How I Lost Faith in My Favourite Game (GT Critique Complete Series)

hey guys before we dive into this one I'd just like to say that I now have a patreon as some of you know I am making these videos full time so anything I can get from that would really go a long way and help take some pressure off meaning I can spend more time on these videos and make them even better the link is in the description so support me today if you can anyway on with the show it told me sitting there waiting in that state of play live stream on the 2nd of February 2022 what we would experience in the few short months after that I don't think anyone could have predicted the game so almost universally despised by not only just its players but pretty much everyone who heard about it a Creator having to issue a public apology to his fans and a developer and publisher left thoroughly embarrassed by the whole situation but now well over a year later it's business as usual almost as if the whole Fiasco never even happened so I guess that means everything's been taken care of right I'm not gonna lie to you when I started work on this video series about six months ago my Outlook on Gran Turismo 7 was not the same as it is today I held a view similar to many other people in the sense of accepting the numerous flaws with the game but also having a mild amount of optimism in seeing the positives the fact that gt7 in the stator that it was and still is works as a baseline to build an excellent game from and with a few simple tweaks it could eventually get there one day through through continual updates but what I've grown to understand is that if you were to take every critique every complaint and every issue that I talk about for the rest of this entire video translate it perfectly to the point where there is no room for interpretation and put that directly in front of the people who actually have the power to influence the situation nothing would change nothing that may seem over the top and a completely wild assertion to make but that's not simply just a representation of my own disillusionment with gt7 I have very genuine reasons to believe this to be true Gran Turismo is arguably the most influential racing game franchise of all time personally it's the reason why I love cars and driving more than almost anything else but through making this series I came to many realizations having to dig through countless interviews archives reviews design decisions and just piecing everything together has really opened my third eye the more you understand about the situation that produced gt7 the worse it seems to become it makes me question not only the nature of the game but the intentions of the Creator and even why I loved the previous games in the series most people were completely blindsided by gt7 but now understanding everything even before launch when we were also anticipated for what the game could bring the signs were already there but now I'm getting ahead of myself let me explain how deep this Rabbit Hole goes so grab a drink some snacks and settle in because it's gonna be a long one this is GT critique this is my own personal descent into madness this is Gran Turismo 7. so it's safe to say that the public perception of Gran Turismo 7 has changed a fair amount since it released back in March 2022 the game once touted as the savior of the racing game genre and a long needed return to form the franchise it's managed to fall so flat on its face that it's quite incredible to think we were ever hyped for it to begin with as a long-term fan of the franchise stuck with Gran Turismo 3 and having played the game so basically as long as I can even remember you can imagine how I feel about this with that said there is still a fair amount to appreciate about Gran Turismo 7 the level of tuning customization of assert and the best in the series The changeable weather and track conditions simulation is incredible in this depth and detail and the car models and overall visual presentation are simply second to none and that's not even mentioning the driving itself if you simply pick a car in a track and just drive you'll be hard-pressed to find a game that can do it better there is a reason why I've sunk over 400 hours into this thing but on the other side of that coin it's obvious to see that only a tiny fraction of those hours have been in the past few months on paper gt7 had every reason to be an outstanding single player experience but it's difficult to come away from it without an overriding sense of disappointment and wasted potential to the Casual Observer the reasons for this may seem obvious force-fed microtransactions and an in-game economy that incentivizes the grind to no end and there's certainly some truth in that but if you look beyond the internet commentators and outrage merchants and actually play the game you begin to understand that it's not so simple so here I am this will be the first line of videos I intend to make that breaks down every area in which gt7 has either completely failed or not lived up to the expectations let's start with something obvious building a car collection something that's been an integral part of the series from the very beginning and even featured a fair amount in the promotional material leading up to the release of the game as well I mean they couldn't possibly mess this up whoa hold your horses first we've got to understand why collecting the cars was such a big part of these games to begin with I mean it is a racing game after all not trading cards well not yet anyway so when the first Gran Turismo came out on the original PlayStation back in 1997 it shipped with almost 180 cars far in excess of any other races on the market at the time and not only that but these were fully licensed real world cars which could be bought from a dealership including second-hand models at a discounted price then upgraded and fine-tuned Perfection there were tons of different races and events catering to each type of car meaning having a diverse collection was almost inevitable and given you would then win even more cars as you progressed the ways in which you could build up a collection of them was pretty much endless formula has been the same for basically every Gran Turismo game up until this point excluding sport of course we're not going to talk about that one today on paper that description sounds pretty similar to gt7 doesn't it well why don't we take a look the problems with the game in this respect start from pretty much the second you boot it up well the music rally isn't great either but that's not what I meant so the game starts by giving you the choice between three starter cars the Honda Fit the Toyota aqua and Bulbasaur I mean the Mazda demio so the choice of these three cars in particular is very obvious they're all Japanese compact cars are very similar performance and whilst I would prefer the old school Gran Turismo experience of giving you a bit of cash you're just letting you loose to buy whatever you can afford I can somewhat understand this decision for example back in Gran Turismo 4 it was very common to find a car for cheap in one of the used dealerships that was just far too good as a starter car I think something like an R32 gtst or early Lancer Evo and just completely destroy the early events so this does make sense to some degree what doesn't make sense though is that immediately after choosing your starter car your first objective is to get the other two this is introduced through the menu books which are essentially a series of tasks most of which involve collecting three cars that are linked together in some way the first of which being of course the Japanese compact cars so after making your choice the first thing you do is to make that choice completely meaningless some of you may remember how in Gran Turismo 6 they removed this element of choice completely with every player being forced to start with a Honda Fit to me the way Gran Turismo 7 handles this is even more insulting it gives you this illusion of choice the idea that oh no this is the classic Gran Turismo experience of buying a cheap used car to start your collection and your journey within the game when it's very clearly not the same thing I mean to use the analogy of a Pokemon game which I've not successfully been referencing you may have noticed imagine that after choosing your starter you then just have to catch the other two anyway and then even worse is soon after that you're pretty much not even allowed to use your starters if you want to progress in the story so they