I want PD to go back to focus on driving cars more than racing cars. If you want to be really serious about racing online, the car becomes a tool for your craft more than something you lust after. Shaving .01 of a second off a sector in a track you have lapped 200 times is what gets you going, not taking photos of your car in a barn. Telemetry becomes your car porn. Next is your racing rig, if you get serious about racing online, your rig quickly follows suit and starts to push the limits of your budget. I love racing, but racing is not what a GT game should revolve around. Driving..the driving experience is what has always captivated me in GT games. Walking into my virtual garage of hundreds of cars , picking the one that suits my mood and then taking for a drive. Normal stock cars, like ones you could go to any dealer right now and buy, on normal stock tires are where GT has always shined. Racing cars are about precision tuning, fine tolerances, millimeters, milligrams and milliseconds. It is a much more clinical approach to the automobile. Sportscars, roadsters, gran tours... a vehicle that feels familiar but exhilarates when you get to push them harder than you ever dared in real life. I want that in my GT games.
I think they should double down on the GPS course maker and get that working the way we all hoped it would. PD should be the first racing sim to have procedural generated roads too. Tour a region or country, stopping off at local race tracks for a track day in your favorite car. Have always online areas a-la destiny where you are driving a back country road winding through a hillside where you are going for a nice drive, getting the tires to bark a little bit on the windy bits when all of a sudden a car zips past you..fuck that sunday drive is over, its on, and you down shift a gear, plant it and the chase is on...and right as you are about to pass him on a diving double left hander, three on coming cars out having their own fun in the hills.. you swerve at the last second and trash your car into a woods. Your car is badly damaged, towed back to your virtual garage where you see it sitting in its crumpled heap. Yep, all damage, wear and tear are persistent in this world. The engine needs work, but you don't want to ditch it. You have a lot of history with this engine, 25,000 miles on it, across 4 continents. You want to keep that original engine so you pay more to fix that and loads of body work. Maybe you leave some less important bits unrepaired, gives your car a little character. Change up the paint job while you are at it and install some upgrades. There are many like it, but this one is yours. The more you drive the car, the more it wears, original parts gaining a little more rattle, a little less HP, but a hell of a lot more character. Eventually you buy a faster, better car, but you get to keep this one parked front and center in your virtual garage to admire every time you enter it to hop into your new ride. Maybe some sunday down the road you hop back in it and head to those hills again to reclaim your lost glory.
That is some shit I want in GT!