Slothy

Been quite a while since I've made a blog post. I've actually had a few things I've been meaning to talk about regarding the strategy game but since much of it is about character design, I'd rather wait a bit until I have more to actually show everyone. So instead I figured I'd talk about some stuff I'm playing lately, largely from a design perspective obviously because that's just the way I tend to look at a lot of stuff after the first few play sessions.

Anyway, I've been rather obsessed with Gran Turismo 5 since I got it a week before Christmas. I always tend to get absorbed into the experience of these games more than most others. Very few games manage to create a flow type of experience for me; where I just get absorbed in the experience and the world and most of what we'd think of as conscious thought starts to fall away and it's just me, the car and the track. It's a wonderful state to be in when you can find it, and GT is a series that almost never fails to get me there.

That said, there's still some elements that are bothering me to no end. A lot has been made of the menu's being terrible, and for the most part they're kind of bad, although not as bad as everyone seems to think, especially compared to previous games in the series. Anyone who's played GT4 but can't remember the nightmare of a layout it had should go back and play it again. GT5 is a large improvement over navigating a map screen which has multiple tuning shops, dealers, and race series spread across it, seemingly for no other reason than to be a pain in the ass. It all got a little ridiculous. Want to race this series? Well then you'd better go over to this portion of the map and choose the professional races. Feel like racing this other series? Go select this country over here. Single make race? Better drill down through several screens to find that particular one.

As ugly as GT5's menus are, they at least made some effort to consolidate things under one roof when it made sense to. Dealers, races in one other, a single tuning menu (mostly). There's still some redundancy like having to go to a separate menu from the one where you normally buy parts in order to add spoilers and the like, and some other things that don't make sense like changing your cars tires in a completely separate menu from the regular car tuning menu but at least it's a bit of progress overall. Speaking of tires though, I can't understand why the tuning menu will list the tires I have for a car but force me to go to another menu to change them. I can even understand why they show up in the other menu too. The one where you change tires loads faster and I'm more likely to change my tires for a particular race than completely change the tuning of every part of my car, but why not let me change them in both screens? Particularly when the tuning menu is where you went in previous titles to change it? It honestly took me more than a race or two to figure out that it didn't automatically change my tires to the best allowed by the race and that I had to do it myself. Again, I don't want to sound like I'm complaining too much since the menus in every GT game generally suck and these are a big step up from GT4 (particularly being able to access the garage before entering a race series and having it automatically show only cars which can run the race), but my god do they still have a long way to go sometimes. Frankly, I'm surprised the guys designing their menu system still have jobs. The less confusion, and the less I have to several different screens to do one thing the better, especially in a game with pretty hefty load times.

One other thing that's bothered me a lot is the leveling system as well. For those who don't know, GT5 has introduced an RPG like leveling system. As you race you gain experience so you can gain levels and unlock new races and the ability to buy better cars. I'm not really sure how others feel about it, but as long as we're talking about redundancy I might as well throw my feelings on it out there. I can certainly understand that some people out there may like the false sense of improvement this system provides, but I personally feel it is not only unnecessary, but is actually impeding my progress, particularly as I get higher in level. Right now I'm actually halfway through level 22 in the game and have beaten almost every race I can that I've unlocked so far. I'm more than ready to move on to the next set of races but I can't. Instead I'll be forced to grind for at least another hour by my estimates to unlock them. And what's worse is that I still won't be able to do one of those race series when I do hit level 23, because it requires I get a car I can't buy until I'm level 24 despite having the money for it now, and I can't win it in any race series. And sadly, that's not the only example of this happening.

And I can't see why this system needed to be implemented anyway except to provide some false sense of progress and make a game that already was a bit heavy on grinding at times even more grind heavy. In previous games my ability to move forward was impacted by nothing but my skill as a driver (either when winning races or completing license tests) and how fast I could make money or win prize cars which let me compete in higher races. And I would argue those were actually sufficient barriers to ones progress as it let players who weren't very good build their skills before moving too far in the game and the expert players could bypass much of it and advance quite quickly in the game by racing well and exploiting race series which provided a lot of money and expensive cars to sell. Now I'm being held back by a system that provides absolutely no real benefit to my gaming experience and actually actively takes away from it. In the early stages of the game it wasn't so bad. I easily blew through many of the levels up until around the late teens. But now it's impeding me and the only reason that even comes to my mind as to why leveling was added at all is because either someone thought it would be a good idea and no one bothered to question it or because adding RPG elements is the cool thing to do, even when it makes no sense to do so.

Again, I don't want to sound too negative. The game still provides the GT racing experience I love and is definitely one of the better entries in the series overall. I'd even say it's a strong contender with GT4 for being the best in the series in my eyes. I just wish there weren't so many little things taking away from the experience. Mind you, I feel that way about most games.

Not sure what you can look forward to from my next blog post. Maybe something about the strategy game if my spriting improves, but more likely I'll throw out my thoughts on some other game before that.