You didn't know ? GTA is the best PGR-like ever. Lots of city backgrounds and lots of radio stations.

I get the feeling it will be in the 70s. Visuals will be great and probably a good implemented multiplayer, but it might not play as well as it looks.

Well both MSR and PGR (MSR true spiritual successor) are street racers those are the facts.  Anyone that claims otherwise never played any of the games in the series.

That is just the track backgrounds..... How it races is what matters most background lol.  You reaching,  people have played all those games and disagree with you..... Someone even posted a link. 

How did you come to that conclusion...?  People playing it now says it does indeed play as well as it looks.  Handling,  AI and sense of speed are excellent

How would this game surprise anyone now? The game and footage is known since a very, very long time.

Footage does not equal real game play. ... . It is better then people expected after what they played before the delay.  You cannot sense how a racer plays from videos. 

Of course it does not but people were actually really hyped by the footage and it seems gameplay wise it seems to be good, too. But given how much time/money they spent on this title I didn't expect anything less. Calling it a surprise is not fitting, in my opinion. Shadow of Mordor is way more of a surprise.

The scenery is an importan aspect of driveclub, where project gotham is a city racer, driveclub tries and mostly succeed at resembling how wonderful racing outside actual racetracks can be, just you a beatiful and a set of wonderful cars which race against eachother. Whereas PGR resembles the thrill of streettrack racing. Though denying that both of these games aim to be the ideal mix between arcade and Sim is not true and that is one very important aspect of Driveclub. But saying driveclub is the direct spiritual succesor of PGR seems a bit to much of a long shot for me especially since Grid comes closer to PGR than Driveclub.

Hype -6
The lack of weather at launch -3
The lack of a photomode -3
Not having 100 cars -3
Having only 55 tracks -3
Minor flaws -2
= 80