Gran Turismo 7

This game is so frustrating. My goodness, the CAFE. Why? It's all this non-stop chatting and having your hand held. Worse than that, you can barely breathe.

Imagine going to Disney Land and the whole time there's this annoying guy who follows you around, commenting on everything, standing in your way, telling you what to do even if it's obvious and he NEVER LEAVES. That's what GT7 is like.

I play games largely for freedom, especially the Gran Turismo games. In real life, I own one car - a Toyota Corolla Hybrid. I like it, but it's not exactly a hot, cool, racing car. And I can't afford more cars.

But playing Gran Turismo, I get to acquire tonnes of great cars, compete in all kinds of international competitions, go really fast, etc. And the best part is the feeling of progress and the freedom to take whatever path I like. Maybe buy used cars to save money, or save up to get a really good car I want, or doing the license tests, or tuning up a car to do a particular set of races or whatever. So many races to choose from and a nice balance of rewards but also having to work for them.

GT7 seems to misunderstand what made the series great. It limits what we can see from the start. Things are gradually unlocked which makes the game feel small and underwhelming. And every time you unlock something, some chatbot is talking to you! It's so annoying. Everywhere you go. Tuning, buying cars, license tests, races, the cafe - chatbots everywhere.

The license tests are way too easy so far and the rewards feel meaningless because I'm acquiring so many cars from races anyway. And you only get 2 cars - one for bronze and one for gold, no car for getting all silver! I fondly remember the earlier games where the license tests were hard. Bronze was usually not too bad but still required a bit of skill, silver was doable but sometimes hard, and gold could be anywhere from tricky to nearly impossible. When you finally got it, it felt like a big achievement and usually the car you won was actually useful, unique or cool. Doing the driving missions in GT7 and winning a Sambabus and an army Jeep is super lame.

The interface is also painfully slow at times. Especially the main menu, going both to or from other things like Brand Central or Tuning Shop. Why does it take so long? They have a static background for crying out loud! It needs to be snappy or else it ruins the game. Sometimes I accidentally exit from a section and it takes nearly 10 seconds just to get back in.

The graphics and racing themselves are really good, of course. I'm no expert but the physics seem good and the cars and tracks look really impressive. Although some of the tracks don't feel as fun as in previous games, for whatever reason.

The tuning system is annoying since it's not clear which parts add on to each-other and which parts are redundant. For example, to decrease the weight of your car, you have to get Stage 1, then 2, then 3, etc. But for brakes or transmission or turbo, you can jump straight to the higher end stuff. I partially know this from earlier games but the way they're arranged can make it tedious to figure out what you actually need to maximise a car's performance quickly.

The Cafe way of organising progress is annoying as well because it's so linear. You get 3 similar cars and then another 3 similar cars, etc. No real choice, not that much sense of progress because it's all scripted. I honestly feel like I'm still sitting through the opening tutorial and waiting to get to start playing the game. I'm worried that will never happen though. That the Cafe and chatbots will be haunting me throughout the entirety of the game.

I still have no sense of the structure or scale of the game. Are there endurance races? Are there power-limited races? How many races are there? Are there different levels like Beginner, Amateur, Pro and Expert? I don't know. I just follow the yellow target and do what the Cafe tells me to. How lame. None of the cars feel like they belong to me, I'm just watching someone else play the game and collect cars.

Meanwhile, the rewards system is terrible. In previous games, you just make progress when you feel like it. You can often sell prize cars. Some things take longer but some things pay well so you can decide if and when to grind. But in GT7, a lot of it is random. By various ways you get these ticket things and then you have to watch an annoying roulette reveal to see what you got. Even worse, you seem to get the worst prize about 90% of the time. So what's the point? It's far worse than just giving me that prize! I'd prefer a straight 10,000 credits rather than sitting through a stupid animation just to get 10,000 credits. And some prizes are so stupid, like a suspension upgrade for a car you don't even have yet. WTF? How do they come up with this stuff?

Anyway, I'm still enjoying the game for the racing, cars and tracks. Hopefully there will be some better features once I get further into the game. But I think I'd prefer to play GT2, 3 or 4 on an emulator at this point than bother with GT7. The earlier games were fun and gave you that huge sense of freedom and accomplishment. GT7 feels like watching someone else play and constantly talk to you about it.

Also, I couldn't care less about the extra, frivolous stuff like liveries, what colour helmet the driver wears, what colour gloves, what colour suit, taking photos or looking at photos, changing the oil (are you serious?), and other boring things. What's next, filling out insurance forms? Will they start to simulate toilet and food breaks in the next game? Shall my driver need to sleep every so often? Will I go to Brand Central and find they're not open and I have to wait until the next day? Simulate DRIVING and RACING and great cars and tracks! Stop simulating the boring, frustrating aspects of life like clothes, photos and changing oil. I want escapism, not more pedantry and superficial BS.

Gran Turismo 7 is a perfect current example of a good core game being ruined by this ever driving push for live service games. You can't have too much content initially because you have to drip feed people for years to hopefully keep getting them to spend money on micro-transactions. Well, that seems to have initially been the plan but after recent updates they've walked back on its stingy reward system somewhat and the result is that GT7 as released feels like a well-polished but ultimately barren and unrewarding triple A racing game experience.

