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DRIVECLUB |OT2| You Can't Rush Evolution

QaaQer

Member
I am sick and tired of this PIECE OF SHIT ARIEL ATOM. Would you like to turn around a shallow bend? HERES A 270 DEGREE SPIN. I've been gaming for decades and nothing has ever made me this frustrated. I'm not sure much has ever come close. Any slide that causes a loss of speed sees the AI cars ruin everything.

Having finally beaten the first round in the event that forces you to suffer it, I find the next one is even worse. The Venom hot lap was a walk in the park by comparison.

haha, yeah I thought that way too at first, even rage-quitting once. But once you get the hang of it, it is the most fun and satisfying car to drive in the game imo.

It has almost zero grip at low speeds, but get some speed and the grip comes. It requires aggressive driving. Powerslides are important (don't use the handbrake to initiate them, except possibly on the tight hairpins). Also, be careful with the accelerator during cornering, I sometimes just coast through corners.

I've been practicing the Norwegian track with the tunnel in time trials with the Atom and have gotten up to 91 on the global leaderboards. I think that is only because people hate that track and/or the atom though, so the competition isn't super strong in that event. Still, 91 makes me smile.
 

DCS

Banned
I'm not in a club, I don't know anyone who plays this. I don't like their boneheaded decision to lock some cars behind community participation when the online stuff only works 50% of the time.
Join my club man, search for 'Horlixdix' and you'll get those cars straight away.
 
I am sick and tired of this PIECE OF SHIT ARIEL ATOM. Would you like to turn around a shallow bend? HERES A 270 DEGREE SPIN. I've been gaming for decades and nothing has ever made me this frustrated. I'm not sure much has ever come close. Any slide that causes a loss of speed sees the AI cars ruin everything.

Having finally beaten the first round in the event that forces you to suffer it, I find the next one is even worse. The Venom hot lap was a walk in the park by comparison.

The Atom is awesome. Just remember to not put the power down through the corner, wait til your wheels are straight and you're golden. Reminds me a lot of the Zonda R in GT5 actually; careful use of the throttle is key.

I genuinely don't get the hate for the Atom. It's reslly satisfying to drive when it all comes together.
 

Mokubba

Member
YES

Finally got under 1:16 for the Venom hot lap.
I got flashbacks of the Vettel challenge on GT5 with that one.

I'm surprised there wasn't any trophy for getting all 225 stars.
 
Probably wont be able to join until tomorrow after work but I got DriveClub last weekend and I'm really enjoying it. Anyone have an open spot in an active club I don't have any friends who own the game. My PSN is Philaphillies21
 

Zalusithix

Member
Just as a FYI to Supa, I just took up the last slot in Auto Da Luz, because I might as well be dumping my points somewhere. That and having extra cars to play with is always nice. =) Can't say I'm a huge fan of the masked club badge though lol.
 
I've just made a club. Sons of Anarchy was taken, SonsOfAnarchy was also taken. So I've gone with SonsOfAnarchyUK. I'm pretty happy with my badge as well. Was actually quite fun putting it together with my girlfriend.
 
Just as a FYI to Supa, I just took up the last slot in Auto Da Luz, because I might as well be dumping my points somewhere. That and having extra cars to play with is always nice. =) Can't say I'm a huge fan of the masked club badge though lol.

I was just messing around with it the other day and the editing tools for the badge are so incredibly limiting that it's frustrating. Glad you're part of the crew.
 

Zalusithix

Member
Ah, that euphoric feeling of beating your previous ghost that's been tormenting you for the past hour by a decent margin. Followed by the grim realization that'll take multiple times that to beat it again. At #13, it's the best I've managed to rank on this track with a vehicle I've invested any time into. (Scotland BHR 2, Lotus Exige) I've put over 1200 miles on this track now and I'm still somehow not tired of it.
 
