Gran Turismo 7 | 1.18 Update Rundown

And with that, my time with Grind Turismo 7 has come to an end.

I'll be talking about it on my struggling YouTube channel lol, but this game is effectively dead in the water or will be dead for a while:

Polyphony fixes these "money" exploits with a sense of urgency you'd expect from a triage surgeon, but they completely ignore why people use those exploits.

People use those exploits, because without them, the money making aspect of the game is a seriously depressing affair. There's only a handful of events that pay out enough to be worth doing, and the difference in rewards between those events and normal events is so large that even if you enjoyed the other events, you'd feel like you're wasting time doing them since you're not earning as much credits.

PD deliberately put certain cars and upgrades behind RNG rewards. Brand Central? You need invites to buy certain cars. The invites expire and the cars are expensive. So you need credits, fast... Which means back to Sardegna, Spa or Tokyo Expressway you go. Legend cars? They sell out after a certain volume is reached and their price goes up as their popularity does. They're expensive. So you need credits, fast... Which means back to Sardegna, Spa or Tokyo Expressway you go.

This would be fine if the single player races themselves were fun, but they're not... Their AI is trash. So the only way they could think of to make the game challenging when the AI basically drives like a train with no conductor, is to give the AI an artificial advantage. In some races, they start 45 seconds ahead of you. There's no qualifying, no sense of a grid, no standing starts. It's just, chase the rabbit.

They deliberately space the AI out so that even if you drive well, you finish only a few seconds ahead of the fastest AI car.

That's not even the most egregious part of it: the rubber-banding is awful. When you pass an AI driver, you'd think they were Max Verstappen in an LMP car. The AI immediately starts putting out the fastest sectors of the race just to catch up and pass you.

AI is also not affected by mechanical damage or wet surfaces. Even when the AI crashes, they hyper fast correct their car and get up to your speed within seconds.

You know it's sad when a racing game's AI is so awful, it makes the AI from the Formula 1 EA games look like Hal 3000.

Overall, it's sad, because the core of what makes Gran Turismo great is there: the used car marketplace, the tuning shop, GT Auto, the CaRPG elements... But it's all distorted and gross from all the MTX pressure by Sony executives. They had a chance to really evolve the series and show how much people are willing to invest into a racing sim for a single player experience. And they just Ferrari F1 team strategy boned it up.

I'm selling my Fanatec DD Pro and switching back to PC-only sim racing. It's sad that the game literally had everything that I wanted for a single player sim racing experience, but the execution was so awful that just a couple months later I'm done.

Don't worry, I'm sure Polyphony will make another patch in a few weeks to make it even harder to farm credits, make certain cars and upgrades completely not purchasable unless you buy their Sony store credits. If you think they're done ruining this game, you're in for a rude awakening.

GT7 is dead for me because of lack of deep and long campaign mode with at least 100 races like Grid Legends or Forza Motorsport 7 or Forza Horizon 5.

TedBrosby- said:

AI is also not affected by mechanical damage or wet surfaces. Even when the AI crashes, they hyper fast correct their car and get up to your speed within seconds.

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This is actually false, they are affected by wet and mechanical damage, it's pretty easy to test out. There is some "rubberbanding" though, but it's just remnants of the PS3 B-Spec behavior, aka "I'm James May when nobody else is in sight, but if there's a car within 5 seconds around me, I default to Stig". If you overtake them and gap them enough, they'll slow back down. Again, pretty easy to test out.
The main issue is some of the latest races they've put in, some specific AIs has permanent boosts, either in pace or tyre / fuel management, so they're able to sustain a pace that would normally be impossible to have on their strategy.

I hate the physics changes they made. I really enjoyed the old, oversteery nature of the cars with my DD Pro prior to 1.13. I've since moved the DD Pro over to PC racing and discovered that it is absolutely no better than my TM TSXW. I might even like the TXSW better.

So that's 2 wasted purchases.

The DD Pro isn't any better than my high-end belt driven wheel, and GT7 turned out to be a boring exercise in credit farming (dressed up as if it's a racing game).

2 biggest GT7 killers for me:
- the constant repetition of same events or lack of events at all
- no career

Easily the worst Grind Turdismo made (numbered)
I can't believe the lack of care, creativity and sense of urgency to bring this thing up to speed. It felt less than half finished when it arrived and drip feeding it content is not helping. Who releases a new track to the series and only gives it THREE races. Races that don't even payout well. It just unbelievable. PD has lost all of my respect.

GT-Alex said:

This is actually false, they are affected by wet and mechanical damage, it's pretty easy to test out. There is some "rubberbanding" though, but it's just remnants of the PS3 B-Spec behavior, aka "I'm James May when nobody else is in sight, but if there's a car within 5 seconds around me, I default to Stig". If you overtake them and gap them enough, they'll slow back down. Again, pretty easy to test out.
The main issue is some of the latest races they've put in, some specific AIs has permanent boosts, either in pace or tyre / fuel management, so they're able to sustain a pace that would normally be impossible to have on their strategy.

