Caltrops - Reviews





	[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"][quote name="Gutsby"]I don't really know how to talk about the bits and bobs of this, but driving is important in a driving game, so that's where I'm at.[/quote] No one knows how to talk about the driving in a driving game. The closest most reviewers seem to get is situating it somewhere along a single axis of realism, which is about the worst way to evaluate any kind of entertainment product. I tend to think of it in terms of technicality and dynamism; the former being how much your minute inputs matter, the latter being how much freedom you have to find your own lines. For example, I would consider OutRun a highly technical game, since the gulf between taking a corner well and taking it poorly is so huge, but not a particularly dynamic one, since there's pretty obviously a right way and several wrong ways to tackle each. Burnout I would consider the opposite, very dynamic but not especially technical - precise cornering is deemphasized in preference to smashing and boosting. I would say Forza is both technical and dynamic, as befits any game with claims to simulation, while Ridge Racer is neither, really, but I love it all the same. One element that unites all these games is their predictability; they follow clear, consistent, understandable rules, whether or not those rules have any relation to our real-world physical laws. To me, a good driving model is usually one that makes you aware of your car's limits long before you reach them, while a bad driving model is one that keeps you guessing until it's already too late. [quote name="Gutsby"]I think you might have problems with the way things unlock: you start with a couple of cars and can pursue a "speedlist" from a list of three. These speedlists are essentially just themed (racing, pursuit, driving precision) packets of achievements. So you'll get a speedlist telling you to gold a race, earn 70 000 points in a session, and drift for 200 meters. When you complete it, you unlock a bunch of stuff, including a new car. Pick a new speedlist, unlock a new car, unlock more stuff. It's very simple, but I kinda like how easy it is to sit down, play for 20 minutes, and just unlock a car.[/quote] Honestly, I don't have a problem with unlocking shit. I know if a game is any fun I'm going to want to do all the challenges ANYWAY, it doesn't really matter which order they want me to do them in. I'm only against unlockables in principle because I know there are people out there who really really want to pretend to drive a very specific pretend car, and they're not necessarily always the most experienced gamers in the world. So if completing challenges is a requirement for unlocking cars, the challenges pretty much have to be so easy that literally anyone can do them, which kind of defeats the purpose of having challenges in the first place - unless the purpose is just to waste enough of your time that you feel like you got your sixty dollars worth. This leads to situations where developers start unashamedly referring to the single-player portion of their super fun thrill-a-minute racing games as <b>the grind</b>, and doing a healthy side business selling tokens to let busy people skip it. [quote name="<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-12-fixing-forza-5-how-turn-10-wants-to-turn-things-around">Dan Greenawalt, creative director, Forza Motorsport series</a>"]I understand that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck... I know the statement. But honestly if you look at free-to-play games they usually have things called paywalls, where you're slowly wearing something down and the only way to get around it is to pay. That's not what we implemented in Forza 4 and that wasn't our goal in Forza 5 either. We don't have paywalls. We have acceleration, and that was based on feedback from players in Forza 4 - there's a small group of players that can't be bothered to do things and they have disposable income. They're the sim guys in a lot of cases. They don't want to do the career, and they don't value those aspects, and that's alright by me. With Forza 4 we had car tokens that range from one dollar to three dollars - the most expensive car was ten million credits in game, and it only cost three car tokens which would have been three dollars. That felt like it was not making the car exclusive enough for those who are willing to pay. So we made car tokens equal to credits - it's not about making more money, it was actually about saving people's time when doing <b>the grind</b>. I can totally see how people are perceiving it, but that wasn't our thought process - we designed the tokens last, which isn't how you'd do it if you were making a free-to-play game - you would design that economy and the token economy first, because that's how you make your revenue. That's not how we make the revenue - we sell the game, and the tokens aren't a big revenue driver. As a creative director, we were looking at it as basically giving people cheats, but if you want to put cheats in you have to pay for them, which puts a barrier in and makes it exclusive to those who want to pay for them. The biggest experiment was the acceleration - but that wasn't meant to be a paywall. <b>The grind</b> was not designed to be arduous, but I understand people perceiving it that way and that's why we're making the patch to change <b>the grind</b>. It was not designed to be any more so than it was in Forza 4. We're changing it because that's how people perceived it, and perception is reality. But it was designed based on Forza Motorsport 4 data. We changed it, and we had to make some assumptions - some were right, and some were wrong. We changed so much in the game, and our goal was to make a truly next-gen experience, and some of the assumptions we made in converting our data from Forza 4 to Forza 5 were wrong. And that's why we're fixing it. That's why we lowered the price of our most expensive car from ten million to six million - we wanted to make it more accessible. And we have people that have already earned the car - the GTO and the F1 car - but that was about rarity. We didn't want to lock cars, we didn't want to have unicorns, we wanted it to be based on work that people put in. We're making changes.[/quote][/quote]