Career / Story Mode in Sim Racing – For or Against?

[F_B]

No. If it has a story mode, it's not a sim, it's a game. Story mode means more time and money spent to develop it, so less resources on technical side of things. And SIM should be considered a tool. Racing game however is a GAME targeted primarily for masses and entertainment, with easy controls, probably designed to be playable with console controllers and keyboard.
F1, as in screenshot, can call itself a "sim" all it wants, but input lag, handling and other issues tell otherwise.

EDIT: Before flaming me, I was referring to "story" side of things. Story is the part with characters, actors, voice acting, scripts etc.
Career is very useful for new players to gradually learn driving.

Disagree here. It's not all just black & white.
I love and use sims (most of the time Iracing but I also like AC & ACC, rfactor 2 and RRE) but I also really like a well made career mode and I have to say that I miss that in many sims. Why can't you have a sim with a good career (especially important for single player, yes....they are still alive), it doesn't contradict. After all: we are all playing games in front of a screen with our toy-wheels, it's still not reality although you use a sim.

 

[ShredatorFIN]

Why not. Sims don't often have it, due to their low development resources. But it doesn't make them better sims, but worse.

Racing IRL is also a sequence of races, and points gathered during a long season, not just a single race. You don't simulate that, you don't simulate everything about racing. ACC is supposed to have improved Career mode and I find that a good thing.

I don't need cutscenes or fake emails from sponsors to fill my inbox. Just a realistic championship, with it's rules, points, progression. Maybe even optional "Ironman mode" where you can't restart any race, only save by exiting the game. DNF is DNF, and onto the next race. Maybe your small team needs to pay for every damage, and can go bankrupt.

Like in flight simulators, having campaigns with different consequences for win and loss. Instead of endless skirmish against AI planes, in a meaningless dogfight. Rinse and repeat

 

[DrRob]

I'd love to see a mentoring/training mode, where you get live feedback on your inputs and lines.
I'm actually amazed this hasn't been more of a thing, or maybe I just overlooked it somewhere.

Rather than just progressing through levels of AI weakness, career mode could be more like real life, where the focus shifts from car control via situational awareness into chasing split seconds.
Therefore becoming a more driver centric, and essentially more rewarding, progression.

Wow, I'd really like that. I mean there are some youtube videos around on so many channels to help you with racing lines. But thinking of that MoTec support I was just visualizing a 3D model of the track, the line I took and the ideal line in overlay. Include dry line, wet line(s) and have an easy to understand tool.
I just thought of the indicators in ACC on the right upper corner. If you want the before mentioned idea to be integrated into a career mode and progression, have some kind of indicator on your racecraft based on your driving skill for example. Give progression, if you improve your line. But be sure to give actual feedback, not just some indicator increase. That would be just one idea.
Or maybe more profoundly analyse race behaviour in terms of where you start attacking other racing drivers on track, how fair/unfair you behave, etc. Also use this to give grid penalties or time penalties. So, a first step into a marshalling system.
There are surely much more of these concepts worth looking into.

 

[HazelR]

For me a decent career mode is a must, bad weather makes my internet simulate a yo-yo.
And yes that even includes 'silly celebration dances' by the customisable driver figure, have you not actually watched real life drivers celebrate?
But I also want proper racing rules & penalties. and physics as realistic as is possible consistent with decent performance & control.
Basically mix the customisations from Forza Horizon 4 with the physics from ACC, and AI drivers based on the drivers from RD

But then what do I know? My first 'sim' was white squares on a black background powered by a ZX81!

 

[Pitr]

The best carrier mode is in sims like RaceRoom Experiance, why ? you can setup your own championship, fully custom, for me it`s enought.

Project Cars 2(not the 1 title) and ofc F1 games are also great , well maybe My Summer Car to

 

[Ramipril]

Wether the game comes with career or story or what doesn't affect the way I rate the game, but I am not one bit interested.

I stopped being able to immerse myself in stories a long time ago in games, I just don't care for the standard single player story experience one bit.

Maybe something went wrong in my brain, I can't really engross myself in TV shows either, I'm just always bored and am unable to suspend my disbelief.

Anyway, I like game mechanics. As long as there is a way for me to just have every bit of content unlocked and choose a car, choose a track, choose some opponents, I'm all good.

If other people want to pretend to be an up and coming racedriver working through the ranks frrom bangers to supercars or whatever, that is fine as long as I don't have to suffer through it to get all the content.

First thing I did in wreckfest recently was the steam community mod to give you everything in the garage for free. I would have probably stopped playing it after 30 minutes if I hadn't found that.