Really enjoy this game a lot so far, up to about Lv17 now. That must be about 12 hours by now. I've done a lot of time trials goofing around a bit with different cars with the HUD off which seems to level rather slow. I really like the balance between the controls and gameplay right now. The little incentives to try get people to race clean, and the way cars sort of break or stay in control is rather forgiving I think, but it helps ensure lots of really tight and intense SP or MP races so far. I love all the 'mini-dings' or events that happen during races, or at least the concept. Face-offs so far are losing their appeal because I find the Drift ones usually hurt my main objective (lap time or something; maybe I'm not good at drifting yet? but it seems slower in this game than a perfect line), the driving line ones are OK but often I have a line that's almost as good but different just because there are so many opponents blocking the 'optimum' line, and then the speed ones are mostly broken because almost every time I get one, it's against somebody that somehow went 10,000 or 20,000 KPH lol. But in general, I love the concept. I wish they were a little more important, gave bigger leveling boosts, and even were more dynamically tied to the event. I like the actual static challenges like get X time but also get Y drifting points to get a star.

Anyhow, having an absolute blast so far. Maybe my favorite arcade racer since Burnout 2 and Burnout 3. Reminds me of classic Project Gotham, too.

Clubs and stuff are kind of cool, too. I joined a random new one and sort of created a cool sense of camaraderie with the other 5 strangers, and how we're all leveling together. It's cool to see when someone else levels up the club while you weren't playing. Also a cool concept. In general all the great and seamless social tie-ins are really neat, and while not always well balanced, very well executed.
 

Zalusithix

Member
I was just messing around with it the other day and the editing tools for the badge are so incredibly limiting that it's frustrating. Glad you're part of the crew.

Well, on the topic of badges, it looks like the club unlocked another 36 badge shapes and 12 paint jobs when the club hit level 30. =)

Edit: And this game seriously has me considering getting a wheel sooner than later. At least with a wheel I can blame myself for any fuckups. With the controller I have to watch as my apparently physically impaired driver refuses to turn the damned wheel more than ~90 degrees in a given direction for any corner taken above walking speed.

Edit 2: I think they're going to have to rework the way faceoffs are handled. Run a track enough and eventually you reach a point where you're extremely unlikely to beat the next faceoff. Players have effective skill caps, and can't continually get better forever. Considering that fact and given that you get no points for "failing" a faceoff, once you reach that point, you're better off just disabling them all together. There's no point in dealing with the distraction if you're just going to get rewarded with failure notifications 99% of the time.

It's even more silly since the game tracks the number of times you win a faceoff vs attempt it. It's a totally useless statistic because all faceoffs aren't created equal. You can game the system by slowly doing better each lap and "win" each time. Or you can go balls to the wall the first time and immediately start facing off against ones that are far more challenging and require effort to beat. The game should reward you for the later approach, but instead punishes you for it.

Thus I propose dropping the faceoff won/attempted statistic all together. One less thing to bog the overloaded servers down with. In addition to that, the way points are rewarded should be modified in a way which behooves people to keep them enabled even when their chances of winning them are low. I don't think the challenge should regress to allow easy wins again, but instead have a system that somehow rewards points depending on how close they are, with a bonus payout if you do win. Points rewarded would be based on how difficult that particular faceoff is. I mean, a faceoff against the best score on the server should be worth way, way more than one on the bottom. Even getting close to such a score would take more effort than winning against the lesser ones.
 

DirtyLarry

Member
I took a few weeks off from playing the game. Figured I would give them time to sort things out and also there was so much else to play it was not a big deal at all.

I have never had a complete lack of completely forgetting a games gameplay mechanics like I experienced with Driveclub yesterday.
For example I could take months off of playing both GT6 and Forza 5, and would just need 1 race to get back into the swing of things.

I played for upwards of an hour yesterday and was truly driving awful the entire time. I never got the feel for it back. It was quite frustrating to say the very least. It was truly like I never played the game before.

Just curious if anyone else has had a similar experience? I am actually heavily considering starting over because of how bad I was driving last night.
 

AndyD

aka andydumi
Well, on the topic of badges, it looks like the club unlocked another 36 badge shapes and 12 paint jobs when the club hit level 30. =)

Edit: And this game seriously has me considering getting a wheel sooner than later. At least with a wheel I can blame myself for any fuckups. With the controller I have to watch as my apparently physically impaired driver refuses to turn the damned wheel more than ~90 degrees in a given direction for any corner taken above walking speed.

Edit 2: I think they're going to have to rework the way faceoffs are handled. Run a track enough and eventually you reach a point where you're extremely unlikely to beat the next faceoff. Players have effective skill caps, and can't continually get better forever. Considering that fact and given that you get no points for "failing" a faceoff, once you reach that point, you're better off just disabling them all together. There's no point in dealing with the distraction if you're just going to get rewarded with failure notifications 99% of the time.

