Early Experimental Preview of Career Concept

someone tell me how can I complete this mission faster 3:10

 

After trying out the new features of this update with regards to career mode I got to say that it's great. I especially love the influence I see coming from test drive unlimited. I got hit with the best wave of nostalgia when I bought the first starter car. Seeing the cars in the parking lot before buying them and being able to walk around them and open all the doors and rev up the engine (and even test drive later cars!) really drives that excitement and anticipation of what's to come from your purchase.

I feel like all the little details like the camera panning around the car after buying it really immerse you into the game and make it feel like the car is more than the sum of its parts. It's the small details that really validate the experience and I hope that the team will focus on these some more in the future, like playing some sort of animation when you enter garage mode (maybe putting the car on a lift and lifting it up?) or when you reset your car (maybe like showing the car being put on a tow truck). I know that these things could really be messed up by the advanced damage system of the game since you can deform the chassis of a car into something unrecognizable but I feel like the dev time of implementing these features is worth it for the immersion it adds to the game.

I'm really looking forward to what the team is cooking up for the full release of career mode as what we have so far is really promising. This could very well end up being the pinnacle of car simulation games, where it's not just with the driving aspects that are simulated but the entire ownership experience.

I do have one question with regards to the roadmap for career mode: would the devs consider adding a hardcore mode after the majority of the features are complete, where for example insurance is optional, and the more you crash the more you would have to pay out of pocket before insurance covers the cost and other features that make the game less approachable but potentially more rewarding? Fallout 4 did something similar with survival mode that was added after the game was released.

Also it's great to see the devs being so active in this thread and really listening to the community's feedback and suggestions, more game studios should take note of this engagement with the playerbase.

 

Also I presume its already known that now some of the missions are a little wonky with the updates WCUSA had. Stuff like light poles being in the parking lot drift stuff or the loop that used to be at the end of the bridge not existing anymore

 

I haven't played since my ancient gaming laptop sh*t the bed. I will be getting back into it soon, and want to say I'm thrilled to see advancements in career. Are there or will there be damage lasting/persisting between loading screens? Will there be a way to affordable obtain vehicles for sports like demolition derby/banger racing etc...

Individual parts that can be obtained without them being attached to a vehicle? Or will you automatically trade in your parts when you buy something else? Stockpiling parts would really add to the gear head experience.

 

My first post here, but had to comment after trying the career mode after the latest update.

While there is obviously a long way to go, this initial iteration feels like the basics of what I wanted/needed from a career mode in BeamNG.

I always enjoyed free roam driving and mixing that up with some missions but something was always lacking. There was no permanancy to your car in free roam and no real reward for doing the missions other than some intrinsic feeling of completion.

This mode ties them both together nicely and provides some consquences to your free roam driving.

I agree with lots of the other posts here about the need to balance the economy, providing even more consequences during free roam (Police spawned, fixed traffic cameras, etc), and some mechanic that rewards using your own vehicle for missions.

Some other things I would like to see:

• When choosing parts for your car, show the effect before having to purchase it. It is a bit clunky to purchase something then realise it wasn't what you thought / you don't like it, then have to remove it again.
• [Probably not limited to career mode] Have a rolling 30second instant replay during free roam and a replay for each mission.
• More consistent HUD - I understand that certain mission types need different information on the HUD but it would be good if the rev counter and some other items were fixed across all types.

I look forward to following the updates to this mode over time!

 

Super agree — I put a modded tachometer into free roam but I absolutely can't be bothered to replace it in every single event type. I'd like to have some way to have it permanently across all modes.

 

Any chance we could get a search function for the store/parts. With all the different wheels, not including different sizes and colors of the same wheels, it can be a bit cluttered, especially when looking for those specific rims.

 

Currently not having a PC so I could only watch others play, but I really like what I see, it's getting in a very good direction!

So, after catching up and reading all the posts, do I understand correctly that we're moving away from the mandatory "first finish with provided vehicle" idea? If yes, that's great. It would be a shame to be forced into it, as owning any car would feel as not important side quest.