 

[DeVxC]

If it's done good yea, otherwise it's a wast of time.
TOCA Race Driver as far I remember was great, I would say GRID did good job too. I don' like careers where they try to be cool, but end up annoying, like DiRT2/3 this dude/man/bro was so annoying. Racing career should be about racing and what I want to do, not grind fest like pCARS - spend five calendar year racing go-karts f*** that... It's my fantasy so I should be able to do what the feck I want.
Story mode in racing sorry this is a no no. I never saw a good one it's always cringy.
F1 by CM try to do something like this with the press conference and stuff but it's too ... scripted? You can ask question and have 3/4 option it's stupid. I'm not going to say anything about NFS, there is no point.

 

[Kjell81d]

I never cared for a story line in any sport game (except baseball). I mostly find it tedious and a time waster. I don't mind the car/team management stuff but the agent and bugging around with fake sponsorships is boring. Spike Lee kind of ruined the experience as a whole for me in the NBA 2K16.

 

[north]

Career, yes. 'Story', no.

 

[Steve Worrell]

I end up creating my own careers. It's a bit sad but on a new SIM like rfactor2 I will start in a slower series, say, skip barber and work my way up to the faster cars.

They will never get it perfect and there's always unrealistic annoying bugs that I think it's better to leave it up to the user to create the story.

Don't know if that makes sense or not.

 

[Dirk Steffen]

To people like me as a user story and career modes in simulation software is a complete waste of development budget.

I want in simulation software utmost realism and a direct connection to engineering.

Now when we are talking about other games (if one has still some time for them nowadays) I LOOOOOOOOVE and in some cases even DEMAND a good story mode as that story is what makes the game.

RPG games for me traditionally are such games - I have absolutely no clue whatsoever what a Fallout game without NPC driven story could possible be useful for and wouldn't touch it ever.

I would for example LOOOOOOOVE a story driven RPG of the quality of one of the Bethesda or Square Enix RPGs completely around motor racing with cross platform plugins into racing simulations.

Say one day you could spend all your time in a story driven RPG experience around research and development of a certain new car component with a little bit of a side story of love and drama of the race engineer you are playing, the next day you would be at the Paul Ricard test track (you could play as the racing teams truck driver and drive that big rig all the way from Stuttgart to the Paul Ricard racetrack).

Having arrived at the track you could play as a security guard, hacking, slashing, karate chopping those pesky Ferrari Ninja spies away from the trailer where they aim to get their greasy fingers on Porsche's latest tech ahead of the season opener.

The next morning you could do some management as the teams racing director, getting all horses in line, managing the teams test days, then putting your race suit on playing as the driver, jumping into the 2019 911 GT3 R to put some test kilometers onto the data logging device only to download and analyze the data properly, playing as the telemetry engineer and discussing setup changes with the head mechanic, …

At some point one would have to play the helicopter pilot who would shuttle a new prototype part from Zuffenhausen to the local airport, where you take over as an Uber driver having to break chase to a team of motorcycle hooligans, armed with Uzi sub machine guns, trying to get to the trunk of that old BMW M5 you are driving (guess these guys were hired by a small team out of Switzerland which just switched to Lamborghini customer racing machines and need that inside detail on the new Porsche parts), …

pure racing sim heaven.

NOW THAT would be a story mode I would care for - if the core sim would use the very best plugin software solutions for each of those experiences instead of trying hard to be mediocre at many things (Project Cars comes to mind) one would experience the very best of everything.

 

[Alex72]

Personally i dont care about them in simulators however they are fun in more simcade/arcade games. Well, IMO they are necessary in those games because if the driving isnt up to sim standards then you (me) need something to hold my attention.

 

[Turk]

I stopped being able to immerse myself in stories a long time ago in games, I just don't care for the standard single player story experience one bit.

Maybe something went wrong in my brain, I can't really engross myself in TV shows either, I'm just always bored and am unable to suspend my disbelief.

It's a real thing. As you age your brain just doesn't dedicate as much of it's processing to enjoyment. Comparing brain scans of teenagers to people 40+ it's an alarming difference with teenagers having a huge area of the brain lit up, while adults have less than half the same area of the brain lighting up.

So we're just not capable of enjoying life the way a teenager is. We're much more logical.

I used to be a big sci-fi fan, but over the years I switched from watching fiction to reading about actual science and now when I watch sci-fi I just spend the whole time going "that's not how space works", "this is just fantasy based on science", "that truck wouldn't be able to keep up with that car", "gene mutations make people sick, they don't cause super powers", I'm a real barrel of laughs.

 

[MrRacer11]

The ToCA Race Driver 2 & ToCA Race Driver 3 cut scenes.

Who can forget the guy called Rick Irving, voiced by Tom Cotcher the Scottish guy.