Click to expand...

I don't know which GT7 you're playing, but I pit maneuvered an AI car (Suswillo) in WTC 600 at Tokyo and put him into the wall at 100+ MPH and he was back on track less than a second later and caught up to 2nd place before turn 1.

They also run racing hards and the only way I was able to maintain a 1 second lead on them by lap 1 was to run intermediates.

And it's very easy to test out that your anecdote is opposite to what I experience. I checked the replay and the AI literally pulls faster times than when they had fresher tires after I pass them.

You're right about some AI being permanently boosted. In certain tracks, it's the same AI drivers that are boosted every time - Suswillo, Kokubun are usually monsters.

TedBrosby- said:

I don't know which GT7 you're playing, but I pit maneuvered an AI car (Suswillo) in WTC 600 at Tokyo and put him into the wall at 100+ MPH and he was back on track less than a second later and caught up to 2nd place before turn 1.

They also run racing hards and the only way I was able to maintain a 1 second lead on them by lap 1 was to run intermediates.

And it's very easy to test out that your anecdote is opposite to what I experience. I checked the replay and the AI literally pulls faster times than when they had fresher tires after I pass them.

You're right about some AI being permanently boosted. In certain tracks, it's the same AI drivers that are boosted every time - Suswillo, Kokubun are usually monsters.

Click to expand...

The solo races with damage run it on low, so you need a really big hit to actually induce engine damage, but when the Tomahawk farm thing was still a thing, I checked in replays and they do get damage, which can severely limit their top speed for the time it remains (about 30 seconds). Sidenote : on that Tokyo race, the AI is running sport tyres, not race tyres.

As for the rubberbanding, that's exactly what I'm describing, they switch into Stig mode when you're within a certain range, but they go sloth pace if no other car is close enough. Take a much faster car and toy around with one AI : first staying at the back, then just stick to its bumper for a couple laps, then pass and get far away in front, then run the replay and check how its lap times evolve. Do that in a high difficulty race preferably, custom races kinda work but they never put more than 90% throttle there.

TedBrosby- said:

And with that, my time with Grind Turismo 7 has come to an end.

I'll be talking about it on my struggling YouTube channel lol, but this game is effectively dead in the water or will be dead for a while:

Polyphony fixes these "money" exploits with a sense of urgency you'd expect from a triage surgeon, but they completely ignore why people use those exploits.

People use those exploits, because without them, the money making aspect of the game is a seriously depressing affair. There's only a handful of events that pay out enough to be worth doing, and the difference in rewards between those events and normal events is so large that even if you enjoyed the other events, you'd feel like you're wasting time doing them since you're not earning as much credits.

PD deliberately put certain cars and upgrades behind RNG rewards. Brand Central? You need invites to buy certain cars. The invites expire and the cars are expensive. So you need credits, fast... Which means back to Sardegna, Spa or Tokyo Expressway you go. Legend cars? They sell out after a certain volume is reached and their price goes up as their popularity does. They're expensive. So you need credits, fast... Which means back to Sardegna, Spa or Tokyo Expressway you go.

This would be fine if the single player races themselves were fun, but they're not... Their AI is trash. So the only way they could think of to make the game challenging when the AI basically drives like a train with no conductor, is to give the AI an artificial advantage. In some races, they start 45 seconds ahead of you. There's no qualifying, no sense of a grid, no standing starts. It's just, chase the rabbit.

They deliberately space the AI out so that even if you drive well, you finish only a few seconds ahead of the fastest AI car.

That's not even the most egregious part of it: the rubber-banding is awful. When you pass an AI driver, you'd think they were Max Verstappen in an LMP car. The AI immediately starts putting out the fastest sectors of the race just to catch up and pass you.

AI is also not affected by mechanical damage or wet surfaces. Even when the AI crashes, they hyper fast correct their car and get up to your speed within seconds.

You know it's sad when a racing game's AI is so awful, it makes the AI from the Formula 1 EA games look like Hal 3000.

Overall, it's sad, because the core of what makes Gran Turismo great is there: the used car marketplace, the tuning shop, GT Auto, the CaRPG elements... But it's all distorted and gross from all the MTX pressure by Sony executives. They had a chance to really evolve the series and show how much people are willing to invest into a racing sim for a single player experience. And they just Ferrari F1 team strategy boned it up.

I'm selling my Fanatec DD Pro and switching back to PC-only sim racing. It's sad that the game literally had everything that I wanted for a single player sim racing experience, but the execution was so awful that just a couple months later I'm done.

Don't worry, I'm sure Polyphony will make another patch in a few weeks to make it even harder to farm credits, make certain cars and upgrades completely not purchasable unless you buy their Sony store credits. If you think they're done ruining this game, you're in for a rude awakening.

Click to expand...

Dont have this but that sounds really bad.

Quite glad I never bothered trying to get a PS5 just for this. I've had some fun times with GT games but we always kept getting told next time will be the one......and it never is. Bad AI, substandard sound, the GT brand of physics and GRINDING. PD never listen, the just put out what they want, not what you want......and yet people stupidly buy it. The best thing for the GT series would have been for this to flop but people are so desperate for anything to actually play on the PS5 that shows it off.

