Old style career, where you have to buy a car, win a race, buy a better car, win another race, unlock another car and so on, won't come back. Most of the modern driving games have already surpassed this approach, gamers mostly want cars and tracks available from the beginning to better compete online and offline. It's a better approach than waste hours and hours to unlock the best cars and then spend more time again to improve the performance.
A GT Sport 2 with minor changes would be a better solution than an old style GT.
Which other modern racing games don't have a progression system or unlocks? And what racing games don't let you access cars for practice runs? The only game I can think of is RaceRoom where the game is sold in pieces.
All of the major racing games on the market have free play modes where you can use any cars you want however you please. Nothing is locked from being used for practice for online racing in any that I can think of. I can fire them all up to check right now if I need to.
Let's go in release date order
- Forza Motorsport 7 starts you in lower class cars and has a progression system for unlocks. It's probably the most open and accessible on the market though. You can "unlock" the every car in the game in about 15 minutes to purchase for use in championship mode. Free play lets you use any of the 834 cars on any of the tracks in the game, even the ones you don't own.
- Project Cars 2 career mode starts you off in kart racing. You need to progress and gain sponsors to move forward. You can also free play with every car and track right away.
- Assetto Corsa starts you in Novice 1 class in a Fiat 500. You need to progress to move on. You can also free play with every car and track in the game right away.
- Automobilista started you off in karts just like Projects Cars. Automobilista 2 is still early access but will likely follow suit based on what I've played. You can free play with every car an d track in the game right away.
- Grid Autosport, which is basically an arcade racer compared to the rest here used a level progression system with you starting in lower class cars. You can also use any car on any track right away.
GT Sport is the only newer racer that abandoned a progression based single player mode unless you're counting games like F1, Automobilista 2 or AC Competizione that follow a single racing class only. The only racing games that use an online-only model like GT Sport are iRacing and rFactor2 which are not really in the same category as GT Sport.
