There are three primary reasons why I purchased a PlayStation 5 console.
- Final Fantasy 7 Remake (and anything else Square wants to put out, really)
- Horizon: Forbidden West (I've got a review coming)
- Gran Turismo 7
Today, we'll be discussing Gran Turismo 7 in exhaustive detail. Spoiler alert: I've returned the game to Amazon and obtained a full refund. Not because it is a bad game - when you're driving around; it is very, very fun. The reason for my return was for all the reasons that define when you can't drive around, and those are many and plentiful.
To coincide with my purchase of Gran Turismo 7, I picked up a Logitech G29 Steering wheel (and pedals) for my PlayStation (thankfully, they also work on the PC) - along with a gear shifter; ready to experience the truest nostalgia I've felt in a game since Gran Turismo 3 on the PlayStation 2.
First; there's the start up screen - a lengthy (one time only) unskippable cinematic taking you on what the devs probably hoped was a tear-jerking retrospective on the history of motoring. There's file footage of races, production lines, and some faces that are known to be involved in racing. It gets you right in the mood for some things to go vroom.
Here's the first flaw, and the first thing wrong with the game. While this movie is playing; the game is failing to respect your time by downloading additional content that wasn't on the disc in the background. It isn't even installing from the disc (whatever content is on it) to the console.
It is proceeding at a glacial pace; before you are unceremoniously dumped into a menu where you select your control scheme, and one of three tracks, while the rest of the game downloads / installs, and does whatever.
The three races are music rally, which is basically a time trial going around sectors of a track that become increasingly challenging to meet. Eventually, after what feels like 30-40 minutes of either doing this (or wandering off and doing something else in reality) - you get access to the true part of Gran Turismo 7.
There's a new menu system which is somewhat like a world map; with various places you can visit. The central one that drives you through the game and its content; allowing you to unlock more races and championships is the Cafe; where you meet some sort of unmemorable avatar who gives you "menus", or "mission tickets"; allowing you to explore the world of motorsport as if you've never driven a car before.
You start off with some production style front wheel drive cars; the type that everyone would see ubiquitously on the road, particular in Australia and South East Asia - there's some variants of the Mazda 3 (but with different names) and cars of the similar class.
It's like your first race in any Gran Turismo game from the past - here's a production vehicle; a race track, and no limits. Go your hardest. It feels like Gran Turismo all over again. Just like my countless hours pent as a youth in GT3 on my PlayStation 2.
Except, you win a race. Then, you win a car. The same car you just drove to win that race. You think... "great" I'll sell it and get some money, and maybe put that towards another car (for me, I'd be after the Ford Focus, to match my real world car) - except... you get to the garage - and... guess what?
You can't sell the car. You can't even buy a car then sell it. You can only discard the car. You don't even get to see the look of joy on someone's face when they find a discarded, shiny new car (pointless to you) that they can drive off around the bend at extreme speed.
You just. Can't. Sell the car. You can't get in game credits for it. You just throw it away. It's despicable, particularly when the other cars available in the game are expensive relative to the numbers of credits you win from each race.
You. Should. Be. Able. To. Sell. Cars. If you win a car you've already got; you should get at least three quarters of its value in credits, so you don't have a duplicate in your garage, destined to sit, without tyres, on cinder blocks for the duration of your Gran Turismo 7 career.
As you progress through the "Cafe" menu, and unlock more and more races (and different, increasingly more powerful car types) the gap between your vehicle collection and that of the competition widens significantly.
The prize purse does not inflate with the growing cost of new vehicles (required for the new championships and race modes you unlock) - not to mention the enforced upgrades which cost many orders of magnitude more than the vehicles themselves. (Weight reduction, stage 4 costing as much as the car did itself, in light of cheaper hatchbacks?)
Then... apart from all of these little issues with the game's progression and economy - forcing you to either grind out races to obtain new cars at a glacial pace (how does 90 races in your current car sound to move up to a more exotic, performant league, where you will need to race another 90 times to upgrade the car to be able to compete?)
