied array of races with only the content it has.
That, and actually offer some semblance of difficulty, and rewards for choosing a higher difficulty, instead of masking the same slow and dumb AI under difficulty settings that don't matter in the grand scheme of things because most of the difficulty comes artificially from AI being halfway around the track when you start the race.
Doing races isn’t grinding, it’s racing. What makes it grinding is when you do it because you want something other than the racing or to make credits.
I'd say that racing can be grinding, due to the reasons outlined above. And considering Polyphony,
by their own admission, made car collecting a major part of the game, invariably it means one's going to have to be grinding if they want any of the big game hunting vehicles to finish a scrap book.
Over the next few years I’ll take hundreds of cars round the ring just to see what they are like, do countless hours and get no credits for it.
Good for you. I'm playing the game by the way Polyphony wants me to - buying cars, tuning them up, and racing. And all three of these aspects have various levels of problems that absolutely needs to be addressed, and criticized.
If you like cars, like driving and racing then I’m not sure what the issue is.
That, or you're not willing to listen to the problems outlined by the literal highest ranked member of the staff not named Jordan, reviewers from reputable sites, and people in this very thread, including myself, and think that your reasons for playing the game are applicable to all, when they aren't anywhere close.
