I feel completely the opposite, having put in near 30 hours, im starting to confidently feel that I know where im going within the city, for the first 20 hours I basically drove looking at the minimap. Now If ever I catch my self looking at the minimap i just look up at the top to see where I am supposed to be going And then I just concentrate on driving to there. I have never ever opened the main map during a race.
As for the handling, It feels exactly like all other games in this genre imo. Your supposed to drift around every corner that you take with the break on. The only difference is that in all those other games like NFS and MC for example is that its the E-Break opposed to the regular break.
I made a quick vid of my self just driving in freeburn my FPS was complete ass though so forgive me for the crappy quality all around.
http://www.xfire.com/video/763c4/
Then again you say you relied on the minimap for the first 20 hours and now a whopping 30 hrs into it, you're finally now starting to get it in your head. 20 hrs is pretty close to the same time I've been playing and 30 hrs is a LONG time to have to play a game just to start to get to know the map. So your take is not exactly the opposite, more like minimap vs main map. Your exact words were "
starting to confidently feel that I know where im going within the city". That sounds more like in general, vs having the specific route of every race in your head. Heck you could probably get an Elite Class license in 30 hrs if you went straight to events and skipped all the extras.
I couldn't disagree with you more on the handling. The cars not only slip around more than most arcade racers like NFS where you have a certain built in hookup, they steer like lead balloons, and in opposite fashion of most arcade racers. In most arcade racers braking makes the steering more sluggish, in BP you HAVE to use regular brake to steer tight enough, that's WAY different. The only time you have built in hookup in BP is when boosting, and too much speed often makes you crash. Also, in most arcade racers if you lightly tap handbrake, it puts you into a pretty controllable powerslide around corners. IN BP it's virtually useless because you spin out way too easy and it's largely due to the cars handling too slippery to begin with. You also don't need to drift in most arcade racers unless IN AN ACTUAL DRIFT EVENT.
This is where I think the problem began with BP regarding car handling. They did not foresee that combining drift elements with cars that are supposed to be for events other than drifting would be a problem. It's utterly absurd to have drift elements in a car that you are bombing down roads at break neck speeds with, trying to avoid traffic and rival racers. One might say, then don't drift, well, problem is there are many cases where you need to steer and brake and you can't avoid it. It's not so much that the idea is bad, they just didn't implement it well. There should be a drift mode you activate, perhaps via a more controllable handbrake, but you shouldn't HAVE to drift just to race, the cars should hook up and steer better. Hell, the drifting only scores you points in Stunt runs anyway.
Watched part of the vid. There was no sound, though I don't know if it was supposed to have any. Also, you're not going all that fast in it, nor racing, nor was your driving all that different from mine. This is clearly a game where you are going to be inadvertently smacking into things because the cars handle like crap. You could take the best of NFS and GRID players, have them play this game, and suddenly their driving would look much worse.
Bottom line, it's not so much how well you can drive the map freeroaming, or how well you know the map. It's a combination of how many hrs you've spent playing, how many races you've done, AND how well you know the map. THAT is what determines if the game has good flow as they intended. Plodding along for numerous hours hitting billboards, barriers, stunts and exploring is not exactly making full use of the action of the game. Also, even IF you do all that for many hours starting out, it doesn't really route train you well for the races because a lot of your focus is on the billboards, barriers, and stunts, rather than the roads.
Had they included an option of some sort to detail your route better, be it via highlighting a plotted route or just visually showing the crucial turns vs that very subtle and oft hard to hear turn signal sound, you'd be able to jump right in the action confidently with good flow and maybe not even have to use the visual aids the second play through. In fact visually highlighting the crucial turns the turn signal sound warns of may be all that's necessary, and you'd only really need a couple temporary visual flashes to see them. They could even cleverly implement it via overhead traffic signs that flash like the billboards do.
It's not inconceivable they may add something like visual route and/or turn indicators in a patch. After all, the original version didn't have flashing billboards or lights on the jumps, it was patched in. I certainly hope that turn signal sound wasn't part of that patch though, because it's clearly inadequate and barely audible even with the music off. Even if just a visual turn indicator option were added to the HUD, it would be something.
