I've got a bit of a knowledge hole when it comes to F1 20xx games. How long would the game be if you never played a race twice?
Race length is scalable, so let's set that to 100%.
-A season is 18 or so locations depending on the year.
-At each location the race itself probably averages an hour and a half in length (F1 races go from a bit over an hour to right on two hours long). 27 hours of racing there.
-Each location also has qualifying, that adds up to about 40 minutes. Another 12 hours of gameplay.
-And there's practice. It varies between the realistic 3 practise sessions in earlier games (three hours) to only one in later games (one hour), and it's kind of optional anyway. Although if you're playing through the first time, you will be spending at least a bit of time in practice. Let's say it's 18 optional hours.
So qualifying and racing alone you've got about 39 hours of gameplay on 100% race length, and another 18 hours in practice. There's also some time trial challenges in all the games, the later ones have Young Driver Testing and F1 2013 has a classics mode. I'm not entirely sure how long that is. There's a few more hours of gameplay scattered around.
The hardcore version of the game is then designed around working your way up from a lower team to a higher one by achieving success in a season, but by that point you'll be repeating races, albeit in a different car.
How do you gain access to other vehicles in Grid Autosport?
You choose the championship you wish to enter. You are offered a contract by various teams to compete for them, and each team has their own cars that they run, similar to a real racing team.
Initially, you're only offered contracts for low ranking teams. There's a real difference in car strength, and it can be very difficult to finish well up the order in some of them. To get to a higher level team you need to prove yourself by finishing well relative to your teammate and meeting or exceeding team goals. You'll then be offered a contract with a higher level team if you choose to enter the championship again.
Now... I didn't define grinding. It was defined in the post to which I was responding as "doing the same race more than once", regardless of the advantage conferred in doing so. You're defining it as doing the same race(s) repeatedly if there's an advantage to doing it.
Yes, well. Doing the same race more than once because it's fun doesn't count as grinding, IMO.
People grind because they want resources. Whether it's grinding for gear or gold in WoW, or credits in GT it's still about the resources and not about the actual play. That's what separates grinding from just going for a race.
Because of the type of game Gran Turismo is, the need for that is never really going to go away. As long as there's a credits system, people will need more credits. So labelling driving for credits as grinding is not really that useful in defining an interesting situation, although many people do label that as grinding. It's more a by-product of the relationship between race payouts and car prices than anything else.
What is more interesting is when people feel that it's more efficient to repeat one single race or championship to gain credits.
If the Red Bull events didn't exist it seems quite likely that folk would go back to racing the Like the Wind races over and over again - 140k at 200% for 5 minutes (SSRX) or 130k at 200% for 4 minutes (Indy). Is that still grinding? By the former definition it would seem to be, but I'm not sure if it would be by yours.
The N24 seems to be about the same rate - 25k/minute. Would racing that over and over again be grinding? Again, by the first definition it would be, but by yours it's about the same rate as the LTW races and, since there's no advantage to either event, it wouldn't seem to be.
No. Like the Wind is not more efficient, it's just easier. People do SSRX while texting on their phone and such, which is a good way to multitask, but purely from within the game framework it's fine. As you say, it's roughly on the same level as the "endurance" events, and so a player would not be disadvantaged by spending the same amount of time doing those instead.
Quite so - though the amount of belief that still exists today that says GT6 has the worst credit economy of any GT game to date is astonishing.
The GT6 economy was pretty terrible at release, but so was GT5. Both were fixed in reasonably short order.
If judging by the state of the economy at release, I could see the argument for it.
Actually, there's a better one. "We hate microtransactions so gave our players a really easy way to avoid them. Oh, did we forget to make it a one-hit deal? Silly us."
It's possible, but I'm not a fan of this one.
This requires that PD be so bent over Sony's knee that they don't have a say in how the microtransactions in their game will function, but that they are rebellious enough to sabotage it from within, but that they didn't sabotage it at release.
I think it's far more likely that they simply wanted to make sure that the Red Bull events would be well used. They're being paid to include them (presumably), and so it's to their interest that they make sure that the customer is exposed to that branding on a regular basis. Same reason that they put up VGT events with good payouts, to incentivise players to view the marketing that they represent.
I dare say the majority of users will never need the gameplay extended - they simply won't reach the end of it to need more of it. It seems that only one in three (from PSN accounts registered at the site as owning GT6) have even
got into the S-Class events and not even half have
reached International A (which means they can't even do LTW, let alone N24)...
That said, it's time for a redesign of GT's career mode.
You're probably right, I'm talking about a minority of people who will play through the available content even once.
I'd certainly support a redesign of the career mode. It has some good ideas, but I think it's largely overwhelmed by legacy stuff now. It could really use someone with a fresh set of eyes taking the concepts that are at the core of what makes it fun, and starting a design without reference to the last 15 years of Gran Turismo history.[/quote]
) i have currently 40 mil. and almost all the car i wanted without repeating any a-spec event.