I see all those posts as very positive for the hobby.
Yo all of you out there interested in using your newly acquired wheels on a Simulator (racing game) with unlimited access to cars, tracks, championship, career, zero grinding, we have you covered on the PC side.
Come to the dark side.

We do not bite (mostly)

Mariangello said:

2 biggest GT7 killers for me:
- the constant repetition of same events or lack of events at all
- no career

Click to expand...

There's a lot that I could respond to in this thread but I'm going to go with this one because I'm not sure what people were actually expecting from a Gran Turismo game? They tried to create a more linear career-like experience in the GT Cafe whilst fitting it within the framework of a traditional GT experience, and as for event reptition there isn't much of that going on until the post game. Even then it depends on how strict your definition of event repetition is, as the only true repeat is the WTC 800 and Gr3 730 races at Daytona being pretty much the same.

I think the big difference this time around is how much GT7 played up the idea of collecting cars over completing all of the events as the end goal of the game. Trying to collect all of the cars in any GT game other than 1 and 3 was just as grindy as this if not moreso, but it was largely agreed up to this point that 100% race completion was the main aim, not 100% car collection.

One more thing I would argue is that a lot of the racing titles this demographic enjoys has the same shortcomings. ACC's career wasn't really a career, and iRacing has a progression system not tied to accomplishments we traditionally associate with a video game career mode.

To me, Gran Turismo needs a new installment that focuses on hardcore Sim in terms of driving physics and is to be exclusive to PC.

Or otherwise, if GT7 gets ported to PC, then get its physics and various features to be fixed.

JayOTT said:

There's a lot that I could respond to in this thread but I'm going to go with this one because I'm not sure what people were actually expecting from a Gran Turismo game? They tried to create a more linear career-like experience in the GT Cafe whilst fitting it within the framework of a traditional GT experience, and as for event reptition there isn't much of that going on until the post game. Even then it depends on how strict your definition of event repetition is, as the only true repeat is the WTC 800 and Gr3 730 races at Daytona being pretty much the same.

I think the big difference this time around is how much GT7 played up the idea of collecting cars over completing all of the events as the end goal of the game. Trying to collect all of the cars in any GT game other than 1 and 3 was just as grindy as this if not moreso, but it was largely agreed up to this point that 100% race completion was the main aim, not 100% car collection.

One more thing I would argue is that a lot of the racing titles this demographic enjoys has the same shortcomings. ACC's career wasn't really a career, and iRacing has a progression system not tied to accomplishments we traditionally associate with a video game career mode.

Click to expand...

The difference is, the grind was fun in GT 1-4. There were different events with huge payouts across different circuits with different strategies.

And ironically, the AI drove better in earlier games. It wasn't that they tried overtakes, but they didn't deliberately wreck you either.

And the other big difference is that PD are deliberately making changes to the game to SHOW you that they want you to buy credits at the Sony store. The prices for legend/rare cars are dynamic so they are only cheap when they first hit Legends/Used Car, but the price goes up over time as the car almost sells out. The invite system has an expiration date for expensive cars, so you feel "fear of missing out" if you don't farm the credits super fast which pressures you to think about spending real money to get them.

People didn't do exploits in GT3/2. There were "unofficial" exploits like 930HP cars that just destroyed the competition, but people weren't doing prize exploits. People do exploits in GT7 because without exploits, it's impossible for you to keep up with the FOMO aspect of the game.

JayOTT said:

There's a lot that I could respond to in this thread but I'm going to go with this one because I'm not sure what people were actually expecting from a Gran Turismo game? They tried to create a more linear career-like experience in the GT Cafe whilst fitting it within the framework of a traditional GT experience, and as for event reptition there isn't much of that going on until the post game. Even then it depends on how strict your definition of event repetition is, as the only true repeat is the WTC 800 and Gr3 730 races at Daytona being pretty much the same.

I think the big difference this time around is how much GT7 played up the idea of collecting cars over completing all of the events as the end goal of the game. Trying to collect all of the cars in any GT game other than 1 and 3 was just as grindy as this if not moreso, but it was largely agreed up to this point that 100% race completion was the main aim, not 100% car collection.

One more thing I would argue is that a lot of the racing titles this demographic enjoys has the same shortcomings. ACC's career wasn't really a career, and iRacing has a progression system not tied to accomplishments we traditionally associate with a video game career mode.

Click to expand...

For a moment there I thought you were comparing ACC and Iracing to GT7. surely I have read that wrong.

bootrossx2 said:

For a moment there I thought you were comparing ACC and Iracing to GT7. surely I have read that wrong.

Click to expand...

You did because I was pointing out that ACC and iRacing don't really have career modes in the conventional way we view them either. But if you're going to post in such a passive aggressive tone, let's get dangerous. iRacing has ice physics, ACC has no car variety, checkmate simdads.