So, in my head, for it to work with all types of players, you'll be allowed to rent a car for each event, but rewards will be cut down to i.ex. 20% of Beam$ as a fee for car provider, maintenance, fuel, extra insurance etc. and full BeamXP. Yet if you enter with your own vehicle you'll get full reward. Or to name it more player friendly, once you enter with your own car, you'll get a bonus / multiplier for cash. As for "hard" difficulty, I'd personally like to see this "rent-a-car" option only for specialized expensive vehicles like T-series, buses, rock-crawlers, PRO offroaders and GT4 and higher-class race cars that are quite expensive to obtain, but those more common types like drag, drift, amateur rally, street racing events to require a car of your own. This way, by setting difficulty we could have systems for all kinds of players; those who love to grind for their cars, fine tune, and all those goods that BeamNG can let you do to feel rewarded for knowledge and commitment, and those who crave action only without caring too much for their vehicles, ownership and all the other details.

I'm personally into "hardcore mode", challenging gameplay, high price for mistakes. Experimenting with suspension tune, pressure in tires, maintaining brake system and all those details that BeamNG.drive lets you do. I like to care about my cars in games

It has been mentioned that there won't be a way to "beat" the game, but things aren't set in stone
- I'll just say that:

The sandbox part is fine, yet it would be great to have some kinds of bosses or bad guys to beat and a little story involved for each. Nothing too deep, optional for those that don't care, yet something that lets you actually "beat" the game, and continue to play afterwards. I've many ideas how it could be done. For the police part too, so far only labourer part is puzzling to me to introduce a boss challenge type thing. Even a single event like RoC from SLRR with a unique prize would be better than nothing. Yet a combination of NFS: MW and NFS: PS kind of thing with ladder to climb and category (drfit, drag, street racer etc) specific bosses would be amazing and probbably not too difficult to implement? Something for us, completionists, to reach that 100% bar. Maybe some collectibles, like in Overspeed - a quite underrated game, simple yet fun. In which, after obtaining all the upgrades for each car, you unlock a challenge for quite special one of a kind wide-body version of it. IMO Sandbox part is good, but without a major goal carrier may not be as appealing to a lot of gamers. I mean there's a reason why almost all games have a way to beat them, even MineCraft which is the ultimate sandbox. Don't you agree it feels great to finish or beat the game?

 

Specially for races as the sound mix is fu*** up and you hear way more your opponents' cars than your own so shifting by ear becomes imposible.

 

I made a new save file after my old one stopped working, and everytime I have to make a new save. The problem is, it never loads. It just goes to the menu screen without the ui and it has the career mode wip tag in the top of the screen.

 

(Oh man, I've completely missed this thread. I've already created a separate thread for my career mode feedback but turns out it was here all along. Here's some of my feedback)

I've been trying out the recent update to career mode and it's getting a lot of fun! Especially with the progression of unlocking missions. But I've found some issues with the general gameplay loop of it at the moment, so I want to share some of my thoughts on how I think it could be shaped in the future.

I fully understand it's heavily a work in progress and maybe some of my ideas might be already planned, but I'm interested to hear what you guys think!

Current gameplay issues, so far, I think

Currently the gameplay loop looks something like this: you buy an car; you use it to get around to missons; complete missions and get money; use that money to upgrade your car and buy other cars.

Sounds great, but as I see some have already pointed out: there's no real gameplay incentive for the player to use their own car, or to upgrade it, or to buy other cars. From a gameplay perspective, it's essentially a daily driver that the player uses to get around the map to missions. Therefore the game doesn't really give the player a meaningful reason to upgrade it or replace it with a better vehicle, because it's only really used for commuting around most of the time. Even though you can use it in some missions, once again there's no incentive to do so besides your own.

Secondly, I think the game is not punishing careless driving quite enough. No matter the severity of the damage, player just pays 500 beam$, maybe waits a minute (which is a good addition), and they're good to go. Not really motivating the player to be more careful on the road or take care of their car, since crashing the car doesn't really hurt the player in a very significant way, in my eyes (and I think BeamNG would be a damn good place to learn that lol).

