When Career Mode is The Worst

On Xbox 360, Battlefield 3 had its Multiplayer on Disc ONE, whereas Campaign was on Disk Two. 

Though it's just a number, and shouldn't matter, everyone knows exactly why the order wasn't flipped. That multiplayer component is why people bought Battlefield 3. It's the game's primary selling point, and it's proud of it.

Imagine Battlefield 3 implied that you should start with the Campaign...

Thing is, games do the equivalent of that at times, and I just experienced it!

Okay, maybe that's a little over dramatic, but in the case of booting up Flatout Ultimate Carnage for a potential Multiplayer session, I skipped the long, tedious, and boring career mode which I dropped despite loving the game years ago, in favor of its Carnage Mode.

Basically a highlights mode with a selection of pre-made events the player could choose to do in whichever order they please, so long they had the credits to decide. You're not starting out in a Grandmother's VW and upgrading it per month, you're starting off in the game's top level vehicles, and experiencing it's full sandbox of handling characteristics, track layouts, and batshit challenges.

However, what started out as just a means of testing the game without having to deal with the slow career progression, became a multi-hour play session where I wasn't just enjoying Ultimate Carnage, I was falling in love with it!

Finally, it was so much more than just a technically inferior Wreckfest, or a less focused Burnout game, but a completely unique gem deserving of its own pedistal!

One moment I'm activating Nitrous Boost on a rooftop in a fully custom muscle car, landing upside down ontop of a low health rival whose car explodes underneath my floorboard, witnessing their character model be flung through the windscreen and being clobbered by three other oncoming vehicles.

The next I'm picking up power ups in destruction derby to ram through five on-coming pick-ups like a Rhino.

Five minutes later I'm flinging my character model on a stunt stage into a game of bowling, basketball, or long jump.

I didn't need to keep playing, I just wanted to, and that's when I got to thinking...

There's certain games which benefit from the standard career progression of starting from zero and spending hours and hours and hours on becoming the hero, this has been the basis of sports games for the last twenty years, and people have really started to miss it as of late, but Ultimate Carnage I don't feel is one that needs it.

You're not blowing stuff up less in the first couple hours of its "Flatout Mode", you're just doing it at a slower rate than "Carnage Mode". Flatout: Ultimate Carnage is its name, so beginning the game as Flatout: Little Carnage just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Now… one could bully the developers into thinking they're dumb for putting the spotlight on the part of their game that discourages its very goals without enough gain.

Truth is, it's not their fault.

Flatout began as a tribute to Folk Racing, stemming from Northern Europe, where the cars were rusted up beaters and the tracks were dirt roads in the forests. 

The cars were cheap, the drivers even more so, but as a result, the racing was pure.

Flatout exaggerated this… mainly with its rag-doll drivers, but it really was rather grounded, bordering on a Sim at times, with the closest comparison probably being the Driver games. 

Physics-based gameplay driven sandboxes where by the sheer detail of this game engine's ability, no two events were ever the same.

In this environment, traditional career progression makes sense.

Even the starter cars are quite a handful, and the punishment for hitting one bump incorrectly, let alone another vehicle or barrier could mean the end of your race. Starting people off in the game's fastest cars would lead to guarantee frustration for all but the biggest masochists in the genre, and learning to master that steadily over time is gratifying.

Flatout: Ultimate Carnage is a very different game.

Despite sharing so much of the technology, the sequel is much more… Hollywood.

Nitrous Oxide turning your car into the Millennium Falcon.

Power ups in destruction derby mode.

School buses blowing up fields of cars.

It's insane!

And it's great!

As said, it occupies a unique gameplay style you can't simply achieve in Flatout 1, this franchise's spirtiual successor Wreckfest, or Criteron's Burnout.

To make all of that carnage palatable however, necessary changes had to be made, vehicles were toughened up to survive the game's much more frantic action, while being far more forgiving to control to let players also survive the far bigger spectacle.

Ultimate Carnage's context with Flatout 1's physics engine would be painfully unfun. Dropping the previous game's engine detail, was the right choice for what Ultimate Carnage wanted to achive.

This is where the conundrum comes in however.

The series, and gaming at large, has been telling people for years that Career Mode is the primary mode of play; telling people otherwise, especially for a mode that's much shorter, and eschews "features" would make even its biggest fans skeptical at best.

Because that experience I had?

You can't advertise that.

You can't put it on the back of the box.

You can't have them experience it without giving the game away for free.

When people buy games, they buy things based on what's heard, and it's a lot better to hear about there being an in-depth Career Mode with progression, management, purchases, and decisions. Even if all of those are boring in practice, to one's ear, they don't sound boring.

Playing a bunch of pre-set challenges of high level vehicles with nothing done to earn them?

Where's the fun in that? ...To one's ear.

In practice, it's really god damn fun! And don't be surprised if you see me recommend this game in the near future!

I'm just disappointed that the fun I had likely wasn't shared, and it's not even anybody's fault, because I would've felt the exact same way as anybody else, had I not boot it up on a whim.

Sometimes I wonder, how much could change in gaming if multiple games were just able to commit to change in unison… would Career Modes really be the main expectation in games if they were axed, or just not centered on the start page for a couple years?

I then remembered we have in-fact done that!

Just… 90% of the time, for the worse.