Project Cars 3: need to know basis

And thus ends a month of rivals mode!  Every day, right after breakfast, I booted up Project Cars 3 and spent time playing whatever rivals mode had on offer.  And this morning, I was greeted with my final results for the month for February.

Drum roll please…

The 75,000xp reward is pretty nice.  But it’s worth noting that it’s only a small portion of what I actually earned from my daily dalliances with rivals mode.  I’ve been playing Project Cars 3 for several months, but I only started rivals mode in earnest on February 1st.  Before then, I mostly played the career mode.  Even during February, after playing the daily rivals event, I tended to mosey over the career mode for a few races.  But look at how much xp I’ve earned overall:

It turns out that the real reward for rivals mode is the xp you earn just by driving the events.  (Solo xp is earned by setting up custom events, and multiplayer xp is earned by playing games that actually have a multiplayer community.)

But looking back at the summary for February’s rivals mode, why am I credited with participation in zero out of 33 events when I know for a fact that I completed all 33 events?  Why is my “highest event division” listed as Bronze 1 when I reached the silver tier several times?  What are “personal best points” and why didn’t I get any?  And why is this information immediately and forever buried when I leave the notification screen?  If I want to find my place on the February leaderboards, I have to laboriously page through 15 results at a time, starting at the top, with a five to eight second loading time for each set of 15 results.  I finally found myself at #151.  

If I’m in the top 20%, that means 755 people completed at least one rivals event in February.  I have no way to filter people on my friends list, or even by nationality.  But I can confirm that I’m in the top 12 in the United States!  And I have no way of seeing information about what tier I placed, how many events I supposedly participated in, or my ranking.  I guess I’m just supposed to remember that summary screen.

This inability and/or unwillingness to present information is a consistent issue with Project Cars 3.  From the core design, to the career progression, to the race results, to the personal records, to the accolades system, to the incidentals, Slightly Mad Studios has saddled their mostly brilliant racing game with a serious communication problem.  They shoot their own game in the foot over and over and over again, by either failing to present information, or hiding it so most people never see it.  Project Cars 3 doesn’t know how to interact with people.  It is sullen and terse.  It has no game.  If I didn’t like it so much, I’d have long since uninstalled and moved on. 

Instead, I spent my morning driving the daily, weekly, and monthly events for March.

Previously: forget it, Jake