Suggestions and ideas

To make it more engaging, I think it would be cool for the game to benefit the player for using their own car, taking care of it and expanding their car collection. Motivated by gameplay and not exclusively by individual player's wants and needs.

Let's say the missions will still include the option to use a proposed vehicle, but for using your own you get paid more money, bonuses, and get more benefits in general (would probably be mainly for races, deliveries, stunts, fleeing from police). So you get motivated to upgrade your car to get better at completing them and continue to invest into it for better results. Maybe the missions structure could be something like this:

• Intro missions, where you're given a proposed vehicle because you don't own anything suitable yet;
  
  
• Both options, where you can use a proposed vehicle, but you get more benefits for using your own, thus motivating you to continue to invest in your car;
  
  
• Own car only, where you're required to own a certain type of vehicle to enter, so you're motivated to expand your car collection and own your own car for most types of missions, gets most benefits;
  
  
• Special events, where you're provided with a special car that you can't own for yourself, but maybe has certain requirements for you to enter.

(Last two might be heavily inspired by Test Drive Unlimited lol, but that game had a very nice feeling progression.)

Maybe the benefits for using your own car could be represented in: (most importantly) higher money rewards, maybe higher XP, maybe you can get discounts for various parts or cars (depending on the mission). Also, maybe the milestones could also give you some of those rewards, so you have a reason to reach them.

And for the careless driving issue. I think the game could punish it more by introducing gradual repair costs (no matter the in-game insurance explanation and stuff). Got a slight fender bender? Pay 500 b$ and you're fine. Your car is totalled and barely drives? Depending on the % of damage, maybe repair costs can go up to 10k b$ or more.

And if you don't have that much money for repairs, then that's how you get punished for not taking care, and you can go sell your totalled car for scraps to get barely enough to buy yourself a new starter car.

Now that does raise some concerns in the events where you use your own car. What if it's totalled in there? I guess, depending on how it's balanced with the overall difficulty, but maybe it gets automatically repaired once you exit out of the mission. Or you get big discount on repair cost after you finish the mission.



P.S: Hopefully I've managed to convey my ideas clearly! I see that a lot of people share some of the same sentiment, but I thought I'd mention it anyway to contribute to it, lol. Career mode is showing a lot of promise so far! It feels good to have more of a "game" in such a game, and especially in a full on simulator.

From my own experience I can remember me trying to complete "Go Home" race with my stock starter car, and it was quite a bit slower than the proposed car of the mission. But I still managed to complete it with all 3 stars, and that felt like more of an achievement than doing it in the proposed car. That motivated me to upgrade to a more powerful engine, even though the game doesn't really reward me for it. Now if I was rewarded for it with various bonuses and consequently better results, and considering everything BeamNG has going for it, then it could elevate BeamNG's career mode to one of the best career mode's in any racing game ever, I believe!
--- Post updated ---

Agreed! It would be nice to have a hypothetical "ender dragon" of BeamNG, lol. So you can beat it and have a sense of accomplishment, but free to roam around outside of that. Maybe after you finish all main missions you get to do randomly generated missions, so it feels truly endless if you want it to be. (basically Minecraft's philosophy as have been mentioned)

Maybe for each category of missions there could be their own final boss to beat. A "super mean fast" racer boss with multiple races for the racing category (sort of like finale for Grid 1). A nearly impossible timed delivery challenge for the labourer. An epic chase for a law enforcer or big and epic escape from police. An epic showdown between you and a "stunt master", or smth, lol.

And once you beat everyone on West Coast, then maybe you get to travel to Italy map and grind your way to the top there! That could probably be a whole another feature of travelling between maps and doing career stuff on each, sort of like in Test Drive Unlimited 2. Maybe you get to unlock other maps after certain conditions (maybe beating one of the bosses on West Coast), and then you drive to a "quick-travel" tunnel or road on the edge of the map and you get introduced to a new map to explore and beat.

 

I am having issues with my career, I’ve bought a car, tuned it up and stuff, and it’s not in my garage anymore, I can’t find it anywhere. May I get support for this please?