It's even more silly since the game tracks the number of times you win a faceoff vs attempt it. It's a totally useless statistic because all faceoffs aren't created equal. You can game the system by slowly doing better each lap and "win" each time. Or you can go balls to the wall the first time and immediately start facing off against ones that are far more challenging and require effort to beat. The game should reward you for the later approach, but instead punishes you for it.

Thus I propose dropping the faceoff won/attempted statistic all together. One less thing to bog the overloaded servers down with. In addition to that, the way points are rewarded should be modified in a way which behooves people to keep them enabled even when their chances of winning them are low. I don't think the challenge should regress to allow easy wins again, but instead have a system that somehow rewards points depending on how close they are, with a bonus payout if you do win. Points rewarded would be based on how difficult that particular faceoff is. I mean, a faceoff against the best score on the server should be worth way, way more than one on the bottom. Even getting close to such a score would take more effort than winning against the lesser ones.

I agree that it needs to be redone somewhat. I keep referring to SSX and the way they approached this as far better for the player. You got challenges that felt beatable as they were always ever so slightly more improved than the player. But maybe that's because there were so many more people playing that game.

Also, every time someone lost a challenge to your time, you got some money. So even if you didn't win and beat challenges, you still earned because those below you were consistently presented with your time to beat.

All in all I agree, at some point you hit a skill plateau, and then there's the bugged scores, so you inevitably stop winning altogether and instead get frustrated with repeated losing.

Another thing they should do is within races have the same challenge displayed to all racers, and award points for that accuracy as well. So you might not win the race, but if you were the best at all race challenges you can still get points. We all know that while we race flat out to win, we won't be sliding around to meet a drift challenge. You either go for speed, or drift points, but rarely can do both.
 

Zalusithix

Member
Just curious if anyone else has had a similar experience? I am actually heavily considering starting over because of how bad I was driving last night.
I exclusively do time trials, and on the same track by and large, but even a day away will reduce my skill. It takes a bit for me to get back into the zone. Granted my off times aren't horrible, but I'll have very little chance of a top 50/100 score for the first hour or so. It also takes time to get to grips with a different car's handling when switching - especially if they're in different classes. I enjoy the challenge though. It feels more rewarding when things go right.

I agree that it needs to be redone somewhat. I keep referring to SSX and the way they approached this as far better for the player. You got challenges that felt beatable as they were always ever so slightly more improved than the player. But maybe that's because there were so many more people playing that game.

Also, every time someone lost a challenge to your time, you got some money. So even if you didn't win and beat challenges, you still earned because those below you were consistently presented with your time to beat.

...

Another thing they should do is within races have the same challenge displayed to all racers, and award points for that accuracy as well. So you might not win the race, but if you were the best at all race challenges you can still get points.

Both of those would also work. The points for people challenging yours would probably be the easier solution to implement mechanically compared to my partial completion points. They already know who is presenting the challenge, and it wouldn't require them to come up with a new scoring mechanic to handle calculating points based on how close you are. Get X for winning a faceoff, get nothing for not winning. However, get Y points for every person to challenge yours but lose. X and Y could be static, but ideally would also scale based on the challenge represented.

We all know that while we race flat out to win, we won't be sliding around to meet a drift challenge. You either go for speed, or drift points, but rarely can do both.

Yep, same thing applies to time trials. Pretty much all of the faceoffs aren't possible to beat if you're actually concentrating on getting a top time. Virtually all drifts rob speed, let alone the crazy drifting you have to do to win those challenges eventually. Average speed zones reward movement between A and B without regard to whether you can control your car after point B. Cornering lines aren't necessarily laid out for best course times. I mean lower end faceoffs can be hit while driving for best speed, but once you put effort into a given faceoff, you'll no longer be able to care about it while you're otherwise doing good on the TT. They only become feasible when you've botched the run. Even then, you'll hit the skill cap eventually and not bother with them at all.
 

i_max

Neo Member
We have a slot left, anyone in South East US trying to find a club, we're I believe 27 plus level. Send an request to ApexWinners
 

sneaky77

Member
I think the only thing that I cannot get to work is the challenges, it seems when I load the game is always trying to load but never lets me select the mode.. do you have to let it load for a while?
 

