Career?

[Chili Peanut]

Hi folks
I'm new to Rallying, but being a big F1 fan I thought i'd dive in.
I bought the GOTY edition of Dirt 2.0, and when I go to my garage, i'm a bit confused, i've got 2.5 million credits, and all the cars. Doesn't that take the challenge of earning credits to buy cars?

Secondly i'm choosing to play the Rally Career. Is it just a case of picking my car, then doing the 6 different courses, rinse and repeat? Thanks, I think i'm missing the point a bit...

[Nero]

well you only get the dlc cars for free
the normal ones you have to earn

when you start the carreer you begin in OPEN ..so the AI is relatively easy.
when getting in top 3 total you get to CLUBMAN..which is harder.
then PRO.. then ELITE then MASTERS each step gets harder and harder

and each Difficulty will get longer and longer
OPEN has 6 stages
Masters will have 12 (so every possible Stage variation in the game)

goal is of course to complete MASTERS ...which is almost impossible. You will have to drive flawlessly

[Hoksu]

It's extraordinarily dumb the way the automatic unlocks and extra money, neither of which should even exist in the first place, are forced on you with not even an option to decline them. Microtransactions and pay2win have become such a norm in gaming that developers no long even consider the possibility that someone might actually want to play their game instead of progressing without playing. Just sad.

What I did: I sold all the instant unlock cars (you get no credits for selling them) and then kept buying and selling expensive cars to get rid of the pay2win money. Mind-bogglingly idiotic jumping through hoops just to be able to start career from the beginning like you should but it works at least.

Career is nothing hugely special, other than promotion to higher level there isn't much actual career there. And you will have to suffer the always online which can wipe your progress at any time, every car is gimped and you need to grind more horsepower to really unlock the car (why???), and career has service every 2 stages so both damage and tyre wear are complete non-issues. I have played career quite a lot but have pretty much quit other than online events, Freeplay gives you a better experience.

[Sparda]

Every car that is given to me as DLC i Sell and i get rid of any of thoses free credit waves the devs gave us a while back. If i didnt earn it i dont want it.

[Xenial Jesse]

Edit - Oh God, sorry for the massive wall here. I like to write. :/

-- Freebies --

Seconding/thirding the above impressions. The freebies do indeed defeat the point of progression and threads with the same question as yours aren't uncommon.

When the game was released it started you off with 2 weak cars and 0 credits. Seasons 1 & 2 content gave the buyer a free 1.2 million credits, then Seasons 3 & 4 did the same thing again. Meanwhile all new cars created for season releases also just got put in the player's Garage for free. People don't buy seasons so much nowadays but anything with extended content (like GOTY Edition or YOP) still works the same way and all those free credits and cars still get applied.

Some other notes:

- It can take around 30 minutes to buy & sell your way to zero credits and the 2 starter cars.
- Nothing in Options helps, unfortunately. Resetting your Racenet data actually puts all that free stuff back.
- You shouldn't have discovered all cars in your Garage, but around 40 (still a lot). If you go to the game's Freeplay section you should be able to see the difference, since Freeplay does have all 80-something cars unlocked from the start.

-- Career --

And yeah the game is pretty notorious for having such a basic Career mode. Some people get into it, some don't; it is after all just a solo drive against a list of imaginary times. It's also a very tough-in-a-respectable-way challenge that can understandably spark interest, especially to those with a racing fan background. If your priority interest is in the progression game of unlocking and upgrading everything, it's pretty dull and grindy progression, especially if you want to do it "properly" by deleting all the freebies first. But if your priority interest is in testing yourself against the Dark Souls of rally games, you might not find that at all, especially if you've got good skills and equipment and engage with a community doing the same thing.

With all that said, definitely don't think the game is mainly about Career mode. I've played around 700 hours and less than 10% of has gone into Career. There are several other approaches to how you spend your time on the game so the rest of this wall of text is a summary of 6 other approaches I've noticed.

1. Freeplay's Custom mode, as Hoksu mentioned. You get control over all Championship setup options and all cars are available and un-gimped. You can also race Custom Championships against other humans in real-time (there's a twitch streamer that sets up online championships every week that I like to join). In return you lose the progression/persistence factor of Career mode, and the connection to calendar events.

2. Clubs. They also use the championship format but work in not-real-time against other humans (only) over a longer duration (like a few weeks). Clubs come with web-browser-accessible info about everyone's progress and how the Championship is going, and the Club creator can set up whatever theme they like. There are at least a couple of Clubs floating around these forums.

3. Real-time only. If this is you, look into the Steam guide (under Dirt Rally 2's guides) for setting your Steam download region to the right region. It drastically changes the number of lobbies made available to you. This was the main way I played at first.

4. Events (again as Hoksu already mentioned). You've surely already seen the daily/weekly/monthy events. I've gone from not-enjoying to enjoying; depends on community a lot for me. If this gets your interest and you don't care much about the progression game, I'd recommend not nuking your credits and cars, since deleting cars just means fewer events you can access, and in anything you do access you're already racing at a disadvantage anyway so the free credits help you un-gimp your cars faster.

5. Pure Time Trialing. This uses a completely separate set of leaderboards from the rest of the game and restricts stage settings to one fixed dry version and one fixed wet version of each stage. It means that you know the people above you weren't just racing on better conditions, and the people below you weren't just racing on rubbish conditions in some event they weren't trying to run their fastest. Time Trials also provide the ghosts of every single record set for you to select and race against, so that's pretty cool (I've spent probably about 50% of my time on this).

6. Finally there are the other solo modes that differ from the Career format to varying degrees: the Historic Championship and the WRX Championship are in Freeplay (both of which I've barely touched at all), and the 40 Colin McRae Challenges are their own entire section that you've probably noticed already. They're fun and tough, and let you set your difficulty level.

TL;DR - Yeah it's a super basic Career mode. Other approaches and community engagement helps you break through DR2's repelling facade more than anything. Once you find your way to enjoy things past its force-field, the core that you sink yourself into is really great. It's excellent driving.

[Chili Peanut]

Thanks everyone. Xenial that was really helpful of you, I appreciate it.

[Ganondalf]

I feel like they kind of killed the career mode for new players by removing the carrot-on-a-stick. Being able to start as a nobody with no money, even if grindy, can be a fun way to play. This is the way most racing games approach career modes. However, if you own the GOTY / year one pass, you don't have that option. Forcing players to disable steam DLC, or manually sell their cars and drain their credits is silly. At the very least, they could offer an option to reset credits to zero, and owned cars to the original few. If that hampers a player from running certain non-career events, that's the player's perogative.

What Xenial explained is helpful, as there are many other ways to enjoy the game... But I still think they killed the career mode for those that want to experience a traditional ground-up career :(

[Hawaec]

Переведите игру на русский язык пожалуйста!

[_Caball3ro_]

ha, just when I was going to write about this issue I found out I'm NOT the only one loool.

WHen would devs understand that most players Don't want millions of credits and dozens of cars for 'free' (you pay actual money yes but you get the point)

I fond the best feeling on a racing game to fight for some credits and finally buy a new car with.... not just being thrown away at you...



selling all DLCs cars too

[loppantorkel]

So... for the experience and difficulty the devs originally intended for career mode in this game, it's recommended not to buy the DLCs or the GOTY version..? That's an interesting decision by the people in charge....