Rivals lacks so much QoL
I love Rivals. Right now it's my favorite 'endgame' activity. I love the mental gymnastics that I go through chasing less than half a second of pace. I love working on my favorite cars without relying on meta cars (looking at you City E II) or online builds.
HOWEVER,
This mode is SO frustrating and tedious to play, and could use a shit ton of quality of life changes. I'm not sure if the devs read these, but here are a few suggestions:
- Upgrade menu pre-race. Everytime I want to experiment with different builds, I have to leave the race, spawn back in freeroam, TP to festival, upgrade, go back to freeroam, navigate the damn menu again and go back to the Rivals event. It's incredibly tedious and could use some work.
1a. Change cars pre-race.
Change Rivals in pre-race. "Oh this Rival is too fast, lemme swap to a slower one" -> Leave the event and navigate menu hell again for something as basic as loading a different Ghost.
Faster restart. There really should be a 'Fast restart' to a race aside from the standard 'Back to Pre-race' restart to save time.
Rivals replay. Sometimes I just want to learn someone else's racing lines, but as far as I can tell you can't simply boot up someone's Ghost as a replay. You can't even do that for your own Ghosts. You can't see the Ghost when you replay during Rewind either.
Live delta. It'd help me see where I'm losing time against the Ghost. Even a per-checkpoint delta like the one from online races would be nice.
Better filters. Why is 'Near Me' a filter and not a button? Why is 'Hardcore' a filter, but 'Clean Times' (times that don't have the yellow "!") isn't? 'Same region' is a filter but 'Same car' isn't?
Better 'My Rivals'. Sometimes I just want to challenge every single time a particular friend has set. It'd be nice if I could see every time a particular player has set across all Rivals events, instead of going through them one-by-one.