Hello there! Today I booted up Driveclub again after more than a year of not playing it. The reason I stopped playing is the fact that the game and its DLC were delisted from the PlayStation Store in August last year, meaning that my game would remain incomplete.
Nowadays, Driveclub is what you managed to cobble together while it was still on the storefront, and for me, that is only the base game, which renders 90% of the potential content unplayable. Of course, the multiplayer servers were shut down too, so there are no more challenges and no more multiplayer and clubs. The only thing you can do is get all the stars in the singleplayer races. The singleplayer experience was affected too, because the game had a system in which you could see the ghosts of other players in time trials, random challenges would pop up on track to beat the speed of other players, or to follow a racing line better than them or even beat their drift score.
At the start of each race, under your car appears a pop-up which tells you there was a problem connecting to the servers, as if the game is still hopeful that this state it experiences is temporary. After the race is over, you are presented with a menu, but most of the menu options are greyed out, because they were the social functions of the game. The only remnant of my multiplayer interactions with the game is the club wrap for my cars, forever being the second available option for a car when I start a race.
Thing is, the game is quite good, it is an arcade racer in which the cars have actual weight and the omnipresent "brake to drift" mechanic popularized by Burnout does not appear. I do not mind this mechanic in particular, but it seems that people gravitate towards it, including it in every arcade racer. In Driveclub, if a corner is too sharp, you will have to slow down to take it efficiently.
You could say the game is a bit similar to the original Grid (funnily enough, Grid 2 features "break to drift"), being a more realistic take on the arcade racer in which you drive around circuits. Yes, the game features legal racing. There is also a points system in place, similar to the Kudos system from Project Gotham Racing, rewarding you for clean driving and stunts like drifting, but it also penalizes you for reckless stuff like collisions with other races and the environment. These points go towards unlocking new cars to play with and new wraps for your cars. If you want to unlock wraps for a certain car, you have to drive cars from that car's manufacturer to earn points for that brand.
All in all, the game is now an abandoned mess, as most of it doesn't exist anymore. This is a testament for the games as a service model, showing that if a game doesn't bring the big bucks, they will just pull the plug on it. Driveclub is still a happy case, as there is still some game to be played, however minuscule, but most of these kinds of games are not that lucky.
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