The Gran Turismo franchise is one that I hold extremely near and dear to my heart, but one I have had dwindling interest in since the early-mid 00’s. Gran Turismo 2 was one of the first two games I ever played on the original PlayStation (the other being Croc: Legend of the Gobbos), and it’s a game I used to spend an extraordinary amount of time playing with my older sister. It’s an extremely important game for me from a nostalgic perspective, as well as being the game I can pinpoint with getting me interested in the racing genre. Gran Turismo 3 was the second game I played on the PS2 (the first being X-Men 2: Wolverines Revenge), and it was likely my most played game of that entire generation, with it until recently being the only GT game I have played to completion. But I fell off the wagon with GT4 onwards, I was just so enamoured by GT3 that the changes brought forward in 4 were ones I never really clicked with, and then the HD era GT5 and GT6 brought with them their own major issues. I opted out of playing GT Sport entirely because I found the last three games so underwhelming and it seemed like I missed something awesome, but with GT7 on the horizon and the promise that it would combine a lot of Sport’s best features with a more traditional Gran Turismo experience was something I didn’t want to pass up. I’ve spent around three months with Gran Turismo 7, and my opinion is somewhat mixed, on the one hand it’s the best entry since GT3 has reignited my love for the franchise, but on the other hand there are multiple glaring issues that simply cannot be ignored.
Understanding the kind of game GT7 is and why it is this way requires looking back at the franchises entire twenty-five-year history. The original game was unlike anything else on the market and brought simulation racing to the masses via the original Sony PlayStation, showcasing incredible graphics and a multitude of real-world cars recreated ins tunning detail. Gran Turismo 2 which came just two years later was an overwhelming improvement over the original game, adding a considerable amount of depth to the gameplay, as well as increasing the car count, and improving the graphics to become one of the systems best looking games. GT3 made the leap to next generation hardware and was at the time leagues ahead of what any other game was achieving with its graphical fidelity, although it did reduce the amount of content from what was present in GT2. GT4 made another significant graphical leap near the end of the PS2 lifecycle and upped the content count once again, as well as introducing a more realistic physics engine and much more. The jump to the PS3 proved harder than expected with GT5 facing multiple delays and development issues, but eventually released with a mostly positive reception, but despite that it was too little too late as it failed to match up to many of its competitors and suffered from some glaring technical issues. GT6 was a bloated mess of a game that didn’t solve any of the problems GT5 had, and with it releasing on last generation systems it was swiftly swept under the rug and forgotten about. GT Sport revitalised interest in the franchise but many missed the inclusion of a traditional single player experience, so GT7 promised to essentially be the next generation HD Gran Turismo experience that GT5&6 should have been. What GT7 needed to do was provide one of the most visually impressive racing experiences available, with a wealth of content that didn’t seem overwhelming, and work out the technical issues present in GT5&6. I’m happy to say that GT7 did succeed in all of those areas, but it brought with it a brand-new set of problems.
Understanding the kind of game GT7 is and why it is this way requires looking back at the franchises entire twenty-five-year history. The original game was unlike anything else on the market and brought simulation racing to the masses via the original Sony PlayStation, showcasing incredible graphics and a multitude of real-world cars recreated ins tunning detail. Gran Turismo 2 which came just two years later was an overwhelming improvement over the original game, adding a considerable amount of depth to the gameplay, as well as increasing the car count, and improving the graphics to become one of the systems best looking games. GT3 made the leap to next generation hardware and was at the time leagues ahead of what any other game was achieving with its graphical fidelity, although it did reduce the amount of content from what was present in GT2. GT4 made another significant graphical leap near the end of the PS2 lifecycle and upped the content count once again, as well as introducing a more realistic physics engine and much more. The jump to the PS3 proved harder than expected with GT5 facing multiple delays and development issues, but eventually released with a mostly positive reception, but despite that it was too little too late as it failed to match up to many of its competitors and suffered from some glaring technical issues. GT6 was a bloated mess of a game that didn’t solve any of the problems GT5 had, and with it releasing on last generation systems it was swiftly swept under the rug and forgotten about. GT Sport revitalised interest in the franchise but many missed the inclusion of a traditional single player experience, so GT7 promised to essentially be the next generation HD Gran Turismo experience that GT5&6 should have been. What GT7 needed to do was provide one of the most visually impressive racing experiences available, with a wealth of content that didn’t seem overwhelming, and work out the technical issues present in GT5&6. I’m happy to say that GT7 did succeed in all of those areas, but it brought with it a brand-new set of problems.
