Driver Profiles

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JohnBM01

JohnBM01

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Driver profiles marks the topic for this topic, GT Planet. Hello.

For Gran Turismo 4, I think with online play, you'll need to build a profile to be used online and offline. For starters, you can input your name (first, middle or middle initial, and last), then talk about location and gender. When I played a demo of PS2 game "ESPN College Hoops (remember, I'm more of a college football fan, even though UConn blown out Georgia Tech in the Men's Final Four title game), before the game could start up, you can choose to have generic names for both teams. So you can call one of the point guards John Doe if you wanted to. So in Gran Turismo, I think racers should have their own profiles. So if you enter in a race, you can look at the other drivers you have to contend with. And as a mini-consideration for GT4, imagine if you had a chance to get to know the generic-named racers before a race or championship began. Who knows? The person on pole in her 3000GT is a lady named Namie Amuro, and the outside polesitter in an RX-7 is "Ayumi Hamasaki" or something. Maybe one other racer in 4th is a Jennifer Lopez. And then there are the others, including yourself. Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 paid no serious preference to driver names as they did car names, but seeing who you are actually dealing with rather than racing against faceless bots, you can have profiles for all the drivers. If GT3 had them, you'd see Beginner Race drivers kind of stay in that mode, but some beginners move up to Advanced, and as soon as you know it, a beginner can race the GT World Championship in Professional mode. You can also learn their skill levels and what makes them a better racer than the next person. Some can have laughable profiles like "in high school, he was called 'whipping boy' because he's lose fights at school, and he's always picked on." And some can have more serious profiles like "some say she is a regular 'girl from down the street, but her driving skills make her a female eqivalent of Michael Schumacher." Hey, I think girls can race as good as any guy. Racing is not only a guy sport, you know! Anyhow, what do you think in terms of driver profiles in GT4? I think they will be in the game for online and offline play, because driving against faceless racers gets kind of dull sometimes.
 
As an owner of a Playstation 2 equipped with the Network Adapter, I can tell you that for online there are allready profiles (or aliases) in use. How GT4 is going to use those profiles is beyond me, perhaps it will use the personal icons in addition to the aliases?
As for profiles for offline, nah, according to PS2 IGN, their test of the HDD will allow multisaving through the use of directories. (Wouldn't mind multisaving on a single memory card, though) It would most likely become faceless offline anyway. The opponents would most likely get imaginative names such as "Opponent 1" - Midtown Madness style. Try to imagine a field with JohnBM01, Opponent 1, Opponent 2, Opponent 3 etc.
If PD would start with driving characteristics however, then I wouldn't mind it (as long as they would use regular names, such as K. Yamauchi, D. Beckham, C. G. Bernadotte Rex etc - you get the picture), so the programmers could link specific driving characteristics to a specific names. But then there should be slightly more people in the game other than spectators.
 
Re: "K. Yamauchi"

Yup, we may be racing against the man himself!

Cheers,

MasterGT
 
hmmm...

btw it just crossed my mind with the profiles, how would we win money? Obviously we get money by completing races in offline mode but do we get money on the online mode?

Can we bet money and race other peeps?
 
Well, what if you want to build your own profile? You may be able to build one profile to save certain aspects of the race, and you can even load up an alternative profile in case you accidentally overwrite something or you accidentally delete your primary profile. And plus, it's not like your name will be sounded out by announcers, so why not? If the AI racers had profiles of their own, you might be able to keep track of who actually has a rivalry against you. Imagine grudge matches against your biggest rival. And like I said in another thread, I think the profile thing should be believable without giving Gran Turismo 4 a storyline.
 
Multiple profiles should be watched carfully, to avoid thoes 100% win clowns, the second they lose a race, they create a new profile and start again so they always have 100% win status.
 
You got a point there, Live. Of course, I just hope I'm not facing ex-members of Osaka TXR3 gang "NO LOSER." Either them or "Darts." So yeah, every profile is affected. I think Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution did it best. I mean, in this game, you basically take a VF4:E character and you go to all the arcades in the city taking on all VF4E players. And the thing about this game (I wouldn't recommend this for GT4) is that the models are based on actual players in arcade tournaments for that game. Why wouldn't I recommend this for GT4? It would be too much work. Plus, how can you accurately keep track of several different real players to a game that hasn't even been released yet (as of this post), which demo version only has 5 tracks, whose racing habits can actually be told apart from others, and overall... which racers are more likely to win more than others. That's why I wouldn't recommend the "Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution" approach to AI characters. I wouldn't even recommend using GT3 players to play in GT4. I mean, that's stupid. GT4 is a totally different environment than GT3. Not to mention the penalty system (post a reply in "Penalty Considerations" for more on this), in which aggressive GT3 players will be silenced like calming down a mad dog.

So what is a better approach to this? Generic characters. I mean, I don't even care if they come from Tokyo or Oita or Sapporo or Kobe, generic profiles should be based on driver talents. So someone with a B-grade license drives less talented than an IB or IA driver. I don't think it should be an RPG deal, whereas you level up. You can do that on your own just by winning races and earning cars. Had it been more of an RPG, experience points would be given out in races, so someone with 2000 exp in the beginner leauges can jump into 325000 exp within winning races, and may challenge you in future races. But Live4speed, you're right about the "clowns" that think they are perfect. Heh, not so perfect when you're trailing by 6 seconds with no way to fight back. Oh, and by the way, if you do face a Michael Schumacher wannabe, give him/her Hell. And make sure that racer plays fair.
 

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