Hopefully you’ll like it better this time around. I know VR preferences can be very subjective, so I can understand why it may not have worked for you. While I don’t know what specifically you didn’t like, I will say that on the performance and visual fidelity aspects of VR, they’ve done some good work over the last year or two. Improvements to the engine and things like DLSS in VR really help it run better.
Regarding the crafting and material collection, I have some good news. From your time with the game, you probably remember the difficulty options of Normal, Survival, Permadeath, and Creative. That last one eliminates all costs and penalties from the game, for people who just want to Netflix warp drive and chill. But, if you don’t want to make it too easy, they’ve since added a ton of granular difficulty controls, most of which are adjustable on the fly. You can make a game that’s otherwise normal, but eliminates crafting costs, if that’s your preference. You may already be familiar with the settings, but I mention it anyway because a surprising number of people I talk to about the game don’t know and have played the game for a long time without realizing they can adjust fine grained difficulty settings.
Absolutely spot on. It reminds me of a comment I saw somewhere on here a few months ago where some clown used “seggs” and someone else responded to them and said they can just say sex because there aren’t any algorithms here that would cause problems for them. The clown has a complete meltdown and ranted and raved in response about how they’ve been using “seggs” long before the internet or some wild shit like that and how dare anyone tell them that they don’t have to use it here. The really fucked up thing was that he got a bunch of up votes and the person they lost their minds on was down voted to hell. I felt like I was losing my mind reading that interaction.
EA rarely makes good use of the devs it consumes and destroys, unfortunately. This isn’t even the first racing team that I was a fan of they’ve destroyed. Hell, it’s not even the first British racing team they’ve destroyed. They’re truly a plague on the industry.
While I definitely hope the people laid off all land on their feet, having a handful of people from a large team show up at another studio doesn’t really do anything for us. We’ll never get another DriveClub or OnRush or Dirt 5 because the magic that team made has been scattered to the winds.
In a perfect world, sure, but I only know of one time when most of a team stayed together after being laid off and that was when Sony shut down Evolution Studios and around 80% of them were picked up by Codemasters. It’s not likely to happen again and the Nacon has multiple fully staffed racing teams, including the one that made the WRC games before EA bought Codemasters and destroyed them.
I wouldn’t hold your breath. Word is, those recent EA layoffs hit a lot of the Codemasters people, including the teams working on their rally games. They mostly kept the F1 team because that series inexplicably sells tons every release (never been an F1 fan myself, but there does seem to be an appetite for those games). Anyone not on the F1 team was moved to another internal EA team whose name escapes me at the moment and they’re working as a support team for others.
Are you talking about the highways? If so, those gave me trouble at first too, but I figured it out. Once you select one from the toolbar, tap a point on the map. That’ll be where it starts. Then, tap the location of the destination, and the highway will form itself automatically connecting those two points.
While I agree with just about all of your points, there’s one thing I’m not clear on. Who’s the monopolist in your scenario? The console space has 3 competitors and on the PC side, you’ve got several more. I don’t see any of the big PC or console companies dictating game development trends. That seems to me to come from the publishers chasing the next big thing, or trying to make their own version of the last big thing. The rest of what you said is spot on, though. We need stronger unions and we need to demystify what developers do. And we absolutely need to tell the tech bro types to fuck off and stop stinking up the place.
They’ve always been quite clear that this is a passion project and that they’re nowhere near done with it. However, that doesn’t stop a chunk of the community from being absolutely convinced that the next update is the last, pointing to all kinds of obscure wording from old interviews or data mined files that are clearly incomplete as proof of this. It’s a really weird thing and I don’t get it at all. I remember last year a lot of people were spreading rumors that the summer update would be the last, based on kind of weird numerology. It’s baffling.
You’re all wrong. It’s DriveClub. They put so much detail in the simulation of air pressure, angle of light coming from the sun, dynamic volumetric clouds, and so much more. On top of that, they simulate their weather on the conditions 100 miles out from the actual racetrack to make things as realistic as possible. It’s absolutely gorgeous.
You’re doing better than most of us!