So, what can you expect from GT7 as both a newcomer, and a returning fan? GT7’s simulation mode has been overhauled to provide a more structed roadmap for players. Done in the name of accessibility, the new mode introduces GT Café, a place where you can interact with various people to learn about automobile history, as well as progress through the Café menu. The menu tasks players with unlocking three cars, usually of a certain class or from a particular manufacturer. It will then highlight the races you need to complete in order to attain these cars. Once a menu is completed, you’ll return to the café for a run-down about why these cars are important for automotive history, and earn rewards. This is the real meat of GT7’s entire single-player component, completing menus and the events attached to them, and to go through all thirty-nine menu’s it’ll take you approximately twenty hours. Progressing from slower road cars with tiny engines all the way up to exotic performance cars and GT.3 class racing vehicles. It’ll take you through almost all of the game’s mechanics such as tuning cars, buying new and used cars, car maintenance, and introducing some of the other side activities such as Scapes (photo mode), missions, and of course the iconic license tests. This streamlined approach is done primarily in the name of accessibility, and it does help to ensure that you’re less likely to spend your money on a car you’re not able to use yet because you don’t have the adequate licenses to race them. For some GT purists this may come off as developer Polyphony Digital stripping away player agency, but I genuinely feel it’s a change made for the best. This acts as training wheels for the lower to mid-tier events, and by the time you’ve finished the final menu book you’ll have access to all events which include the lengthy endurance races. It also means you’ll have built up a collection of close to one-hundred cars which will suit you for almost any kind of event, as well as allowed you to build up enough cash to start branching out on your own to make big purchases with the knowledge you’ve gained from all the GT Café experts. Gran Turismo has never been inaccessible as such, but it can be daunting to start from scratch with no cars, no money, and no idea what you’re doing, only to make it five hours in and realise you’ve spent money on the wrong things and now you’re going to need to spend another five hours grinding the same events over again to make some money back, or just delete your save an start again. GT Café’s menu books remove some of that danger by guiding you to what you need to do next, it doesn’t stop you from accessing higher tier events as they also unlock as time goes on, but it does encourage you to do the normal events first so you can earn more cars and safely build up a bank account so you can buy some real big boy toys when the time arises.
The downside of this is that obviously it does act as a tutorial of sorts, essentially meaning that you’ve got your training wheels on for the overwhelming majority of the game. It also gates off some more difficult tracks, such as the Nürburgring and 24 Hour le Mans, until much later in the game than you would expect to find them in other GT titles. Plus, some components of the game, such as Multiplayer and Sport mode, are locked off until you’ve progressed a certain way through the game. Those two are unlocked relatively early on, but you’ll still need to put in some time doing basic races and license tests until you can play with friends or climb online leader boards. Personally, I would argue it’s for the best, because even as a GT veteran I was learning my way out of bad habits before they became an issue, but I can see why some might feel like they’ve had their agency stripped away from them.
The downside of this is that obviously it does act as a tutorial of sorts, essentially meaning that you’ve got your training wheels on for the overwhelming majority of the game. It also gates off some more difficult tracks, such as the Nürburgring and 24 Hour le Mans, until much later in the game than you would expect to find them in other GT titles. Plus, some components of the game, such as Multiplayer and Sport mode, are locked off until you’ve progressed a certain way through the game. Those two are unlocked relatively early on, but you’ll still need to put in some time doing basic races and license tests until you can play with friends or climb online leader boards. Personally, I would argue it’s for the best, because even as a GT veteran I was learning my way out of bad habits before they became an issue, but I can see why some might feel like they’ve had their agency stripped away from them.
When in a car and driving, GT7 is probably the best entry in the franchise. A totally redesigned physics system means that cars handle more realistically than ever and react to subtle changes in the road and weather much more effectively. Playing on a PS5 with a DualSense controller, you really feel every bump in the road, and can better gauge your cars performance thanks to the incredible haptic feedback system in place. Swapping tyres out on an endurance race now not only comes with visual feedback that you’re not sliding around on the track quite so much, but actual kinetic response you can feel, and it gives you as the driver a much greater understanding of the conditions you’re racing under and the limitations of your car when in a race. There are a plethora of different accessibility options too, meaning anyone can pick up the game and play. Initially you’ll need to select a ‘difficulty’ but that simply determines how many driving assists are switched on; weirdly though of the three pre-set options only the highest ‘difficulty’ gives players their own agency over the brakes on the car. I needed to fiddle for a while to find what I wanted, but once I got the game setup to a system that allowed me to relax whilst also provide a comfortable amount of challenge, I was having the most fun I’ve had in Gran Turismo since GT3.
