So drifting will be back by the end of the year. Yay. And the announcement has me a little worried. Apologies if my assumptions are wrong, but I prefer to be assume wrongly than not say anything.
Before I move on, I’d like to address that this is a different suggestion than the Drift layout suggestion. My suggestion doesn’t care what criteria is used to score drifts/points, I think the FM7/FH5 drift point scoring system works just fine. My suggestion is more about having designated drift tracks/zones.
The announcement goes like this:
In Drift mode, players earn Drift Score based on speed, angle, and duration of each drift. Your score must be successfully “banked” to count towards your overall points. The driver who has the highest Drift Score when the timer expires is considered the winner.
“Overall points” to me suggests this is going to work like it did in FM7, or FH5 MP, where you are graded on the whole lap. But if you look at Formula Drift, that’s not how they do it. FD tracks are a handful of corners at most, with short, 10-second-ish runs.
The suggestion thus is for drift mode to include designated drift zones.
These zones may be part of a standalone drift layout, or part of a regular full circuit layout. But ideally each track (track here means each environment e.g. Lime Rock, not each layout e.g. Lime Rock Full) should have at minimum one drift zone, and these zones would have their own leaderboards.
In effect, they would work like FH5 drift zones, just not open world.
You could still have whole-lap drifting events, where the goal is to post the best score for a whole lap. But I think there should be the option to limit scoring to specific zones that are purposefully designed to be good drifting sections. So you could for instance be drifting from Virage Porsche to Virage Corvette only, as opposed to having to drift through the Hunaudières for 6 kilometres.
For Drift Meetups, you could have both a whole-lap score winner and a zone score winner, depending on what players choose to focus. I’m not sure whether this would work for Featured Multiplayer, although personally I think zone scoring would be more adapted for that experience. Again, drift tracks aren’t whole-lap race tracks.
And to go with those zones/layouts, there should be a reset button similar to Rivals’ “Skip Lap” option, where your car is put back at the start of the drift zone, with enough runway to properly initiate drift.
