Of course these were added later, I had already did all the races up to the endurance section before the first seasonal came to be so they are a bit of a red herring.
You using your game experiences to fit those of everyone who played GT5 is the red herring. The fact that you weren't able to take advantage of them doesn't mean the Log In bonus and Seasonal Events didn't exist. GT5 did not sell 10 million copies or whatever it was within the 20 or so days when both of them were patched in; nor did everyone spend those days doing nothing but grinding GT5 to unlock all of the races. My GT5 save corrupted around March the following year, and it was night and day how different the game was when I restarted it and when I first bought the game. I got to level 37 without even touching a single A-Spec
or Special Event race in career mode; and the only time I repeated A-Spec Seasonals is when they started doing the performance difference multiplier.
Special events did offer a bit of help but they also were restricted by XP level.
Special Events also generally gave you more than enough experience to reach the next one; and Seasonal Events were not similarly restricted even when they were similarly structured.
GT5 career was very linear, at level 1 there was one event, at level 2 there was another and on up through each of the levels. If you actually played career mode you could not do say 3 events in the first section then 3 in the next section, unless of course you ran those 3 events several times each.
You mean "if you actually played Career mode the way HBR-Roadhog did." I've already pointed out that until you got towards the end of the game, that stopped being required pretty quickly after the game released. The greatest hindrance early on became the level restriction on cars so you'd have something to use, and even that was trivial to get around using either wholly legitimate (raising B-Spec level, which also had the benefit of having Seasonal Events; using preorder/stealth cars) or non-legitimate (having friends send you cars you needed, or simply making fake accounts to do the same) means.
I did not say GT6 was the same as GT4
You came just short of doing so:
In GT4 you had only a few races to choose from until you completed some tests, same in GT6, then more races and more tests and then some content was locked until you reached 25% and some locked until you were deeper in. GT6 is very similar to GT4 in that regard only it takes a lot less time to unlock all the events.
My response, which I will continue below, was explaining how that was not true; because you keep applying the idea that you had to play GT4 the same way you did in GT6 simply because it was an option in GT4.
and here you are saying that you could run all these races "IF" you completed all the licenses first which BTW were about the same as running all the races required to unlock the license tests and doing the tests in GT6. Remember that there were twice as many in GT4.
I skipped through the events in GT6 to unlock S races right away. It did not take long at all before I could run any race I wanted in GT6. GT4 took quite a while to do the same, much much longer than GT6.
20 minutes for B.
20 minutes for A.
20 minutes for IB.
30 minutes for IA (though the penultimate test was a fairly daunting one, so I'll say 45 minutes).
The S licence took about 40 minutes if you bronzed each one first go; which I admit is quite generous time wise but also wasn't strictly necessary anyway, since the game only required it for 4 races and they were all in the Extreme Hall.
So a bit under two hours of work if you were decent that you could opt to do to unlock about 80% of the events in the game, which if I'm looking at the lists correctly is still notably more than GT6 has total. Certainly more varied, though it's hard to make that call precisely when I'm going off of secondary information.
Or you could opt to do licences as you were required, which would make the game the same as GT6 except with more events so it would take longer. That "or" is the important part.
Not only am I reasonably sure that you couldn't get to the "ending" of GT6 you are describing that quickly (though I admittedly don't know from experience), and not only were you
forced to take the latter option above because they put the licence tests in the place where they were most useless; but when you do unlock each thing in clumps and finally get to the end the events for the most part are the same largely unimaginative ones GT5 had; and now the entire category of races you unlocked at 25% in GT4 was
removed entirely.
The concept however is pretty much the same, much of the game is locked until you complete a given test and/or number of different races.
If you break it down that simply, even GT5 1.0 technically fits that definition.
In any case you are welcome to your opinion but the way GT5 was laid out the races either needed to be ran in order or you had to do something else to unlock races.
That, too, is a
pretty big "or" when you had so many options to do so!
In GT6 you can run the races out of order, skipping most of B A IB and IA to unlock everything and then do any race you want in any order you want. This was not possible in GT5.
Again, the only difference as you are describing it is that you couldn't do the final races even with the bigger EXP boosts, which I've already said was the huge problem with GT5.
The seasonals helped, especially the Expert A-Spec but still the higher races were out of reach for a very long time and before they added the seasonals it was really really bad and of course that is when I played GT5, I could not tell you how many times I ran around Indy just to get XP to try and unlock something else or earn a few credits.
This argument is a bit like saying GT6 is still on patch 1.01 and the only way to get needed credits with any sort of speed is by doing the VGT glitch or buying microtransactions. It's an experience that is at odds with how most of the people would have actually experienced the game at this point, since PD took steps so quickly to repair things.
By the time the high payout repeatable seasonal came to be I had already quit playing.
You stopped playing after only 6 months? I know some people did, especially when the PSN thing happened and made the game somewhat unplayable for a month, but the high payout seasonals happened pretty quickly for a game that had major support for a bit over two years; nevermind the one-time huge payout seasonals and log in bonus that showed up almost immediately.
And, most importantly, all of this is all ignoring that the main crux of my argument is that GT6 doesn't allow
player choice for progression rather than any specifics for which game is more linear than the others; and that because of functionality stripped away and/or additional restrictions imposed on top of what GT5 had people are exaggerating how much better GT6 actually is. Couple that with people having cloudy judgment of how much better GT5 was made very quickly compared to how poor it was at launch.
GT6 right now is a damn sight better than GT5 was in November of 2010, but it was only November of 2010 for one month out of the 24-30 that GT5 was actively supported; and GT6 is not
that much better than GT5 that the advancements GT5 had over its life can be overlooked. Particularly when GT6 is
not unilaterally improved over GT5, having issues with obsessively restricting the player that even circa-2010 GT5 would balk at.
On top of the "forced to buy a car to start the game" thing that GT5 introduced instead of allowing the player to do licenses first (ultimately compulsory, as in GT1-4, or entirely optional as in GT5) and use prize cars early in the game, now you are required to buy a
specific car before you can even look around the main menu; and you can't even do licences or get prize cars until the game says you can. That's a massive amount of replayability for the game, completely excised.
With the removal of the gifting tool and, for that matter, most of the online functionality, also goes with the removal of having a friend help you out in the early portion of the game. B-Spec is gone too, so now the player can't even hand off the game to the computer to advance through races.
Online play, which in GT5 was both an option for the player to not have to bother with single player at all and an option to advance your experience level (albeit slowly) is now almost completely dependent on single player advancement since Shuffle Mode was removed and the online payouts are pitiful; and the game
requires you to complete an arbitrary amount of Single Player to even access what little was carried over from GT5.
Even ignoring the more controversial stuff I didn't mention, like whether licence tests being reverted to compulsory was a regression or not, which one of those changes above was an improvement on GT5's ideas for game design? No one
liked the experience system in GT5, surely; but it is truly surprising that GT6's system is given so much high praise when its main advantage is that it isn't the experience system rather than what it does well by its own merit (both compared to the first four titles and even GT5 in places).