The game is also super-fast to load on PS5 thanks to the SSD storage. Sadly, the PS4 can’t take advantage of this, but it’s still a significant improvement over even GT Sport when looking at Digital Foundry’s technical breakdown. On PS5 I can go from the start menu to a race in under thirty seconds, a far cry from GT5&6 where each individual menu could take upwards of ten seconds to load in, with races taking well over thirty seconds to load, and when you spend this much time in menus responsiveness is everything to enjoying the game.
But there’s an elephant in the room which does detrimentally hamper the overall GT7 experience and that is its always online requirement. GT7 is unfortunately a live service game, with new content and features slated to be added over time, everything requires an internet connection to even function. Music Rally is the only mode of the game that supports offline play, and even then, you can’t play all of the tracks. Gran Turismo 7 is also designed with microtransactions in mind. Pay-outs from races are generally pitiful, and the cost of some cars are so astronomically high that it’s physically impossible to earn that many credits through gameplay and so they must be purchased with real money. What makes that even more disgusting is that some of these cars will cost you hundreds of pounds in real world money to buy, a fact that Polyphony and Sony have just shrugged off with a statement saying that cars value in game is equivalent to the value of its real life counterpart, which in other words means they just want money from you and a lot of it despite the fact that you just spent £70 on this ‘finished’ AAA title. So yeah, whilst I loved playing GT7, I hated playing GT7.
You can earn rewards through driving a certain distance each day, and by completing some events, but the roulette system by which you earn these rewards is so hideously stacked against you that you’ll rarely walk away with anything other than the worst prize on offer (usually a couple of thousand credits or a part for a car I don’t own). I’ve earned over fifty roulette tickets in my time with the game and only twice have I ever landed on something that wasn’t the lowest in monetary value (with one being a mid-sized stack of credits, and the other being a half-decent sportscar that I already owned).
The game is also super-fast to load on PS5 thanks to the SSD storage. Sadly, the PS4 can’t take advantage of this, but it’s still a significant improvement over even GT Sport when looking at Digital Foundry’s technical breakdown. On PS5 I can go from the start menu to a race in under thirty seconds, a far cry from GT5&6 where each individual menu could take upwards of ten seconds to load in, with races taking well over thirty seconds to load, and when you spend this much time in menus responsiveness is everything to enjoying the game.
But there’s an elephant in the room which does detrimentally hamper the overall GT7 experience and that is its always online requirement. GT7 is unfortunately a live service game, with new content and features slated to be added over time, everything requires an internet connection to even function. Music Rally is the only mode of the game that supports offline play, and even then, you can’t play all of the tracks. Gran Turismo 7 is also designed with microtransactions in mind. Pay-outs from races are generally pitiful, and the cost of some cars are so astronomically high that it’s physically impossible to earn that many credits through gameplay and so they must be purchased with real money. What makes that even more disgusting is that some of these cars will cost you hundreds of pounds in real world money to buy, a fact that Polyphony and Sony have just shrugged off with a statement saying that cars value in game is equivalent to the value of its real life counterpart, which in other words means they just want money from you and a lot of it despite the fact that you just spent £70 on this ‘finished’ AAA title. So yeah, whilst I loved playing GT7, I hated playing GT7.
You can earn rewards through driving a certain distance each day, and by completing some events, but the roulette system by which you earn these rewards is so hideously stacked against you that you’ll rarely walk away with anything other than the worst prize on offer (usually a couple of thousand credits or a part for a car I don’t own). I’ve earned over fifty roulette tickets in my time with the game and only twice have I ever landed on something that wasn’t the lowest in monetary value (with one being a mid-sized stack of credits, and the other being a half-decent sportscar that I already owned).
As well as its improvement on loading times, GT7 is a real powerhouse of a game visually. No matter whether you’re playing on a launch PS4, PS4 Pro, or PS5, the game will run at a buttery smooth 60FPS with rarely any instances of dropped frames or bad frame pacing. It’s usually only when things get really busy with dynamic weather effects and a whole bunch of cars piled up in one place that things ever show signs of struggling, and even then, it’s rarely enough of a problem to detrimentally effect what you’re doing.