disappear into the Pokedex never to be seen or thought of again I mean that would be insane it would be like why what is this what even is game design what's the point and I understand these are just the starter cars and in reality it doesn't matter that much I mean no offense to fans of the Toyota Aqua if any of you are out there but the truth is that most people are just going to move on with the game and not really going to care but for me I always think back to when I started my first playthrough on Gran Turismo 3 almost two decades ago after weighing up the options I came to the choice of the first generation Master MX-5 in Mariner blue and never looked back and ever since then I've always had that connection with the car because it was my choice and how I wanted to use the car going forward in the game such as which events to use it in and which appraised to buy was entirely dictated by me and that was GT3 that game only had like 10 Stars cards to choose from and only a handful of those were even viable in Gran Turismo 2 for example you could find that many starter cars available from a single dealership anyway even now in gt7 I keep a bone stock example of it in my garage just for those memories alone It's just sad that people starting off with this game whether they be young kids or Just players new to the franchise will never have that same experience the design of the game itself means it's simply not possible and to me the magic of Gran Turismo is those types of experiences and that's what inspires people to collect so many cars and just enjoy them not being lectured by a JPEG of some random guy as to why you should care I mean does anyone actually give a about the fuel efficiency of a Honda Fit is this really the most compelling way you could think of to get people invested in these types of cars I don't think so so if this idea of forced collection if you will was just confined to the start of the game honestly I wouldn't have too much of a problem with it being truthful I didn't really notice it when I first played through the game it was only when I thought back about it after all was said and done and then play through the game for a second time that I realized this the issue is that this is the single player experience of gt7 you are presented with a menu of three cars you have three races and you need to finish in the top three to win each car the races themselves are not that exciting or challenging for the most part you then come back to the PNG ever Cafe owner and then you'd do it all over again by the old break to do something truly thrilling like washing your car I mean come on guys there are only 39 of these in the game at launch did you really need to put in filler and you have to wonder why they even bothered adding back something like the used car dealership when the progression is so linear and the choice is basically irrelevant they also changed how the stock of cars updates no longer does it update based on in-game progress when you do races or other events thus giving you incentive to continue playing but instead real world days a simple change but one that makes it far less rewarding to play through the game and you see far fewer cars and therefore have far fewer options also everybody who logs in on a given day will always see the same cars for sale as any other player why they had to homogenize even this aspect of the used car dealership is beyond me even still imagine saving up for a new car that you really want finally buying it and then seeing it in one of the menu books 10 minutes later thus giving you an advent of which you can win it from very easily you can of course finally sell cars as of the November update however what you may not have noticed is that you can't do that until you finish the final menu book anyway the game puts so many roadblocks in the way of having a unique experience that the messages painfully clear play the game how we want you to not how you want to I feel like and I imagine that a lot of people felt this way that the many books were just like an extended tutorial and at some point the training wheels would come off and the game would open up much in the same way the older games were from the very beginning problem is when he finally gets that point the game just ends seriously you get to race group through cars for the first time and that's it nothing more to see here folks we're done bear in mind you don't even get to the point of collecting any group new cars in the actual menu books you earn a couple of Ferraris and that's as far as you get you can get a few more cars through the license tests and missions and to be fair there are a few race cars and higher value cars among them but still this is just a drop at the ocean I mean look at it this way through the menu books you collect six to three cars not huge amount to start with and when you consider that each of these earned from just a single race let's just say it's not the most in-depth single player you're gonna find aside from the group b collection which it seems like they only put in the game to make the dirt tracks not entirely redundant in the single player there are no collections featuring race cars whether that's group four group three group two or group one just none of them no higher end supercars or hyper cars not really any classic cars no vision GTS and no non-grouped race cars or just any other cars which don't fit into these categories now some of you may look at that and say oh it's obvious they're all high value Vehicles no way they're just going to get them away so easily it's supposed to force you towards spending real world money just one problem with that if that was their goal why would they shape the entire single player experience and well the races and championships they're in almost entirely around the few cars that you do earn in the menu books and then leave the rest of them completely in the dark you would think that to drive up the desirability of them they would do almost the exact opposite of that is that the case no the real issue is that the core single player experience and of course the events and races within that only exist to serve that handful of cars from the menu books as opposed to the previous games which would serve pretty much all of the cars you know go back to GT3 or GT4 you pick any car from those games and you can find an event to use it in 99 of the time the exception to this being the odd one or two cars like the Nike one or the pens patent motor wagon which fair enough there's really not a lot you could do with them anyway I don't think anyone is crying out for a motorwagon one minute Championship after all still the way these types of Fringe cars were handled in the previous games was far better than what we have in gt7 the motor wagon for example is given out as a price car for completing the European classic car League that makes sense and that's true of pretty much all of these types of cars in the older games you would earn them naturally by just winning races and playing through the game gt7 does not do this no gt7 has the legend cars dealership of all of the multi-million credit Cars by a couple that you can get from the driving missions and things like that you have to buy them yourself playing the game is simply not good enough and these are cars mind you most of which have next to no utility in the game whatsoever let's look at an example the Alfa Romeo 8C 2900b touring when I saw this car originally in the trailers for the game I thought that's interesting I wonder what that would be like to drive sure it's not really going to be much use in the main single player but still it'd be cool to try out a couple of classic car events it costs 20 million credits and there is no other way to obtain it and this is not an outlier there are many cars like this and they all contained neatly in one place in fact in the case of the alpha I've just accepted the fact I'm probably never going to get it not unless there's suddenly a way of earning insane amounts of money quickly and consistently or they start giving out price cards again instead of just roulette tickets but that's a problem for another day simply can't justify spending that much money on a car which is in essence completely useless and they know this is an issue because they sold it in the previous games by giving them out as prize cards they don't have to do that they could just lower the prices to a level which is more acceptable and actually fits with the in-game economy rather than tying it to the real world value