Users on reddit have also discovered that there's a hard cap of 20 million in game credits that you can earn; which means you've got to use microtransactions (in a full priced game) in order to purchase the most expensive exotic vehicles, which are "only available for a limited time" - further prompting or tempting the user to involve themselves in the shady practice of spending upwards of $50-70 on a single car that cannot be used if the game goes offline.
Yep. There's another stake into the vampiric heart of Gran Turismo. Shortly after I purchased the game, got set up, and raced for my second day (pretty happy with the performance of the wheel, the driving dynamics, and the challenging licence tests) I got a notification that the game would be going down for maintenance.
There was a warning that some features would be unavailable. "Sure", I thought. I wasn't planning on playing multiplayer anyway.
And that's when my race finished. My progress wasn't saved (in spite of the half a gigabyte) of saved data on my PS5 SSD. I was unceremoniously dumped back to the menu and given only the music rally options and some arcade features.
For the next thirty hours, I was unable to play the game. For the next thirty hours, there was limited correspondence and detail of what the actual underlying issues with the game were. For the next thirty hours, the Gran Turismo sub reddit became awash with rage, and I thought it would all go away when the game came back online.
Then the game came back online, and all the issues that I was denying in my own mind that weren't a problem suddenly appeared everywhere. I needed more credits than I had to be able to actually compete in and win races, and the fact that every race in the campaign, championship and others is a rolling start, where you're lined up from the back of the grid (no qualifying) made the game a grind, like a broken clutch.
I was having fun finding my correct racing line, executing corners well, and racing to the best of my ability - but no matter what I did, the deck was always stacked against me; commencing from last position; matched against a field of cars that were more powerful than their stickers (and would require obscene volumes of in game credits to match their performance) - to something that wasn't part of the fun of a gameplay loop anymore.
I know that Gran Turismo is meant to be about learning how to drive individual cars, learn their nuance, and get to understand how they each handle in a unique manner, but you shouldn't be forced to complete 90 races to obtain your next car, and get it to the performance level where it is actually competitive.
The most annoying part about this is that if you want to race standard road cars - you'll always be matched against opponents that are either heinously slow, or heinsouly quicker than you are - meaning there's no level playing field. You're either so far ahead it doesn't matter how badly you drive, or so far behind it doesn't matter how well you drive.
Brute force via the application of credits and tuning is the only way to win.
While motorsport, like every competitive sport, bends rules to the point of breaking; this isn't the fun part of a game that is meant to be about driving simulator. The physics model is superb; but the game wrapped around it is a micro-transaction; progression stifling; unbalanced, and incomplete mess.
At least it has really fast load times.
In any case, I've returned my copy of the game and I'm so disappointed. I wanted it to be a simpler game; a fairer game; and well, that's not what I got. Perhaps patches and updates will fix it, but without the removal of its online-only core; the game isn't worth a single look in, despite the brilliance of what actually happens as you're blasting around a track yourself.
This rant is too long. Stay tuned for more reviews about racing games. I'm gonna go through a lot until I find one that makes me happy. I've already got an order in for Gran Turismo 5, which seems to be (by way of reviews) the last "good" Gran Turismo.
There's some small updated from the developers, namely:
Updates which will come into effect beginning of April:
Increase rewards in the events in the latter half of the World Circuits by approximately 100% on average.
Addition of high rewards for clearing the Circuit Experience in all Gold/All Bronze results.
Increase of rewards in Online Races.
Include a total of eight new one-hour Endurance Race events to Missions. These will also have higher reward settings.
Increase the upper limit of non-paid credits in player wallets from 20M Cr. to 100M Cr.
Increase the quantity of Used and Legend cars on offer at any given time.
Beyond this there will be a few additional patches deployed between now and the end of April which will add new cars and tracks and make some other fixes.
They're also giving players "1 million credits" and extending the number of credits that can be accumulated. The big problem is the desire to push the game as a live service, in my opinion.