Career mode and roadmap 2022...?

Money and budget in modern days race drivers live:
I think for a modern time career there needs to be some sort of budget / reputation simulation to advance to better teams (which could be emulated already now with custom ai) or higher classes. Nowadays, already in young age, the drivers are full with sponsor advertisement, like the local furniture store, drinks, equipment deliverer, ....
I like the mechanics of choosing a sponsor and connecting its payment to a bet on the outcome of a series of races (duration of the contract), e.g. take the small advertisement and you need to finish top10. Take the big one and you need to finish top5 in order to get there support / money.
Configurable career mode:
With the different tastes people have regarding which part of motorsports racing should be in the career, the only way I see to deliver the best career experience is by customization. Every feature, as for instance the lap time trophy challenges mentioned above (@TronLi I would enjoy those as well to have some variations in the std career) or the proposed sponsor system, should be optional and can be added or fine tuned when setting up the career.

 

People can dream up all sorts of Gran Turismo / Drive to Survive scenarios, but we're probably just gonna wait 24 months for a re-skinned PC2 "career mode" (long string of meaningless single races with no real reward against widely inconsistent AI that requires you to constantly fiddle with the AI strength).

 

I am confident that the AI will rapidly progress over the next few months. It sounds like a recent beta added another parameter and improved passing. I feel like the deadline is going to be the Racin' USA Pt.3 DLC release, as full course cautions and oval racing require additional AI enhancements.

So I see that iteration process continuing for a while but eventually it will open up new opportunities for the offline experience.

 

Would love to see some kind of career mode where you have to watch your budget and are able to improve your car / team over several seasons. You can invest in things like engine, brakes, wings, aerodynamics, tires etc etc and unlock new shiny things. This of course would mean that these changes also reflect in the appearance of the car and I doubt this will be doable… (various wingforms, different tires, different brakedics…).

Might sound a bit like Need for Speed but would add something more to the sim than "just" driving around. If handled more serious than those cringy Need for Speed / Grid experiences this would be nice.

 

That would all be cool - I think there are plenty of people who would enjoy a kind of Gran Turismo style mode, though I'd guess that might be a bit optimistic. As I said above - I'm looking forward to hearing what Reiza's ideas are for it - and how they plan to achieve their own claim:

"The endgame for Automobilista 2 is the most comprehensive and true-to-life career mode ever designed for a racing game, connecting the game´s incredibly vast and ever-growing ensemble of Cars and Tracks into a cohesive journey across several decades of motorsports."

Maybe that will be some form of 're-skinned PCars2 career mode' - and if so fair enough, but even with that I think they could use the structure, strip out a lot of the annoying elements and make something a lot more interesting and flexible. E.g. making it possible for players to plug in custom drivers/teams/ai/championships, and to customise series calendars, etc.

 

If the AI changed from season to season and if all of the ai parameters/race stats/weather/etc. were written to a database, it would help everyone develop AI customized to their liking.

Imagine this: you do 3 seasons and during the last few races of the 3rd season you experienced fantastic racing with 2 or 3 AI characters. You then look up the AI parameters used by the AI characters during those last few races and compare them to the parameters used in earlier races, hopefully identifying the changes that made the difference. It would be different for each person.

Of course this would only be useful for people that like to get into the data but it wouldn't hurt anyone to have it available as it would only be for offline use.