which these types of cars have basically zero relevance to the desirability of them in the game to be honest though I think they got it right the first time earning cars which are relevant to the events or Championship you win them from and then scaling the performance and value of the price cars against the length and difficulty of the event makes so much sense but clearly too much sense for Gran Turismo 7. I hope that through the course of this video I've been able to accurately describe why I think Gran Turismo 7 is such a betrayal to the franchise when it comes to this core elements collecting cars even mention that the way of leveling up in this game is tied directly to the value of the cars that you collect and that's because it's completely irrelevant they could have just unlocked all of this stuff from the beginning and it wouldn't have made much of a difference if anything it might make the game a little bit better gt7 is not an outlier in this sense because pretty much every other time the series has tried to implement a level system it's just come across as completely arbitrary and meaningless I mean take Gran Turismo 5. that game locked cars and events Behind These level barriers even if you'd earned the license needed for the event and had enough money to buy the car it just made no sense at all gt7 doesn't take it that far but it is still quite questionable such as how it locks online play behind your car collection level meaning you have to slug through a couple of hours of menu books before you can even race online why who the hell knows another point is that I think the power of Gran Turismo as a tool to educate people about cars Automotive History and just get them really invested in it all often goes overlooked but I myself am proof of this Gran Turismo is the main influence that got me to love cars go to sports and car culture as a whole and it did this in such a subtle way as an example you could exhaustively explain the nuances between different dry train configurations and the mechanical theory behind them but if someone doesn't have that initial interest to begin with they're just not going to care as a child playing these games I was firmly in this camp and I'm sure any four to five-year-old wouldn't have the interest nor mental capacity to understand anyway but the way the game presented these ideas was simple they had events for each type of drivetrain the challenge FR challenge four-wheel drive Challenge and Mr Challenge and through playing these the different cars you drive and how they handled you've got this basic understanding of what that means and how each of them is unique it's the same reason why they would sometimes have two of the same license tests but one done with a front-wheel drive car and the other done with a rear wheel drive car it's passive teaching and this was done for many different types of cars based on things like the engine the body style the area it was produced in and the country it came from see how this is far more appealing than what gt7 does by just forcing these ideas down people's throats leaving newer players boarding views and more experienced players unrewarded and frustrated It's A Simple Theory that is used in real world education in terms of how teachers get their students to engage with the topic they're learning about it is debatable whether polyphony was actually trying to do this in the older games I think primarily they were just trying to make a game which had variety and was fun to play but the impact is still clear to see is that amazing to think about how gt7 flipped this around despite the educational aspect of being one of the key targets of the game one of the most basic events the Mr challenge isn't even in the game at the time of writing that's just absurd anyway an important thing to consider about gt7 is that it's a live service and a game that's always updating and expanding surely that's a reason to be optimistic for the future right well let me put it this way it's been about 10 months since the game released and not a single thing I've talked about in this video has been addressed in any meaningful way whatsoever take the most recent updates what did we get a few cars which was very nice a few more races which the game is still sorely lacking in but these ones are just more of the same shot we already have and didn't really expand the game and extra menus oh boy extra menus if you thought the act of collecting cars was Hollow and pointless in the main game you haven't seen the extra menus how the game entices you to drop a few million on some Bugattis not because you would want to drive them or there's a new event to actually use them in but because you earn a roulette ticket which offers the chance of getting a fabled engine swap which in my case was one that I already had a lot of so to summarize I just spent a large amount of money to buy a couple of cars I didn't really want for the opportunity to get a prize that I do want but because of the luck based system of prize giving I ended up with something completely useless to me and now a few million credits out of pocket if this isn't a perfect example of every criticism I have of how gt7 fails to promote the idea of car collecting or even understand why people do it in the first place then I don't know what is the AI in Gran Turismo 7 is not very good [Music] [Applause] [Music] I know quite a hot take and very brave of me to say but the truth is that anyone who's played this game already knows that when it comes to single player racing you're in for a bad time but at the very least a disappointing time but how do we get here the AI in Grand tourism mode has been so consistently bad for such a long time that it's honestly kind of impressive in the earlier games they had a tendency to be a bit erratic but they weren't much different from other games around that time so in my view the issues really started to come into focus on Grand tourism before where there's severe lack of awareness started to become a little more noticeable through the PlayStation 3 era they did improve in that respect but something even more worrying began to take hold they got really slow as in getting beaten by a tuned Suzuki gsxr4 in the GT World Championship kind of slow I know this because I managed to do it myself when it came to purely their speed Gran Turismo 6 was for certain than the deer of the series but here we are with Gran Turismo 7 still dealing with these same old issues however what I think most people don't appreciate is just how ridiculous the AI can get when you really dig into it it's not a case of the AI simply being slow or lacking awareness this is a story of manipulation so extreme that having a decent race is seemingly not possible by Design bizarre decisions and limitations of its stifle any hope of enjoying competitive races how you want to and just incredible inconsistencies that leave you wondering if politically Simply Now hates single player racing and despise the fact that it even needs to be in gt7 oh and on top of all of that I'm going to try and explain why when you dig beneath all of this the AI is actually incredibly good and in some ways the best in the series yeah this is going to be a weird one so trap yourselves in as we take a deep dive into the offline racing experience of Gran Turismo 7 where it falls down where it pulls itself back up and even a preview into the future of the franchise before we begin I should mention that everything I'm about to state is through the lens of my own speed and ability on gt7 I regard myself as quite a fast driver I don't have too many issues getting gold times in the time trials for example at least when they don't allow tuning but I don't practice every day and I'm nowhere near my Peak as I was back in the early GT Sport days for example so of course your own experience with the game May differ slightly also I always have the AI set to its hardest difficulty so all the footage you see will be based on that with that said there are a few things about this game which are so uniformly agreed on as the computer controlled opponents being absolute trash to race against pick almost any race in the main single player and here's what you'll get you'll start at the back of a long queue of cars Each of which are fair distance away from the Cars directly in front or behind meaning you have a massive deficit to the leader and your goal is to make up that time in the few laps you have available this setup alone means that actual racing is simply not going to happen if you have a 30 