Zalusithix

Member
The Challenges haven't been fixed and therefore are not available for the time being. As far as remember it wasn't mentioned officially when they will.

Giving an estimate of when challenges will be available would require them to have an idea of when their servers will actually be functioning properly. They're still flaking out even without the additional load that challenges would introduce.
 

Tommi84

Member
They're still flaking out even without the additional load that challenges would introduce.
Yup, it just proves how borked the code/servers are. It's sad because the game is awesome and driving model excellent (for a arcade, of course). At least we'll get photomode tomorrow - probably easier to implement than giving the challenges :D
 
Yup, it just proves how borked the code/servers are. It's sad because the game is awesome and driving model excellent (for a arcade, of course). At least we'll get photomode tomorrow - probably easier to implement than giving the challenges :D

I hope to see a post mortem in the future explaining how they could get it this wrong. Given the fact that they have done server load tests someone has to have made a huge miscalculation when it comes to real life network load.

Challenges were my most anticipated community feature. Their absense has soured my experience of the game.
 

Zalusithix

Member
I hope to see a post mortem in the future explaining how they could get it this wrong. Given the fact that they have done server load tests someone has to have made a huge miscalculation when it comes to real life network load.

Challenges were my most anticipated community feature. Their absense has soured my experience of the game.

Yeah, this game has had some of the worst server related issues I can remember. Both in terms of severity (virtually unusable at release), and in terms of how protracted the problems are (still not fully functional). If they did indeed perform testing before hand, then something went horribly wrong with extrapolations somewhere. Obviously this isn't as simple as spin up some more servers or the issue would have been resolved by now. There has to be some bottleneck somewhere that they're desperately trying to sort out (possibly in the database side of things). A post mortem would be very interesting once all the issues have been sorted.

It's a shame too as the underlying game is really damn good if not for the server issues. Not flawless by any means, but still damn good.
 

Famassu

Member
So what the hell do I have to do to get the 1-million-drift-points trophy & drive-1600km-while-in-a-club trophy? I have achieved both (something like 1,017 million drift points, closer to 4000km driven), yet I don't have the respective trophies.
 

Zalusithix

Member
So what the hell do I have to do to get the 1-million-drift-points trophy & drive-1600km-while-in-a-club trophy? I have achieved both (something like 1,017 million drift points, closer to 4000km driven), yet I don't have the respective trophies.
Hoon-a-tic worked fine for me. I haven't been in a club long enough to get the Lifer trophy yet. I can't say I care very much about them though. I mean I've never been big on achievements or trophies, but in Driveclub, the goals within the game are more varied and interesting.
 

Famassu

Member
Hoon-a-tic worked fine for me. I haven't been in a club long enough to get the Lifer trophy yet. I can't say I care very much about them though. I mean I've never been big on achievements or trophies, but in Driveclub, the goals within the game are more varied and interesting.
I'm not super-obsessed about trophies, but I'd like to get the trophies for which I HAVE done everything required to unlock them.
 

Omnipunctual Godot

Gold Member
Oh, my God! I finally got the third star for the Spyker drift event. What a massive pain in the ass. It took me a day and a half, I'm now over 75% through the Spyker owner's club, AND I got the drifting achievement in the process. Wow.
 

Chabbles

Member
I took a few weeks off from playing the game. Figured I would give them time to sort things out and also there was so much else to play it was not a big deal at all.

I have never had a complete lack of completely forgetting a games gameplay mechanics like I experienced with Driveclub yesterday.
For example I could take months off of playing both GT6 and Forza 5, and would just need 1 race to get back into the swing of things.

I played for upwards of an hour yesterday and was truly driving awful the entire time. I never got the feel for it back. It was quite frustrating to say the very least. It was truly like I never played the game before.

Just curious if anyone else has had a similar experience? I am actually heavily considering starting over because of how bad I was driving last night.


Pretty much describes my time with this game yesterday after a couple weeks break. Felt like i had to relearn the driving again, a whole lot of understeer on everything without the handbrake.
 

