Get ready to grind to progress - unlocking levels is ruined in Rising!

[wesleyspipes]

Nice job...

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/02/25/trials-rising-review

Quote:

Grinding for the Sponsors

Unfortunately, unlocking all of Trials Rising’s levels really starts to drag because of an ill-conceived change to the way the series has traditionally worked. The courses are split into nine main leagues, most of which have eight tracks with a few that have less toward the end, and you unlock new leagues by beating the previous one’s Stadium Finals: a fun series of three shorter, multi-lane races which only unlock once you’ve earned enough XP to reach a certain player level.

Tying new stage unlocks to your level instead of the medals you’ve earned like in previous Trials games is Trials Rising’s largest misstep – far larger than I initially thought it would be. For the first half of the campaign I was generally a high enough level to unlock a new Stadium Final well before I finished that league’s courses, but the second half slows down to an unreasonable degree. It took me over 13 hours to unlock the bulk of Rising’s courses– not including some secrets I won’t spoil – but a large part of that time was spent grinding its new “sponsor” Contract challenges for experience.

Rising’s Contracts replace Fusion’s Challenges, rewarding you with experience and cosmetics for beating a stage while completing a particular set of requirements. Those can range from something as simple as getting a bronze medal or doing six backflips to a combination of multiple objectives at once, like beating a specific level in a certain amount of time while doing 50 meters of wheelies and 10 front flips… while on fire.

Contracts offer so much more experience that improving medals is essentially a waste of time when it comes to progressing.

Some of those Contracts are fun, especially the simpler flipping ones that made me look at a course differently as I tried to figure out all the best places I could weave in a flip without losing too much speed. At their best, Contracts are an amusing way to shake up the Trials formula. But as they get harder they can start to get downright infuriating. And apart from finding some hidden collectibles in levels, there aren’t any Contacts like the cool challenges in Fusion that would ask you to hit secret buttons or finding hidden areas – at least not that I’ve found.

While I would gladly put these contracts off until later, the kicker here is that Contracts are the fastest way to get experience by an enormous margin, making them essential to leveling and unlocking new Leagues in a reasonable amount of time. Later on you need 10,000 experience for one level-up, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to unlock a new League and need nine more level-ups to get the next one. That’s 90k experience I needed to earn, with the hardest Contracts only offering roughly 3-5k each.

Many of the earlier Contracts will offer around 1k or less, and simply improving your time on a Hard track from a silver medal to a gold one without a Contract offers up a meager 450. That means that the part of Trials I’ve always loved – beating my times, gradually getting faster, and earning better medals – is essentially a waste of time when it comes to unlocking everything. The balance for experience gains here is totally out of whack.

Trials Rising’s late game should be a celebration of its well-crafted and satisfyingly challenging final levels, but instead it's a daunting grind as I did wheelies and flips until I just couldn’t take it anymore. I still haven’t even managed to unlock its ultimate final track, The Grand Finale, because the idea of grinding the level-ups needed to get there hardly seemed worth the reward of a single new track.

The core problem here is that you aren’t really given a choice between doing Contracts or improving your times. In Trials Fusion, you could either go for better medals to unlock more tracks or do challenges to gain experience for other rewards. Having both leveling and unlocking leagues tied to optional Contracts makes time improvement completely secondary to progression. Not only does that seem backwards, it makes failing on Contracts I essentially have to complete whether I want to or not frustrating in a way crashing never was before.

[Don Vincenzoo 57]

interesting

[Wakey]

It's a lazy way of getting people to spend more time in their game.
I've been yelling about this since the first beta :P But it seemed I was the only one who had a problem with it.
Enjoying this type of game doesn't mean you're a perfectionist that has to get the best times. Which mean, far from all of us enjoy grinding the same tracks over and over to be on top of the leaderboard.
Sadly, it seems to be what they wanted with this new game. Forcing you to grind.

[wesleyspipes]

Pretty much every review says the same thing - great game BUT the progress system sucks.

Listen to the feedback guys and at least lower the thresholds to fix this. Simple, easy fix that you could patch next week...if you wanted to. ;)

IGN Spain
A welcomed entry in a great series, although it has some flaws on its campaign progression that makes the game a bit less fun than it should have been.

USgamer
Trials Rising adds a layer of annoyance on top of its already-winning formula, with its clunky world map and tedious level gating.

GamesRadar+
Even with a clumsy progression system, Trials Rising's vibrant tracks, tight controls, and excellent tutorials are some of the best in the series.

Destructoid
Some of the out-of-level elements could use another pass, but progression pacing issues, loot-box bloat, and technical hiccups weren't enough to put me off what is ultimately another great Trials game.

TrueGaming
Trials Rising offers solid and precise controls, great level design that will test your skills in a variety of ways, and a lot of content. at the same time, we really didn't like the progression system and preferred the simplicity of past installments.

etc, etc, etc....

https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/trials-rising/critic-reviews

[DK37]

Seriously hope they take everyones advice and lowers the progression levels would be a shame to turn people away simply for that reason :/

[wesleyspipes]

Exactly, simple fix honestly. I even saw a few reviews call out that this will probably get patched post release since it's REALLY bad in the 2nd half.

[moOx]

thanks for telling, not gonna buy the game for now!