second Gap to the leader and five laps to close it down down you don't need a mathematician to tell you that you're going to have to go pretty damn fast so the point where your so-called opponents are just rolling roadblocks and all that matters is your Gap to the leader I mean how can you have a race wherein you need to be at least six seconds a lot faster than all the other cars it's a formula that's destined to produce races which in the best case are tedious and predictable at the worst downright infuriating to play this is nothing new to Gran Turismo pretty much from the start of the seventh generation of consoles polyphony now had the power to put more than six cars on the track at a time and what they did with this newfound power was to have all the cars lined up with a rolling start then they drive around at a cripplingly slow speed and you overtake them one after the other until the race is over in a lot of cases they would drive so slow they would actually become a hazard on the track breaking in the middle of corners for seemingly no reason and just being a general nuisance the goal of this setup is to create a form of what I like to call manufactured difficulty in GT6 in particular the AI was simply not programmed to be fast enough in most scenarios so the developers chose to have all the opponents stretched over a distance meaning that even with their lethargic Pace it still took a few laps to get in front if they'd stuck with the traditional grid starts you couldn't have gotten ahead in a matter of seconds the obvious solution is just to make the first but maybe we were asking for too much there the difference with gt7 is that as you play through a race you'll notice something interesting start to happen the opponents get noticeably faster and it's not quite the same as the traditional rubber banding which is where the AI will suddenly be able to stick with the player once they get in the lead thus not allowing them to get too far ahead key difference is that this starts to happen long before the player actually gets into the lead and it's not a case of them going faster than they should be able to but instead just closer to their true pace so what I've discovered is that the AI runs on an internal clock which dictates their speed now this clock is informed by the total lead which the leading AI car has over the player so the further behind the player is the slower they will drive and of course the closer behind the player is the faster they will drive and this begs the question if you're capable of making them decently fast why not keep them at the speed to start with and make the grids much closer so we can have a much more competitive race what's worse is that this internal clock is seemingly programmed the same for every AI meaning that you can have races where you as the player are miles behind the leading AI car but there are many other AI drivers just crawling along as well because their internal clock is telling them that they need to drive slow to allow you to catch up even if you might already be ahead of them it's just baffling to think about and something which emphasizes this even more is how so many races in the single player have a ridiculous spread of car performance why have a race with an fa tributo alongside a Dino and then basically everything in between it ends up lapped in what is not a very long race because obviously it does and again begs the question of why why have such a spread which ends up with one or two cars that you're actually competing with and the rest just being placeholders all of this adds up to an experience which doesn't exactly tally with the reality of actual competitive Motorsport whether this be in real life or even just virtual the disconnect between how gt7 views racing in sport mode from just daily races all the way up to the world GT series is in complete contradiction with the racing presented in the single player and to be honest I'm not really sure what they were trying to achieve by doing all of this so you could say that this is to try and accommodate newer players who may struggle with more intense races but if that was what they were trying to do then they completely failed at that as well some of these races are really difficult even for me in some cases you just simply don't have enough laps to pass everyone and sometimes the ai's true pace is actually really good which we'll talk more about later the positive is that you don't need to win to progress in the game but this is a racing game if you're not trying to win then what's the point and this can then lead to player retaliation at least it does for me yeah you can criticize me all you want for my driving here but my point is clear over the course of the race I've been by far the fastest driver I'm not going to lose because the game handicapped Me by starting so far from the lead and then only giving me two laps to overtake everyone if the game is not going to respect me as a player I sure as hell am not respecting it and that takes us neatly back to the contradiction with sport mode and of course the idea of sportsmanship the first rule of having a good race is mutual respect so in this case treating the AI as if they were human players it doesn't help that sometimes the AI follow their fixed paths so rigidly that they end up doing this Suzuka I find is particularly bad for them they seem to just turn into the corners with no regard to where the player actually is with all of this put together the end result is that as a player you just can't respect the AI even if like me you're really into the idea of competitive offline racing you can either be numbed by the TDM of these races or to entertain yourself you might end up doing things that make you look bad [Music] but hey forget about all of that because Gran Turismo 7 has a solution ladies and gentlemen custom race okay that's good you can you can stop now so if you're like me one thing that would have really annoyed you is how the intro to the game shows these interesting races which don't actually exist in the game at least at the moment they use cars which never see the light of day in the actual single player events and also in how they portray the races with cars actually being tightly packed together racing amongst one another look at this a full grid of cars at trial Mountain that doesn't happen in the main events but with custom race we have the option to recreate this ourselves why don't we give it a go [Music] yeah ah I see the issue this leads us to our next problem the opponents are wildly inconsistent depending on the track and even the car they're driving their pure speed can differ massively they tend to struggle the most with high commitment Corners so the first few turns at trial Mountain detricane at Dragon Trail Seaside places like that they are just abysmal regardless of whether their speed is being manipulated or not oh and at the Nord schleifer for some reason they just pull off to the side of the track and indicate you past they did this back in GT Sport as well and I still have no clue as to why I guess that's great if you want to make your own tourist and farting session but then just make an option this is custom race we're supposed to be racing here why did they go to the effort of even programming this are they really that committed to never giving you good races with the AI anyway moving on to high speed ring you'll notice that a lot of time they don't use the banking in the corners and as such they're way slower than they could be but also sometimes they do what's going on here originally it seemed to me as though they wouldn't use the banking in road cars but they would with the racing cars but it's not actually that simple see the Alpine a220 is a racing car but comes with Comfort soft tires even if other racing cars from that era come with racing cards yeah I don't know either the point is that AI drivers in the Alpine won't use the banking and even if you equip them with racing cards they still don't was this supposed to be intentional or just an oversight the fact that you can't really tell anymore speaks volumes about this game I love to show the inverse of this running an AI with a car that normally has racing tires but using sports or even Comfort tires however that leads us to our next point so to demonstrate all of this I've been using a brand new feature of the custom race in gt7 the ability to use the cars that you have in your garage as your AI opponents so not gonna lie here I was pretty hyped when I found out that this was in the game