By playing on more powerful hardware, you’re simply given access to more of GT7’s plethora of graphical enhancements. Standard PS4 users are limited to 1080p resolution and have almost all of the flashier effects turned off, but the game still looks incredible with a high attention to detail on cars and tracks, as well as fantastic lighting and weather effects. PS4 Pro users get a resolution bump to 1800p checkerboard with the same graphical limitations or can play at 1080p with some extra graphical features enabled. PS5 meanwhile gets a native 4K resolution with all of the extra features enabled which includes PS5 exclusive features like raytracing. The biggest difference you’ll notice though will be the areas that surround the tracks as the PS5 version has significantly more power to render busier and more detailed environments. It’s not even minor details either, looking at the same track on the two systems provides wildly different results when looking at the track borders. It really helps sell the idea that you’re racing on a real racetrack, and whilst it is entirely superficial, it’s a really nice way to make the game look nicer without needing to sacrifice very much for last generation systems.
Gran Turismo has always been about beautifully rendered cars and this entry is no different. There are times when the car models border on photorealism, with dynamic reflections on the glass and paintwork to really sell the idea of inhabiting a living space. You can get up close and personal with all of the cars and environments in Scapes and the replay editor, and really see just how much detail Polyphony detail has crammed into each and every car. The dashboard camera view also reveals many tucked away details of the cars such as the stitching on the seats, and subtle imperfections to the various plastic and metal surfaces inside the car.
Gran Turismo 7 is a game designed for automobile enthusiasts, with so much history to learn about the cars and their manufacturers it’s just as much a museum as a videogame. It takes twenty-five years of franchise evolution and refines it into a package that is arguably the best iteration of the formula to date. It is absolutely held back by its always online requirement and the heavy reliance on microtransactions, and I have come across multiple periods of time where the servers have been down and therefore the game isn’t functional. If it weren’t for those elements the game would be practically perfect, but as it stands GT7 is an amazing game that is squandered by greed. If you accept these problems as part and parcel of the package, you’ll likely have an amazing time with GT7, but the way they are baked into the game makes them entirely unavoidable for those who don’t want to be hampered by them.
I do consider this game a must play, and probably the best entry in the franchise yet, but it shouldn’t have to come at this cost and we as consumers must stand against these toxic practices to ensure they do not continue.
By playing on more powerful hardware, you’re simply given access to more of GT7’s plethora of graphical enhancements. Standard PS4 users are limited to 1080p resolution and have almost all of the flashier effects turned off, but the game still looks incredible with a high attention to detail on cars and tracks, as well as fantastic lighting and weather effects. PS4 Pro users get a resolution bump to 1800p checkerboard with the same graphical limitations or can play at 1080p with some extra graphical features enabled. PS5 meanwhile gets a native 4K resolution with all of the extra features enabled which includes PS5 exclusive features like raytracing. The biggest difference you’ll notice though will be the areas that surround the tracks as the PS5 version has significantly more power to render busier and more detailed environments. It’s not even minor details either, looking at the same track on the two systems provides wildly different results when looking at the track borders. It really helps sell the idea that you’re racing on a real racetrack, and whilst it is entirely superficial, it’s a really nice way to make the game look nicer without needing to sacrifice very much for last generation systems.
Gran Turismo has always been about beautifully rendered cars and this entry is no different. There are times when the car models border on photorealism, with dynamic reflections on the glass and paintwork to really sell the idea of inhabiting a living space. You can get up close and personal with all of the cars and environments in Scapes and the replay editor, and really see just how much detail Polyphony detail has crammed into each and every car. The dashboard camera view also reveals many tucked away details of the cars such as the stitching on the seats, and subtle imperfections to the various plastic and metal surfaces inside the car.
Gran Turismo 7 is a game designed for automobile enthusiasts, with so much history to learn about the cars and their manufacturers it’s just as much a museum as a videogame. It takes twenty-five years of franchise evolution and refines it into a package that is arguably the best iteration of the formula to date. It is absolutely held back by its always online requirement and the heavy reliance on microtransactions, and I have come across multiple periods of time where the servers have been down and therefore the game isn’t functional. If it weren’t for those elements the game would be practically perfect, but as it stands GT7 is an amazing game that is squandered by greed. If you accept these problems as part and parcel of the package, you’ll likely have an amazing time with GT7, but the way they are baked into the game makes them entirely unavoidable for those who don’t want to be hampered by them.
I do consider this game a must play, and probably the best entry in the franchise yet, but it shouldn’t have to come at this cost and we as consumers must stand against these toxic practices to ensure they do not continue.