Number45

Member
Hardest part of this game for me BY FAR is dealing with the other cars, it's fucking brutal. When I'm alone on the track I feel like I'm getting the hang of it, but it's such a lottery when you're against the AI whether they're going to fuck you up. :(

If anyone wants to join my club give me a shout. I have one reserved spot for a RL friend, but other than that it's open for the other four places. Name is Capra Rosso, which lets face it is an awesome name (as long as Google translate served me well, otherwise fuck!).
 

OmegaDL50

Member
I need to send a personal thanks to fellow club member Agressor616. I logged off and stopped playing the game for a week or so.

I come back and see our club progress jumped from 19 to 22, so I just want to you know I appreciate the effort to continue playing the game and not simply quit the club or abandon the game despite the on-going issues the networking stuff.

I don't know your GAF name, but just want to know that I hope to eventually catch up and contribute more points to make the making the club in the first place worthwhile.

Thanks again.
 

GodofWine

Member
Every fing time someone spins me I end up tboned against a wall. EVERY F'IN TIME. It is like it's a design decision...I go from second to so far in last...uhh
 

Zalusithix

Member
You know, I really wish the game would cache the ghosts. No wonder the servers are in a shit state. The game seemingly downloads the ghost again after each restart. If I hit restart, load the same ghosts from memory. Not having the ghost there from the first second of a start defeats the purpose - particularly when on a track where the first couple corners is one of the trickiest parts to get right. Nobody will care if the leaderboards have changed in the interim and you should technically be facing a different ghost. Either way, they're faster than you and act as a pacing mechanism. The old one will work just fine in that edge case. Update the ghosts when A) it is beat, or B) when the player has exited to the main menu and started the race over that way.

And on an unrelated note, I really don't care for most of the hyper cars. The only one I currently don't mind is the P1. Others either feel too stiff or too unstable. That and the P1 at least brings something unique to the table (and has the best looks of the bunch). Maybe I'll grow to like them in time, but as it stands, I find the performance and super classes the best from an enjoyment perspective.
 
Every fing time someone spins me I end up tboned against a wall. EVERY F'IN TIME. It is like it's a design decision...I go from second to so far in last...uhh

Unless I'm mistaken, the update tomorrow addresses spinouts caused by opponents. At least I hope so!

And on an unrelated note, I really don't care for most of the hyper cars. The only one I currently don't mind is the P1. Others either feel too stiff or too unstable. That and the P1 at least brings something unique to the table (and has the best looks of the bunch). Maybe I'll grow to like them in time, but as it stands, I find the performance and super classes the best from an enjoyment perspective.

I just unlocked the McLaren P1, and it's such a joy to drive. Love the BAC Mono but it feels a little like a toy. The P1 feels like a real car, but as fun as the Mono. I'm also a fan of the Lotuses and Ferraris.

Though I have to give a shout out to the Zonda R. It may look and sound odd, and feel too stiff, but it's almost like cheating with how easy it is to drive. Not quite the joy to drive that is the Mono, but probably the most forgiving of the hyper cars.
 

GodofWine

Member
Unless I'm mistaken, the update tomorrow addresses spinouts caused by opponents. At least I hope so!

Yea, I hope, tonight was the worst experience...I
Quit playing and wanted to hit delete game so bad :)

One guy spun me out 3 times, so I parked and waited for him to come around, and rage smashed the living he'll out of him...it was cathartic
 

Famassu

Member
And on an unrelated note, I really don't care for most of the hyper cars. The only one I currently don't mind is the P1. Others either feel too stiff or too unstable. That and the P1 at least brings something unique to the table (and has the best looks of the bunch). Maybe I'll grow to like them in time, but as it stands, I find the performance and super classes the best from an enjoyment perspective.
I think this really is a case of you just lacking the skills/experience. The hyper cars, more than any others, really require you to 1) know the optimal racing lines by heart, 2) learn to handle the gas delicately and 3) learn to brake early enough or slow down at the right points. If your lines are crappy, then you'll easily screw up in one way or the other (especially when going fast), and if you don't know when to slow down/brake, then you can easily understeer or even fly off the track when there are small bumps in the road or sudden elevational changes (so if you find yourself understeering a lot, then just start applying the brakes a little bit earlier instead of Sonicgottagofast.jpg-ing as much as possible). And of course, yeah, if you are too gas-pedal-happy, many of them are easy to lose control of, so you need to kind of get used to the idea that you can't just hold down gas all the time.