just think of all the possibilities for the different races you could make whether that be imitating Real World Championships events from past GT games or just your own original creation I'm very glad they decided to add this feature but let's just say that it has some quirks firstly if you give an AI a car from your garage they drive it in exactly the same state in which you left it same upgrades same visual customization and identical tuning and that's great except for what happens with the tires you see if you leave the car with the stock tires that it came with Happy Days no issues the AI just uses those tires if you've changed the tires though say from Comfort soft to sports hard they still use the stock tires they drive the car exactly how you make it apart from the tires where they just don't give a at all and then even weirder is that for racing hard tires and racing hard tires only they will use those if you equip them but any other grade of tires and they switch back to the stock set and even if you choose racing mediums or softs they'll default to Racing cards as well it's never simpler with these guys with the return of changeable weather to the series we also have the option to set up our own weather scenarios which again is awesome but again comes with its own set of caveats if you set up a custom race that starts off dry becomes wet and then goes back to dry you'll find something interesting for group 3 Cars For example the AI always use Racing cards in the dry except when changing from wet tires back to dry tires because now they all use racing softs you may be noticing a theme polyphony really seemed to struggle to program their AI to use tires in a way which is consistent and actually makes some sort of sense a very simple fix for all of this would be to just give us the option to set our own Tire restrictions like the career mode Racers have so we can decide which compounds can be used by both the player and the AI but that's not all the rolling start interval option is broken if you try to change it it defaults to the smallest distance and you can't fix it this has been an issue since the game launched and they've still yet to patch it or even recognize it as an issue just inexcusable if you don't want to set up your own custom grid which is understandable since it is fairly time consuming you can let the game choose for you the options are for a random grid a one make race or a specific group of racing cars this is nothing out of the ordinary other than random doesn't mean entirely random since the opponent selected will always be of somewhat similar performance to the car that you drive but even this has its problems if you get in a grouped racing car say a group 4 car if you choose random opponents you just end up with other group 4 cars and sometimes even just the same car which makes this entirely redundant since we already have those as other options so this boils down to how the cars are classed there are basically three sometimes four classes which behind the scenes every car in the game gets filtered into firstly road cars and professionally tuned cars then grouped racing cars so groups one two three four and other cars so by other cars we just mean things like non-grouped racing cars as in classic races singles heaters Etc Vision GTS and anything else which is neither conventional racing car or a road car so if you play GT Sport you might know where I'm going with this because this is just group X for those who don't know group X was a way for the developers to put all of the other cars which didn't fit into the normal groups into their own group the reality is that groupex was not actually a group because it was specifically for cars which didn't have a group and if it didn't have a group due to the way GT Sport was designed it meant that the car was effectively useless unless you wanted to have a one-make race there was nothing to do with them with the launch of gt7 I and a lot of other people were under the impression that this would be solved since all the cars would once again be rated under the performance point system meaning if it didn't have a group you could still class it around its performance level and in the main single player it is sort of fixed since you can use many of these group X cars in different events the difficulty is that there just aren't enough events for these types of cars but that's not an issue specific to group X and don't think I've forgotten about this travesty I'm gonna go in depth on this another time just you wait how this relates to custom race is that since the random option only gives opponents within the specific type of car you're driving a road car always ends up with road cars as opponents grouped racing cars always end up with cars in the same group and with a group X car you always end up racing against these oddballs the cars that don't fit anywhere else and have nothing in common I suppose this is better than only having a one make race as the option but still they could have very easily made this so much better here's my proposal there should be an extra option wherein the game still randomly selects the opponent cars but within parameters which you as the player can decide for example there could be a slider option that allows you to set a PP range limit so say you want to race against specifically 550 PP op opponents you can set this limit in the range of 540 to 550 and then the game can also fill the grid based on any car in this Performance Point range then taking this further we could also have options that we can tick such as do you want road cars to appear as opponents what about racing cars or these other group X cars and from there you can mix and match the type of opponents that you want to show up maybe they could even use tags for this and we could filter opponents based on things like doing want specifically K cards or EVS to appear and again you can mix and match all of that sure we can do all of this manually with the custom grid but again it is time consuming to find all the specific cars you want from your garage and also you need to own all the cars which as we discussed in the last video may not be realistic for most people I've always felt that this would be a great addition but maybe that's just me let me know in the comments now I know this doesn't quite fit with the topic but since we're talking about custom race I would be remiss if I didn't mention the payouts what payouts is probably what you're thinking yeah it's well known that the prize money for custom races are appallingly low while agree that the payouts shouldn't be quite as high as the main single player races otherwise there'll be literally no incentive to actually do them it is still quite shocking using this race at Sardinia as an example which is one of the best money makers remaking it in custom race gives you a max payout of less than nine percent of the original race even if you can beat these group 3 cars with a Fiat 500 it doesn't get much better if we push this to his extreme if you can somehow win a 200 lap race at the Nurburgring 24 hours against Group 1 opponents in the 500 your maximum payout is just over half a mil nice you could buy a few sets of tires with that I better call up the boys and we can start making some easy money guide videos but by far the worst thing about custom race is our old friend the AI manipulation you know back in the November update version 1.26 for some reason they seemingly removed the lap time Tower from replays since then they haven't noted it as a known issue and a few months later it's still absent is this an oversight like we've seen before or possibly something more Sinister you see because of this change making this video has been quite a bit harder as it isn't as easy to demonstrate how their lap times change was that their intention hard to say but what I do though is that unfortunately for them I recorded some excellent footage back in October before the update which really puts things into perspective so this race starts off like most others I can overtake the first few cars with relative ease ending the first lap in 10th and then they gradually get a little bit harder to overtake as we go on but still not really much of a challenge we take the lead on lap 4 and for a few laps nothing really happens until lap 7 where the Magic Begins some of them start to lap faster as you can see my laptops have been fairly consistent and despite not using the catch-up system known as boost the AI seem to be acting as if it were switched on anyway gradually