 

[throughalens83]

LFS, arguably one of the best driving model

This is more then arguable. Recently I got back playing with LFS after two years of AC, 1 year of rF2 and some months of ACC and the first thing I thought was "ten years ago I considered LFS the best simulator?! How was it ever possible!??!?"
About the career/story mode, it's not that bad to have them in a game, if properly done they add a lot to immersion.. personally I like very much the "start with karts and finish with F1" mode.. but surely I can live without them, until I have a way to do offline championships!

 

[liby88]

To people like me as a user story and career modes in simulation software is a complete waste of development budget.

I want in simulation software utmost realism and a direct connection to engineering.

Now when we are talking about other games (if one has still some time for them nowadays) I LOOOOOOOOVE and in some cases even DEMAND a good story mode as that story is what makes the game.

RPG games for me traditionally are such games - I have absolutely no clue whatsoever what a Fallout game without NPC driven story could possible be useful for and wouldn't touch it ever.

I would for example LOOOOOOOVE a story driven RPG of the quality of one of the Bethesda or Square Enix RPGs completely around motor racing with cross platform plugins into racing simulations.

Say one day you could spend all your time in a story driven RPG experience around research and development of a certain new car component with a little bit of a side story of love and drama of the race engineer you are playing, the next day you would be at the Paul Ricard test track (you could play as the racing teams truck driver and drive that big rig all the way from Stuttgart to the Paul Ricard racetrack).

Having arrived at the track you could play as a security guard, hacking, slashing, karate chopping those pesky Ferrari Ninja spies away from the trailer where they aim to get their greasy fingers on Porsche's latest tech ahead of the season opener.

The next morning you could do some management as the teams racing director, getting all horses in line, managing the teams test days, then putting your race suit on playing as the driver, jumping into the 2019 911 GT3 R to put some test kilometers onto the data logging device only to download and analyze the data properly, playing as the telemetry engineer and discussing setup changes with the head mechanic, …

At some point one would have to play the helicopter pilot who would shuttle a new prototype part from Zuffenhausen to the local airport, where you take over as an Uber driver having to break chase to a team of motorcycle hooligans, armed with Uzi sub machine guns, trying to get to the trunk of that old BMW M5 you are driving (guess these guys were hired by a small team out of Switzerland which just switched to Lamborghini customer racing machines and need that inside detail on the new Porsche parts), …

pure racing sim heaven.

NOW THAT would be a story mode I would care for - if the core sim would use the very best plugin software solutions for each of those experiences instead of trying hard to be mediocre at many things (Project Cars comes to mind) one would experience the very best of everything.

U mean the best of all simulation games come togther in one big game , okay than i would love a story mode

 

[Ben Lee]

Personally, I just want a good multiplayer experience. That’s all I really need, that and hotlapping against an online leaderboard. I don’t have any interest in a career type mode or even racing AI.

 

[Antony Snook]

If it's done well then yes not adverse to it.
With an imagination (remember those) you can do it yourself anyway...

Back in the day of Amiga's and Commodores you HAD to have an imagination.
I used to play GC F1 and made up stories and back stories etc..loved it...... i was a kid so not as bad as it sounds...
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I had that game. You could setup team and driver names in a small database. It was real sit in and drive stuff. Code masters i find make the games to hard. and the videos piss you off as they become dejavu. And slow game down.
In this old game You just had a image of a crashed McLaren at Suzuka with Prost walking to the pits after Senna pulled him off. And a image of drivers on the podeom. I Run Race 07 that is as close as i can get. I wish i kept Amiga. You can rig a raspberry pi into it and run retro pie.

 

[Deleted member 637371]

I don't need cutscenes or fake emails from sponsors to fill my inbox. Just a realistic championship, with it's rules, points, progression. Maybe even optional "Ironman mode" where you can't restart any race, only save by exiting the game. DNF is DNF, and onto the next race. Maybe your small team needs to pay for every damage, and can go bankrupt.

I really love this idea. It would be amazing if executed correctly.

I am not into a story mode per say but believe some sort of realistic career progression can be a great addition to a sim. I have yet to see it done really well though.

Managing a budget of a race team, crashes and damage having financial impact, off-track affairs can influence on driving style etc. Hmmm my imagination is running away with itself at some of the possibilities....

I know this wouldn't be for everyone however, and for it to work well, the driving and management side would need to be of similar quality. But given i love racing and management/strategy games, this would be a dream come true for me. Some of the management elements of Motorsport Manager with rF2,AC,ACC, AMS, R3E type gameplay.... I'd never leave the house again!

 

[Matt Lenart]

the girl in the original post looks a bit like Bridgette B.