 After the absence of a 2015 DB for PCM 14, the PCM.Daily Database Team brings back their complete new season updates for the Pro Cycling Manager series.
A whole new feeling to your gaming experience
Needless to say, the 2016 DB includes everything, and with everything I mean really everything, you would expect from a new season update. All the rosters are up-to-date as of 24/02/16, from the World Tour to the Continental Tour. We have updated the palmares for the 2015 season, with all the relevant info about the WT, .HC and .1 races that have taken place during the last season, as well as the World Championships. The palmares now goes back up until 2011, in order to avoid missing links and related issues. We even added a lot of 2015 and 2016 routes, choosing them among the ones that have been posted on the forum during the last few months. All the WT to .1 races in the db will take place on the same dates as in real life.
Something that has always made the Daily DBs stand out is the quality of its additions. A whole lot of edits have been done to the original database, taking the teams total to 115 - including 7 development teams, something unheard of for a Daily DB. All of this whilst preserving our own infinite care for details and keeping our Western European-North American focus.
Meanwhile, we have deleted a whopping amount of riders from the Free Agents, a number that has been mostly made up by riders who haven't raced for 3 years or more. This doesn't mean that there will be less variety in the Free Agents pool, though. At the same time, about 450 riders have been added to the database, bringing the total to more than 3100. All of them have been taken care of by our statmakers, who have been striving to make the most realistic stats, without overlooking the lower divisions, but instead working hard on them as we've never done before, without forgetting about the better-known riders, for which we think we have found the perfect balance, trying to reproduce their behaviours and skills as best as we could through their stats. Even the realistic potentials and the all new popularities we have updated literally from top to bottom contribute to making you enjoy career modes as best as you can.
Talking about career mode and procyclist mode, we have made sure to improve the development of existing riders and regens (the new talents), implementing the ones carefully made by Anderis, as well as adding a whole lot more names to enhance their variety. Sadly, there's not a way to improve the starting stats of your ProCyclist and other aspects of its development, however, we did the best we could to keep the matrix of career modes as close as possible to the original one of our database, as much as you advance with the years, as well as making the regions the regens come from more realistic, and adding a lot of rider types that were hardly found with the original Cyanide database.
But that's far from being all. We have gone through the various PCM communities to bring the total of custom sponsors to choose from up to more than 750, deleting the lower quality packs. All of the most breathtaking creations made by the talented shirtmakers in the PCM communities during the last 2 and a half years are in there, providing also a huge variety of nations you can choose from, when starting a career!
More and better graphics than ever
The Expansion Pack most definitely doesn't miss out on graphics, oh it doesn't at all indeed. As I have already mentioned above, we have included 750 graphic packs for custom sponsors, which is not even the highlight of all of this. Just think about the additional c.a 1200 National Champion and World Champion shirts and c.a 800 accesories that we added for the 115 existing teams in the database and well, I'm sure you'll instantly understand what I mean. And yeah, you read those numbers correctly.
About 100 teams of these 115 have 2016 graphics, while the rest do have their 2015 jerseys and accessories, but soon the entireness of them will have all their new kits reproduced, probably in a next update. Besides that, we even added almost all of the jerseys that have been worn at Richmond by the respective National Teams, and even quite a lot of leader jerseys for a myriad of races in the database.
Another feature we deem very important is the addition of the Jacky Durand's sponsorkits, an immense amount of graphics that makes sure a lot of the races are surrounded by real banners, start and finish lines and so on. Every single World Tour event, the World Championships, and about 45 other races will have them included, whilst in all the others a nice generic sponsorkit will be shown.
Equipment is definitely something we had to look at this year, and thankfully, we fixed all of the numerous bugs we have encountered. Nonetheless, we have used up the 127 limit for equipment brands wisely, making sure all the WT and all but a few PCT teams had their equipment brands in the database - equipment contracts are 2016-ready for all the teams in the db that have announced them. In total, about 310 equipment models have been included. Most of the models are autocolored, meaning that their colors change depending on the teams' main ones!
Last but not least, I must mention that the graphics of the Expansion Pack are obviously not limited to the 3D mode. We have added new, stunning flags to replace Cyanide's original ones, as well as 2016 cyclist photos for all WT, PCT and half of the CT teams, as well as logos for almost every single race in the db. We even added custom newspapers for all the nations where races are held!
Not to talk about races and stages!
Exactly, almost all of the 2016 UCI calendar for the races from WT to .1 has been covered by the db, bringing the total of races to 360, where 25 of them is made up by National Championships who all also include a Time Trial. As I mentioned, the dates are real, to make the calendar as close as possible to reality.
Speaking about realism, we've made sure that playing those races in all the game modes is more stimulating, namely adding real teams' lists for all the WT races that have announced their wild cards so far, as well as making very realistic custom teams lists for the rest of the races. For instance, you'll be able to play a race like Volta a Portugal with all the Portuguese teams in the database, by default. Moreover, clamel has been working hard to provide a huge amount of custom classification files. And guess what, we have implemented all of them! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain it briefly: these files simply make sure that even races like Tour of Norway have the correct bonifications for the sprint checkpoints, or correct points for the different King-of-Mountain categories. As he says, this "little thing" is vital because one single second can change the fate of a General Classification!
...and what about variants?
You really thought I forgot about it, huh? Well no, I didn't. Variants will be, as always, very present in the Expansion Pack, as we're offering at least 3 variants for each Grand Tour - 5 for Le Tour (2010 to 2014) - in the basic pack, as well as at least a variant for every classic and 1 or 2 for the other main stage races.
That doesn't seem to be too much, does it? Well that's where the Variant DLC comes into play. You will find 9 TDF variants in there, which means you'll be able to take advantage of 16 variants of the most famous race in the world, including the 2 default ones and the 5 of them that come with the 2016 DB. The Giro has also got 9 additional variants and the Vuelta has got 7 of them. Obviously, all the other races have got variants as well, Eneco Tour is an example, having got 7 of them. Convinced now?
You may be wondering why even making a Variant DLC when we could have included it in the main download. That's easy, because we don't want the standalone db to become too heavy. The current download will weigh almost 10 gb already (17 gb when unpacked), if we included the variants dlc as well, that would have rised up to a historic 17 gb. We thought that the users that were most interested in more variants would download the pack anyway!
Miscellaneous
We’ve named many features, but there’s even more to be explored in the DB: apart from all these things, there are a lot of little things that will enhance your gaming experience even more. Some of the additions we've made are hard to notice, think about the few more countries and scouting zones, the 444 real trainers, the 153 real physicians or the 321 real scouts that have been updated, or the tons of more sound comments, that will make it possible for even people like Vaugrenard to have a custom attack or fall sound pronounced by the commentator. Even a few translations' mistakes have been spotted and fixed in a few languages such as Danish, Dutch and Italian!
As always, a huge thank you goes to the community for providing shirts, equipment and stages - and a special shout out to the database team: haasje33 (organisation, graphics, DB work), matt17br (DB work, stats, custom sponsors research, organisation), Kentaurus (DB work), sgdanny (graphics, DB work), Selwink (stages), Tafiolmo (stats), the_hoyle (graphics). |