getting faster as I got further and further ahead of them so realizing that I'm completely washed I pull over and let them pass since they've clearly asserted their dominance there's no point in fighting you can probably guess what happened next they became slower again right how much slower 20 seconds a lap slower over what is normally a 90 second lap to put this in perspective I did my final lap using only 7th Gear and still ended up going much faster than them I then got in a stock Mazda RX-8 a car which is just a mere 200 performance points less than the f8 tributo and still lapped noticeably quicker I can understand a little bit of manipulation when it comes to AI lap times but this has no place in a racing game not even the most arcadey casual oriented game should be subject to this and it's not as if I've messed around with the settings to make this happen like I said there's no boost no tire wear or fuel usage or anything really that could influence it to make this happen you would think that Gran Turismo through its 25 years of History would really want to build on the realism in this area they do already with the visuals and handling model so why can't the real driving simulator seem to have realistic racing it easily could they just don't want to instead they want players to have this experience where nothing you do matters where everything is controlled by strings and they just pull them in the direction that they want to to make it seem interesting and exciting it would take them less effort to not do this and just make things more realistic and consistent but they don't anyway you can see how I like to push things to their extremes when it comes to this game so how about we demonstrate all of this in a racing scenario I know I could show you a race against group 3 Cars where I beat them in a group 4 car yeah let's do that no actually I've got a better idea [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you yeah that really just happened so that was the easy part because now after systematically going through every single floor of the AI and the single player racing as a whole I'm now going to try and convince you why Gran Turismo 7 can provide some of the best offline racing in the entire series let me explain so I'd really like to frame this by going back to my first day on the game March 3rd 2022. yeah I pre-order got it a day early so I think a major thing for me was that I was given so much hope for the single player racing on this game by what I experienced on my first day I had won a Mitsubishi GTO from the license test and had it tuned to about 530 PP and that's when I came across this event the Clubman cup plus at high speed ring I was a little bit below the pp limit but still thought I could win given what I'd experienced with the previous games but when I went into the race what I found was not what I was expecting firstly it was a grid start where you don't even start right at the back and the AI were actually quite fast and raced hard I ended up finishing fifth or something in this completely outclassed sure I was new to the game and still getting used to the handling but I still come away from that race with the feeling of they've done it this is real racing this is what I wanted in total there are four Clubman cup plus races and each of them are somewhat like this we're going to focus on three of them the one at high speed ring the one at Tokyo Expressway and the one at sakuba the one I'm missing off is at Goodwood which is a one make race for the Mini Cooper it is still decent but I've spent a lot more time doing the other three because I think they're more interesting so we're gonna leave this out for the moment even if you do get to race against the legend himself hello viewers Super GT here it was pretty much at about this point here that he knew that he was going into the shadow Realm for me the standout of these three is the sakuba race despite starting in fifth with the leader right in front of you it manages to be an incredibly challenging race it definitely helps that sakuba is one of the best tracks for the AI they're always pretty good here and race decently well I'd estimate I've done this race maybe 40 times total and probably only won at about 25 of the time the other two races aren't quite as hard when you get used to them but if you detune your car you can still have a good time another great thing about these races is that the game chooses your opponents from a pool of about 30 different cars starting in a random grid order meaning that every time you do a race you're going to have a different experience unlike a lot of other races in this game which always have the same opponents starting in the same order and as such there's tons of replay value hence why I've done them so many times the funny thing is doing research for this video I found that searching for Clubman cup plus you'll end up finding people just complaining about how difficult it is given my issues with many of the other races in this game I find that somewhat ironic you can't please everyone I guess but they do have a bit of a point I think the fact that so many races in the single player are just you passing AI cars as if they're not even there and then you come to something like this where they actually race you and have decent pace you get a kind of whiplash effect from just how different that is it doesn't help that like many of these comments point out some of the cars you race against seem to be over the Performance Point limit it's particularly evident with the engine swapped cars so this RX7 with the r26b and the 911 powered Beetle they are just absurdly fast on the straights and you don't really have much of a chance or at least they were because after the October version 1.25 update they became clearly slower at sakuba they went from doing High one minute twos to high one minute threes as the ultimate pace and this was the update bear in mind that changed the physics engine to make cars generally faster across the board the crazy part is that even still the scuba races for me by far the best race in the game now you do have to detune your car a bit given the AI Nerf but you can and still have a lot of fun with it the question is then why did they only give us a handful of races like this and then make the rest of them as a sort of cat and mouse Chase again they can very easily do it they just don't want to and since these races are just on the side and not connected with the menu books in any way it's entirely possible that there are people out there who've played the entire game and not even known that these races exist and the worst part is that because you unlock these races so early on in the game obviously you expect there to be more of them because why wouldn't there be they're excellent and that's why I had so much hope after the first day because to me it seemed like they finally understood what we wanted with these races but it ended up just being a carrot dangled in front of us it's a tease of what this game could have been if they actually tried so for all my complaints with how custom race was handled there is some Redemption to be had so do you remember the Boost function from earlier it turns out that if you switch this on it actually has the potential to make things a lot better if you put boost on week it actually reduces the degree to which the AI are manipulated it and as such diminishes this yo-yo effect that it causes it's not perfect but like I said depending on the car and track combination it can sometimes work very well what I tend to find though is that if you're in a scenario where the AI are a little bit faster than you they'll pull away for the first couple of lats then gradually their Pace drops off until you pass them at which point they stick to your rear bumper in classic rubber band fashion if you make a mistake they will overtake again but if you drive clean they just sit behind and nothing really happens the good thing is though that they only slow down to a point you're not going to find them lapping 20 seconds off the pace for example so if you choose a slightly slower car and maybe a lower grade of tires you can actually have a pretty decent race I had to give a shout out here to the custom race thread on GT planet for a lot of this information it really helped to piece it all together these poor Busters are dedicated to making custom race work despite politney's best efforts to make it as frustrating as possible check them out if you want ideas for your own custom races as there's tons