I hated hypers at first, too, but I'm getting around to becoming accustomed enough with driving them that I'm finding them becoming enjoyably intense instead of frustratingly hard to handle. I guess one other tip I'd give you is to take tight/U-turns carefully. It's better to be a little early with the braking and come out of corners carefully than risking it and finding yourself off-road/spun around, at least until you've really become accustomed to hypers more and know that you can push the cars to their limits.

The "problem" with hypers is probably that you come out of Supers a little too confident in your skills. Supers are kinda easy to get used to since they have the speed yet you don't lose that much on the handling side of things, whereas hypers are even faster and handling becomes harder not only because of the speed but because they are a lot easier to spin out as well. So you kind of THINK you can handle them because you did so well with supers, but then the hypers require a different approach.
 

garyBig

Member
You know, I really wish the game would cache the ghosts.

Seconded very much. Reminds me of that one-second pause that used to follow each finish line, it's stupid, unnessary and feels jarring amidst the responsiveness elsewhere - only that this particular problem also actually hinders my gameplay, which is... really bad.
 

Vindicator

Member
I need to send a personal thanks to fellow club member Agressor616. I logged off and stopped playing the game for a week or so.

I come back and see our club progress jumped from 19 to 22, so I just want to you know I appreciate the effort to continue playing the game and not simply quit the club or abandon the game despite the on-going issues the networking stuff.

I don't know your GAF name, but just want to know that I hope to eventually catch up and contribute more points to make the making the club in the first place worthwhile.

Thanks again.

Thanks for those kind words.
A Tour event gave me like 1.400.000 points last Weekend, must have been a glitch haha.
Looking forward to do some races again today (while installing GTA V)
 

Hackbert

Member
was today the day for updates and so what? or which week?

ohhh. time to update folks

There's a new Game Update (1.07) available for you to download now.

Please keep sharing your feedback to help us shape future game updates and rest assured that the online teams are still hard at work to keep improving all aspects of online play and server capacity.

Here are the full details of Game Update 1.07:

* Adds Photo Mode to the game. You can enable Photo Mode during gameplay by pressing the right side of the Touch Pad and share your favourite pictures with the Share button.

* Adds three new tracks - all including reverse variants: Yedapalli in India, Los Pelambres in Chile and Wester Ross in Scotland.

* Adds support for the Renault DeZir DRIVECLUB™ Edition and BMW M5, 2013 to PlayStation®Store (available as free download to full game owners from Nov 25-SCEA, 26-SCEE, 27-SCEJ).

* Adds support for the Ignition Expansion Pack - which includes the Ignition Car Pack and Ignition Tour Pack - to PlayStation®Store (free download available from Nov 25-SCEA, 26-SCEE, 27-SCEJ).

The Ignition Car Pack includes 5 new cars:
W Motors Lykan Hypersport
Caterham SP/ 300.R
KTM X-Bow R
BMW M4
Renault Twin'Run Concept

The Ignition Tour Pack includes 11 new Events and 5 new Trophies.

• Adds support for the Photo-Finish Tour Pack to PlayStation®Store (free download available from Nov 25-SCEA, 26-SCEE, 27-SCEJ).

The Photo-Finish Tour Pack includes 11 new Events and 5 new Trophies.

• Adds support for two new livery packs to PlayStation®Store (free download available from Nov 25-SCEA, 26-SCEE, 27-SCEJ).

Each Livery Pack contains 5 new livery patterns to customise your cars with.

• Changes have be made to corner cutting, corner penalties & collision penalties for balancing purposes.

• Improves the Server Announcements functionality and implements a restyled screen.

• Adds the ability to manually trigger reset-to-track by pressing the left side of the Touch Pad.

• Adds the ability to view a Club's current unlocks (Vehicles, Paint Jobs, Club Badge Shapes and Accolade Stickers).

• Integrates Player and Club Cards into various option menus.

• Adds the option to hide and unhide the results screen in order to view the post-race cameras.

• Adds Newest Clubs to the list of potential recipients when sending a Club Challenge.

• Adds the ability to search for a Club by name when sending a Club Challenge.

• Plus a number of minor bug fixes, performance improvements and usability tweaks.
 
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