You get all these experience points regardless of whether you won the race. An accolades system will give you experience points when you hit thresholds for dozens of ongoing achievements, like driving from the cockpit view, driving certain tracks, putting mileage on your cars, buying upgrades, beating your own records, and so on. You get bonus experience points for driving without assists, or against harder AI difficulties. You get more experience points for clean passes, efficient cornering, and staying on the track. You get points for completing laps, for passing cars, for hitting high speeds, for drafting, and so on. As you race, green text announces various deeds or accomplishments, each adding experience points toward your tally for that race. The foundation for all this progression is experience points. There is not a wasted revolution of these cars’ wheels. Every time you drive, whether you’re winning, losing, practicing, or just exploring, you’re progressing something. Your car collection, your upgrades, your car’s level, your experience points, your accumulated career objectives, your accolades, your available races, the very tracks themselves. You’ll fill lots of different buckets with progress, which is a great hook. It’s a multi-faceted progression structure. But what’s new is that it’s all tied together by a progression system based on good driving. It has the events, physics, track variety, and expansive car catalogue of the previous Project Cars games. But what’s extraordinary about Project Cars 3 - and distinct from the previous games in the series - is that its entire structure is based on driving well. They might acknowledge it and sometimes even reward it.

Plenty of race games concede that, yeah, sure, driving well is a thing. It’s ultimately about something too few racing games know how to express. Instead, it’s a game based on driving well. Project Cars 3 has plenty of speed, but that’s not what it’s about. It emphasizes precision, consistency, calculation, practice. In most videogames, you mash down the accelerator, feel the exhilaration, and have a win! But what’s distinct about Project Cars 3 - at least among consumer-friendly racing games - is that it downplays speed. It’s hardly surprising most racing videogames downplay this part. The important part is figuring out when and how much to slow down. But the important part is knowing when to relinquish speed.

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