While the racing and visuals engine is great, sound is great, the courses and cars are great, the weather is great, the DLC cars and courses are (so far) great..
I do think the social aspect of Driveclub is sort of a _fail_, or at least just an experiment in progress.
1/ most clubs are dead and there is no way to easily spot if a club is a zombie or not
2/ if you are in an active club you have to be pro-active to actually make it mean something and issue challenges to other clubs (that you know are active), communicate with your team out of band, etc. A whole lotta busywork tbh.
3/ in-race challenges are pointless.
a. Nobody is interested in a drift challenge when racing to win or post a best lap
b. Driving line challenges are useless as well, they are either easy (slow down) or get in the way (you already know a better line and want to use it)
c. Average speed challenges are also a 'so what' thing
d. in-race challenges issued are just random picks from a big database - sometimes ludicrous (beat this average speed of 28kmh). Who is this random person? what club are they from? how good are they? when did the challenge get stored? all a mystery.
4/ Time trial challenges issued or available, show promise because they are a complete race, but winning them feels empty. Winning one with more than 50 participants is hard, but if you do, the fact you won is lost in time. A challenge from a friend who still plays the game is about the best you can hope for.
5/ Driveclub fame points are pointless - they just accumulate with time, and are not "precious" as some tool tips suggest. The level and number of points means nothing other than a guess at how many hours logged. Although some people can reach level 50 so much faster than others, there is no recognition of how good you are, really. You can get a sense for how far up the tables your times are on each event, but only you really know that information.
6/ Once you beat the 3 stars, you can beat two ghosts: one is the ghost of the next fastest player, the other is the ghost of the top player. This is undeveloped. How about selecting what ghost you want to beat. Maybe your friends ghost, or a top 10 ghost.
IMO without
- leagues
- seasons
- events you must qualify to compete in
- scheduled events with spectator mode and replays
- and then a club system built on top
then the whole social aspect has almost no traction beyond racing ghosts. Jumping into multiplayer, is just substituting AI drivers for unpredictable drivers some of whom will use the mic. Winning in that, isn't satisfying because two seconds after the race is over it is like it never happened.
there is huge potential in a club based. social, racing game. And Driveclub can develop the idea but a lot of what they have already done would need un-doing and re-doing. I'm not sure they have the patience to go down the mountain in order to climb a better one.