to see such as race replays car setups and and even custom Championship tables they even go to the length of buying several of the same car just so the opponents can drive them with different liveries you've got to respect the grind also putting on tire wear seems to help with some of the tire anomalies I mentioned earlier so give that a go well this is to say that I actually think the AI and gt7 is inherently good with a few exceptions but just completely throttled by all the that's put on them whether that be the manipulation of their actual speed or the bizarre inconsistencies which they are subject to in isolation I've seen the AI race amazingly well make daring overtakes use interesting lines and at times even have incredible raw Pace it's just so rare that you find yourself in a situation where you actually get to see any of this and that's the real tragedy so why do all of this that's the million dollar question I suppose I'm not 100 sure on that in GT5 6 and even sport to a degree it seemed like a way of masking the fact that the AI were just quite slow like we said it's the idea of manufactured difficulty challenge not because the AI have decent pace but because the scenario that you the player are put in leaves you at a massive disadvantage which you need to overcome but as we've seen the opponents in gt7 can give good races when they're allowed to so what was the goal to Simply piss off the fan base even further it's clear that many people have had enough of this even looking at the comments from my previous video which had nothing to do with the actual races there were quite a few people lamenting the fact that this was still happening despite the complaints for well over a decade at this point been instead of responding to that they seem to have doubled down and now it's probably the worst it's ever been in the series so now that we've discussed all the ways the AI has been made deliberately worse than it actually is we need to talk about the AI AI that is quite literally superhuman that's right GT Sophie so to put it briefly GT Sophie is a form of AI which uses machine learning to essentially learn car and track combinations from scratch much in the same way a real person does rather than relying on pre-programmed instructions to drive the car this allows it to effectively have unlimited potential when it comes to Raw speed and also the manner in which it races with other cars to a lot of people this will be the Silver Bullets it doesn't matter that the AI we have now is bad because we've got GT Sophie on the way man I hate to be so negative about this stuff but it doesn't seem that obvious to me think about it this way how will Sophie be implemented in the game as it is now I mean they're not going to rip up all the AI from the single player events we have now and just replace them with Sophie no way that's going to happen from how it's been described as a teacher a student and a friend to race with it seems as though the idea for Sophie is more intimate as in everyone can have their own version of the Sophie AI which they can race with rather than Sophie being a wholesale replacement for the AI we have at present and when you think about it like that it does make sense why would gt7 Implement all of the downgrades to the current AI on purpose just to replace it with a superhuman AI That's as fast as it needs to be but can also race incredibly well why the sudden U-turn more than anything it seems like a trading tool I can definitely see Sophie implemented into sport mode in some way maybe instead of watching videos about sportsmanship and racing etiquette you would have to race with Sophie and those ideas could be demonstrated that way the idea of using Sophie for b-spec has also been floated around as well but if that's just going to be racing against the regular AI we have now then I don't really see much points if it could be a case where we can race our version of Sophie against other peoples sort of like the remote races from GT5 then that could be interesting the key issue though is the limitation of current technology creating Sophie is quite an intensive process and certainly not when a PS5 alone can handle so would it just be a case of the developers uploading a version Sophie into gt7 once it's learned certain car and track combinations if so that would really limit its usability when it comes to the whole student teacher and friend Dynamic still GT Sophie is for certain the thing I'm looking forward to the most that's coming to gt7 at some point not that it's much of a competition but regardless we are still stuck with the AI and the racing we have at the moment in all of its bizarre self-defeating glory and we just have to make the most of it foreign [Music] collecting we've talked about the AI races but just why does Gran Turismo 7 feel so unrewarding to play through well other than the aforementioned reasons I think a lot of it comes down to the structure of the game how it's been designed but how could a game that throws cars at you near constantly and we're earning money honestly isn't that difficult managed to feel like a grind to me like most things it's all about balance and this is where game design is so important but with gt7 it feels like polyphony just took all of their Collective knowledge accumulated over the past quarter of a century on game design and just threw it in the toilets and then launched that toilet into the sun it's no joke to say that when it comes to some of the design decisions made in gt7 it's baffling to think that a team which has showed their incredible Talent on so many occasions could possibly come up with any of this from decisions which give the players the option to not even engage with the gameplay itself to reward systems which actively make players feel like they're being insulted and made fun of gt7 truly has everything even where the game succeeds it still manages to make illogical choices with how certain things are handled it's almost as if nobody considered how any of these choices would impact the player experience or even what people come to a Gran Turismo game for we're also going to talk about how gt7 tries to mirror reality in some areas but in others completely contradicts itself in incredible ways in this respect gt7 is a game which achieves in removing or at least reducing a lot of the things that made the older games so much fun to play through and almost every new addition being something which could have been done so much better or in some cases being put in to deliberately make the game less enjoyable all with the hope of stretching out the experience so players stick around for longer I wonder how that's working out but of course that may not be the only reason for doing all of this that's right we're finally going to talk about that elephant in the room all in good time but for now just remember that with Gran Turismo 7 nothing is quite as simple as it seems it's always difficult to talk about the shortcomings of gt7 without mentioning the successes of the previous games foreign for me Gran Turismo 3 is the gold standard when it comes to intelligent racing game design whilst not being a completely radical shake-up to the formula from the first two games there were plenty of subtle tweaks that made it so compelling to play through the races in GT3 are sorted into five leagues beginner amateur professional endurance and rally one thing I'd love to highlight specifically is how many events often appear in multiple leagues so the drivetrain events FF challenge FR challenge Etc feature in each of the beginner amateur and professional leagues and as you'd expect going up the leaks they get gradually tougher with more challenging opponents driving faster cars and not only that but the races of course get longer and introduce elements like tire wear meaning pit stops may be needed in some of the later races I love this because as you play through the events you have so many options with how you go up the ladder do you stick with the car you used in the beginner league and just upgrade it to keep up with the competition or maybe save up for a higher performance car which you really want or even use a car which you'd want as a price car that's eligible for the events combine this with the sheer amount of variety of these events and it means that basically any car you have in any state of tune will be competitive in at least one event but usually more the only difficulty with GT3 is that since the opponent car performance isn't listed anywhere it can be a bit of trial and error