 

I do not know if anyone has asked this yet, but is it possible to sort the vehicles in the dealership? Like by price, or by year.

Also, maybe instead of repairing the whole car, you could just buy the damaged parts, but also have the option to repair the whole car if i am feeling lazy

 

Unfortunately, you can't sort vehicles as of right now. I'd also really like to be able to sort vehicles in the garage computers - that way, I can quickly find the vehicles I want to buy from one place.

That idea does sound quite good - it's rather like SLRR's system of repairs.

 

first and foremost the career mode is awesome and the walking around mode is pretty much among the best on foot movement I've seem in games i played even tho its an car game, apart from things that were mentioned before like using your own car for missions and price balancing, repair prices, etc (and the severe performance inconsistency im having on my system that is probably related to an vulkan renderer known issue and lack of vram or proton that is completely off topic) my suggestions are as follow:
1. categories on the part buying UI(probably already on plans) and images would be nice specially on cosmetic parts like body panels and wheels ;
2. making some parts requiring going to an specialized shop to buy and fit, in my mind it could add some extra immersion and require you to move around the town more (or it could be annoying);
3. changing the restart button behavior to still register the damage you done to your vehicle, cause atm you can restart the challenge and get no punishment for crashing mid race if you restart;
4. maintenance expenses, it doesn't need to be simulated parts wear, it could be an fixed value made up from an "reliability factor" each part of the car has(or some other simple approximation) and maintenance costs charged accordingly;
5. could be an nice touch to not have all cars you buy be pristine and with an full tank but I know this might be way too much effort for little actual gameplay impact.

but you don't need to actually hear me, the career is awesome and i trust you make it way better than I can imagine within the limitations of current hardware, software and development time

 

on the topic of supplying a car vs using the player's car, what about a system where each mission is assigned a "minimum expected" performance/offroad score, weight class, etc. (based on the loan car),
and based on whether the player's car meets that criteria, either the player's car or the loan car will be selected by default, with the option to override pick the other vehicle.

that way, players with a max upgraded scintilla can still do the run in the slower supplied SBR (as an even benchmark against their friends) , and challenge runners can still do the massive police chase in a wigeon.
meanwhile, casual players who want to just drive to every mission in their stock ETK I can do that, and jump seamlessly into the supplied car for every mission.

 

I know I'm jumping in to the middle of a conversation here, but may as well toss in my three cents in on this page's conversation:

• Hardcore mode: It's great to see that the team is testing features for this; I've been saying for years now that the career mode should have a very difficult setting for those who enjoy the experience. Those sorts of settings are popular across many genres and it only makes sense for a game that prides itself in realism give you the option to take off all the hand holding when it comes to difficulty. Snowrunner's hardcore mode was highly requested and even Minecraft has a popular hardcore mode. Personally I hope that these this comes in the form of many settings with preset options so the player can tailor their experience to exactly what they want from the game. For example, have presets that set everything to "easy/normal/hard" but also allow the player to select custom settings as well, such as mixing realistically difficult AI with an easy economy.
• From personal experience, watching content creator's videos, and taking a cursory glance through the community feedback overall... It seems like more or less everyone is in agreement that forcing the suggested car on the player the first time around isn't a great decision. From a gameplay perspective it takes away from the player's connection to their car and requirement to even buy/upgrade a car, unless you want to 100% all mission objectives since those sometimes will require an upgraded car. Looking at the % complete for steam achievements across most games I don't think most players care to do that. Then there's the simulator aspect, as I imagine a lot of the more serious players would like to build up their car to fit into a required class. Of course there should be some exceptions here, such as tutorials and one design races. If difficulty is the main reason for this then just tie loaner cars into the difficulty settings.
• 5 car garage: I get the reasons for it, but just look at what happened with Need for Speed 2015. It's just a frustrating limitation that prevents players who like to try everything from exploring the game to the extent they actually want to. Personally as someone who wants this game to be a car culture showcase and in all games tries to explore all the available content, it is annoying. Personally I would both tie this to the difficulty setting and make it so that the player starts out with limited garage slots and can procure more as the game progresses