Initially it seems promising, you're greeted with an old friend in a world map quite similar to the one seen in GT4, the most well regarded Gran Turismo due to its bountiful amount of content, but the differences immediately begin to show. GT7 is a modern game. Not trusting the player to purchase their own car, but not wanting to outright give a car to you like they did in GT6, the game guides you to the used marketplace where you are given enough credits to buy one of three cars. It's this back handed hand-holding that will repeatedly be a feature of GT7's single player mode. Then, you are introduced to the cafe. The cafe is a linear, tiny. handholdy and unrewarding progression system in which you are guided through 39 events from your very first race to the last championship. The gameplay loop is you go to the cafe, you enter a race, you receive a car for winning the race and then you use that car to enter the next cafe event rinse and repeat. The context and the history of the cars given to you in the cafe is interesting and it would've been a nice compliment to a full-fledged GT Mode but it basically being the GT Mode is very disappointing. There's no sense of progression once you complete it, there's random events to do but no reward or sense of direction afterwards. Just collecting cars for the sake of collecting. License tests return and I like the tests as a fun challenge to really learn the physics and the tracks, but they're dead easy apart from the very last one. Multiplayer returns unchanged from GT Sport, except with the more realistic physics I feel more disadvantaged at high level play with a controller than I did in GT Sport so it’s somewhat less enjoyable to compete in. Couple that with a broken penalty system and a frustrating player base makes competitive multiplayer an experience that doesn't keep me coming back. Missions are some the most fun to be had once you finish the cafe and offer a variety of unique and enjoyable little challenges, but again there aren't tons of them, so you run out of missions to complete within a day or two. Circuit Experiences are perhaps the most challenging content in GT7 and are they most rewarding to complete both from an intrinsic and extrinsic standpoint. Learning tracks inside and out is extremely satisfying and nailing that one lap is everything I love about driving sims and thankfully the reward gained for doing so makes them well worth doing. But once you go over each track once there's little reason to do circuit experience again. So, there's not much here in terms of content in game modes but what about actually playing the game? Well it gets a little better from here.

The physics are really solid this time around and some races with the AI are genuinely fun and thrilling. The Clubman Cup plus race at Tsukuba comes to mind and shows the potential that exists with this game now that they've nailed the feel and look of the racing. I love racing in the rain, the way the tracks get wet and dry up adds so much to a race and it's also incredibly beautiful to behold, rain is GT7 at its best both graphics and physics wise. The gameplay of GT7 is undoubtedly its best aspect but even here I have issues. Mainly that every single single-player race, bar like 2, places you at the very back of the grid with the 20 cars spaced out so you start a minute behind the leader with no option to qualify. Was this done to mask the slowness of the AI? The Clubman Plus race I mentioned and had a ton of fun with is one of the only grid start races and is incredibly tight and close even with a decently tuned car. I'm not sure why every race has you chasing the AI from last, but it gets old very very quickly. Maybe by GT8 video game AI will finally be good enough to have proper competitive races with without having to resort to giving the player a significant and unfair disadvantage to overcome that amounts to a glorified overtaking challenge. The promise of Sophy says that might actually come true.

Gran Turismo used to be a game for me that was about the entire package. The music, the racing, the cars, the design, and style. I still think it has charm that isn't really captured by other driving sims but it’s been diluted somewhat by conventional modern video game design language. I'm not sure what happened to the relationship between Isamu Ohira and Polyphony Digital but his presence as composer has been sorely missed since GT4. The soundtrack is so nothing now, Ohira's injection of jazz fusion and memorable melodies that accompanied the menu's and dealerships from GTs 1 through 4 are for me, some of the most memorable things about Gran Turismo and they didn't even include any of his old tracks this time. The menu music now is loungy and without personality at best and at its worst you get these weird tasteless classical remixes. However the sound design of the cars is finally at a point where it competes with contemporaries, car engines bang, pop, and whine as they should. Putting an exhaust on will change how the car sounds. The selection of cars and tracks are fine, mostly copied from GT Sport with a few new selections but they're incredibly detailed. I do miss the endless amount of weird shitty used cars you could buy and the legacy tracks. The UI lacks the charm and style of older entries but it’s better than 5 through Sport.

However, despite the UI being nice and clean and loading times being faster than ever, going through GT7 is not so painless because of a few decisions made to "streamline" the experience. Talking heads popping up to guide you throughout the game feels so out of place in GT it's such a soulless and annoying way to teach people how to play the game and tell them where they need to go. You shouldn't *need* to go anywhere on a GT world map, the entire point of the map is meant to be the freedom and these design choices completely undermine that out of fear a small handful of players might get lost on the map for a few minutes. The cafe is indicative of this too, amounting to the cafe owner telling you what event to go do next. There's no story really in GT7, no real reason to care about these JPGs that pop up just to tell you what to do next. It's very strangely executed. Freedom for me is a large part of what is missing from GT7. The freedom to have your own story or journey through the game. You were never truly free in the older GT Mode’s, but it was very good at giving the illusion of freedom because it gave you much more choice. Now everyone has the same journey through GT7, go through the cafe menu books. Sure the cars you use might be a little different from player to player, but it doesn't incentivize freedom, it does the opposite. It gives you a car that's perfect for the next event that you may choose to use. Wink Wink. The damage has already been done. It's a streamlined speedrun version of a GT Mode. It doesn't feel satisfying to go through at all, to conquer the last championship. Not when you've been handed everything all along the way and told where to go next. Couple that with the races themselves being copy paste, start from the back of the grid a minute behind the leader and you get a boring, unsatisfying GT Mode that feels like an afterthought. I genuinely can't understand how they touted GT7 as a single player focused game.

Gran Turismo 7 will probably be a very good GT in 3 or 4 years, with future improvements and additions like the Sophy AI, cars, tracks, events, missions all being promised but because of its GT Mode it will never be the best. As of May 2022 however the game is sparse on content, is extremely short to complete, has a linear boring progression system, a somewhat broken and frustrating multiplayer and a predatory micro-transaction based economy. Thanks to its physics, it's pretty fun for a custom race every now and then but it is not the return to GT4 greatness that the world map led us to believe. Still better than Forza though.