Think setting up a D&D character’s morals, but instead the choice is how many crashes you want to have per corner

Image credit: Bugbear

Are you more of a supervan wrecker or a bone stock maniac? Can you be best described as a British couch racing champion, or is your calling more in the realms of Finnish folk? These are the sorts of questions you’ll have to pose to yourself whenever you fire up Wreckfest 2’s still-in-the works career mode, which devs Bugbear Entertainment have just laid out a bunch of plans for.

Now, the lengthy dev blog in which they’ve done so is an estimate 10 to 20 minute read, so I’m going to have to get my summary pants on. Basically, Bugbear reckon a lot of racing game career modes - the original Wreckfest’s included - fall into the trap of following pretty samey structure. You start off with a slow car, you complete all the events, you end up with many fast cars.

So, with the fact different players come to Wreckfest with different types of wheeled mayhem in mind, the second game’s career mode is designed to cater to you deciding where you fit into three broad player profiles. Folks who want to do regular clean racing is the first, demolition derby and contact-heavy racing buffs make up the second, and the third’s a wild card of sorts dubbed "The Bonebreaker". The last group prioritise fun mucking about above all else, via the likes of "ridiculous vehicle scenarios". The last time you had a race that was lawnmowers vs motorised toilets vs motorhomes. Yeah, that.

Those three profiles break down even further into this monstrosity:

Image credit: Bugbear / Rock Paper Shotgun

From the sounds of it, rather than being locked into one alignment, you’ll be able to choose what you want to focus on every time you fire up the career mode. Depending on what you pick, you’ll be working on progressing up the ranks in the mode’s four divisions: European Racing, Demolition Derby, Banger Racing, and American Racing. Each of those boasts three or four difficulty/complexity tiers, and progressing up through them doesn’t just revolve around winning every event. Here’s how Bugbear explain what you’ll do to move up:

Each division features a collection of accomplishments, and to meet their requirements, you need to accumulate enough of specific type of score across those events. While the exact way to earn score varies depending on the discipline and game mode, here’s the beautiful part: at the end of the day you decide how to earn that score and which events to play.

This is now getting into the nitty-gritty details but to illustrate our point, let’s use a practical example. Imagine an accomplishment called ‘Finnish Folk Racing Champion’ that requires 10,000 points of racing score across six available events. A skilled racer might earn those points in just three events by winning and getting a bonus by posting fastest laps. A player who’s less skilled at racing but enjoys the challenge might need to complete four or five events finishing somewhere mid-pack. Someone who sucks at racing but really loves drifting might earn points by finishing near the back of a race but throwing their car sideways in style.

In line with that, the sort of things that score you points change depending on the type of event you’re in. Racing-focused events, reward high finishing positions and fast laps. Contact-focused events balance those with congratulating you on crumpling fenders. Demo derbies only car about how good you done crashed up your foes.

It all sounds pretty good to me, assuming each section of the mode is equally fleshed out so that one segment of Wreckfest 2’s chaotic evils doesn’t feel a bit shortchanged.