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ProStreet Preview Part 1: Career
Impressions from one day long gameplay session at community day

Having played a lot of the game, including the first three hours of career at the community day event at EA's studios in Vancouver, Canada, I actually found out quite a bit about the central part of the game: the career. As opposed to the previous games, you don't start as a complete outsider, the new guy in town, but rather as the top racer of some unknown racing organization trying to get into Battlemachine. The first race is a qualifying race for Battlemachine and it puts you in a more or less stock low end car (around 150-200 hp) racing against others with similar cars. Once you finish that 3 lap grip race, which is not too hard, you'll end up being a part of Battlemachine, which means you'll get to pick your first two cars. Initially you'll need one grip car and one drag car, as these two race modes are the first you'll be racing.

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[i]main career screen showing race days and your progress[/i]

Unlike in previous NFS games, there is no "you're the hero who needs to save the racing scene by beating the evil guy on the top" type story. Instead it's just a few short videos representing kings and racing orgs and scenes made with game engine showing race days and kings showing off. Nothing too fancy, but it really goes well with the game which is obviously focused on racing.

When you select your first two cars you are finally in the main career screen, when you get to see all the available race days and your progress towards the next racing org, react. Best thing to do is to start joining races and winning or even dominating as many race days as possible. Every time you win a race day, you get to select one random bonus, which ranges from free total repair markers, to upgrade parts or cash. To win a race day it's usually enough to win in a little more than half of the events, but if you want to dominate, you need to do even better. Dominating could be pretty hard as you'll need tuned cars for each event and money is pretty short. I ended up upgrading my grip car but then didn't have enough money to upgrade my drag car. This means I ended up winning all grip races and even setting track records, but finishing in 5th place or even lower on drag races. With that setup I managed to dominate on race day events that were mostly grip, but could hardly win those who were more focused on drag. You can always go and upgrade your car (just not during race day events), or even buy a new one since all upgrade parts are unlocked from the beginning, the same with a lot of cars. You'll have to upgrade one part at a time as level 3 parts simply cost too much to get at the start. Same with new cars - it's impossible to buy a high end car right at the start. You'll have to get a really cheap tuner car or wait untill you progress as some races actually award new cars.

Damage also plays a role in the career, but at least with the more slow cars it's not really a big problem. Sure, you can crash, but since you're mostly driving at low speeds (no speed challenge on battlemachine), you'll hardly ever total your car. And with light or even heavy damage, there are hardly any performance drawbacks you would notice. You can also repair your car during race day event - if you have a repair marker which are pretty easy to get. One thing will be tricky however in the tougher races: you can restart a race, but the damage will not go away. It is possible to quit a race, repair your car and try again. But I'm sure doing that in later stages will make your repair markers go away pretty quickly. Once you leave a race day you'll also be able to pay to repair your car and the costs of repairs are defined by the value of your car. Have a low end tuner and repairs will be almost free, upgrade that car with high level parts and the repair costs will go up. Don't even try to wreck a high end exotic!

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[i]You'll always know which race org you are currently racing for[/i]

In the 3 hours of gameplay I had with career, I managed to do about 3 thirds of battlemachine's races and was one racing day event short of react. I also unlocked the geffect racing org as I had good times on grip races. As the game gets harder and harder with every race org, it's going to take a lot to get to be the king in all modes. The developers are promising 25hours without dominating all events and I'm going to beleive them on that.

The next article in the series will be published soon, if you have any questions about career or anything else, be sure to ask them and I'll try to answer!

Next: ProStreet Preview Part 2: Multiplayer

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