I always played with the older stock cars, which you could upgrade to instane levels - which is what made that work. My favourites were an old used Impreza or Lancer (not the WRC models, but regular street models). Where possible, I'd get the cars I (used to) own.
Besides, the event system made sure you needed different class cars, so that's an argument against your comment as well.
Car selection is a big deal to a lot of people, you can't honestly deny that.
of course selection is a big deal. im talking about the novelty of having 500 cars and all that jazz.
Simply stating that in the end you have 10 cars or so you actually drive around a majority of the time. You may have 150 in your garage, but you will not drive them all.
But who knows. I'm quickly finding out I'm a different gamer then some lol. some folk are anal as hell and are collectors and will spend 400 hours getting every single car and such like that.
For me though, I generally end up with something like.
Best Handling Car
Fastest Car
Favorite luxury car
Favorite luxury sports car
Favorite supercar
Favorite car to just drive ( usually a Shelby Cobra )
Closest Car to Reality
Online racer
Stuff like that. Which in the end, even in a game like Gran Turismo 4 and 5 , my favorite car games .. maybe ever ( driving wise ) I would have a gigantic list of cars in the garage and still gravitate toward that super fast car that is hella fun to drive down Nurburgring. I would sometimes just take a car out to drive around. But come on, you know as well as I do that when the game offers you 50 Ferarris, you end up actually buying maybe 4 of them, and only actually racing with 1-2 of them.
Speaking of ... would love to see this engine on that track.
But yes, before you say the inevitable " EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT " line, I know that already. Guess I'm speaking from a more casual gamers perspective these days who doesn't have 300 hours to collect 300+ cars and certainly doesn't care enough about each one to master them all or upgrade them all. But yeah ... even back when i did have all the time in the world I still didn't do that. So I dunno.
50 cars is smaller then some games. And actually more then other games. As I said, as long as the actual cars themselves are varied from one another and fun to drive, then thats perfect. Oh and lets not forget that everything about these cars is rendered to the smallest details. Including the specific manufacturer screws lol. Fully modeled interiors and everything. How many premium cars did GT5 have at first with the fully modeled interiors and everything?