to find in events that your specific car fits into either way I think elements like this are where game design really shines in racing games more often than not though I feel like this sort of thing is completely disregarded with the mainstream only concerned with how the game looks and how it feels to drive check out this review of gt7 from IGN hardly anywhere does it even mention the single player structure and when it does right near the start where it outlines what the menu books are the author doesn't seem to think it's much of a difference from previous GT games stating the racing events the Gran Turismo Cafe deliberately threats us through all make up part of the large list of career races we'd be otherwise doing anyhow I guess he's the type of guy who doesn't want to think for himself because daddy Luca will take care of it for him this statement alone is odd in quite a few ways but we'll get on to that soon by the way I'd recommend checking out my video on car collecting on gt7 if you haven't seen it already because it will provide a lot of context to this video oh well this is IGN what can you expect that said he does at least highlight the ridiculous rolling starts which we talked about last time man you've got to know that you up if even IGN is roasting you about it a great example I find of game design not really being valued when it comes to racing games is with dirt rally 2.0 let me just say that I adore dirt rally 2.0 I put hundreds of hours into it and when it comes to an authentic rally experience there isn't much that even comes close at least on Console the tarmac physics can be a little wonky sometimes but it's still fun although as a game I feel like it could have been easily made better the single player is extremely Bare Bones with a single Championship available for both the rally and rallycross and there's no restriction as to which car you can use if you win you get promoted upper leak which just means the championship gets longer and if you win the final championship you just stay in the same league and nothing happens you might say that it's a rally Sim so the single player doesn't matter thing is though the previous game in the series Dirt 4 had a fully fleshed out career with various championships for different cars and rallies as well as a team management aspect where you could hire employees deal with sponsors and even design your own Livery most frustrating part is that dirt rally 2.0 keeps some of the team management stuff in the most basic way to the point where you've got to wonder why they even bothered to be honest even if they didn't want to design a full single player again they could have just copied over the stuff from Dirt 4 and that would have helped massively it seems though because they Market the game as a Sim they just get away with not bothering at all in this area Forza Horizon 5 is another that doesn't seem much worth in having a structured single player pretty much every event that you do is part of the main story allows you to use any car you want and the AI opponents just match what you use it makes everything feel kind of aimless structure matters of course you don't want a game like this to be completely linear but a little bit of restriction goes a long way in terms of players feeling like their choices actually matter so let's see what gt7 does in this regard viewing it from the start of the game no not the music rally I've done the street before haven't I so we've talked about the menu books and how all of that works but I need to apologize to anyone who watched the car collecting video You see I've lied to you all with the menu books you do actually have a meaningful Choice the choices are a do the designated races and win the cars through them or B just buy the cars because they always put the ones you need in the used car dealers wow game design that's right in this racing game they give the option to progress without doing any of the races in theory if you get lucky with a couple of cars in the Legends dealer you can complete this game by doing only the Championships and no other races in the single player the only issue would be money good thing that after only a few races you'd be drowning in it at the point in the game where the menu books would insist on you driving front-wheel drive hatchbacks you can have enough money to almost buy a Supercar needless to say the balance is a little bit off GT3 had a reputation for being tough for beginners as breaking out of the early game was quite a challenge if you were smart about it though you could do it without being that fast it was all about Investments so saying okay I can do this event with this car now I have this prize car can I use it in any other event or I could sell it and upgrade my other car with the money and use it for this and that was all part of the fun not that any of this matters now anyway you see from update 1.11 back in April last year a slew of supposed fixes were implemented to the end game economy there's a lot to dissect here and we will but the one that has the most game breaking implications is the massive boost to Circuit experience payouts if you're good enough you can earn millions of credits from just a few minutes of driving the thing is you can do these at any point in the game the only restriction being how quickly you can unlock the tracks by doing the menu books this means it is possible to earn multiple millions of credits within the first few minutes of starting a brand new game of course not everyone may be able to do this but even if you can achieve bronze the payout is insane compared to what you'd normally be earning at this point in the game when I say that these fixes are just a Band-Aid over a massive gaping wound this is what I mean in fact this is more like going to the doctors for treatments they stitch up your wound and then they pull out a knife and stab you somewhere else they really didn't consider the implications to progression when they rushed out this fix [Music] another element we have in gt7 is the good old license tests back once again I've got to say I think they did a pretty good job of them in here in terms of the tests themselves the variety and amount of tests feels good and it's fun to progress and do more of them for more experienced players they're not too hard to go with the exception of the final test S10 which is an absolute standout I wish they applied this much creativity to the rest of the game and in terms of prizes for completing them you can earn it interesting and varied selection of cars as well but like everything in this game there's a catch this being that they're pretty much pointless only the National Bee and National a licenses are required in the game so the IB IA and S licenses do nothing meaning that as they don't actually Grant you access to anything they are by definition not licenses how do you that up incredible anyway we've talked before at length about how the menu books Force you down this Narrow Path when it comes to car collecting making sure you have basically every car you need to progress at all almost all times and dissuading you from buying the cars you want to and making your own decisions whilst also making the cars you do collect almost instantly redundant and it seems to me because this is a racing game that this sort of terrible design gets a free pass in some people's minds but could you imagine if other games try to do this take a role-playing game for example so say maybe you get a Quest from a wise Sage to collect some rare artifact go to x-place and collect this artifact then bring it back to me so you go to the place you defeat some enemies in that area collect the artifact and bring it back and say this artifact is a weapon or some armor or something you can use in the game so you bring it back to the sage they then proceed to lecture you about why this artifact is so important and unique and why you should value it so much and after that they return the artifact to you he then gives you your next quest which is to do the exact same thing but for another artifact really again well at least I can use my new armor or weapon on this Quest right and the whole game is just that repeated like 20 times if that actually was a real game it would be mocked incessantly in fact if someone even tries to pitch that as a game idea they would be laughed out of the room but because Gran Turismo is a racing game in the minds of some people including a professional game reviewers it's fine because as we know only the gameplay and visuals seem to matter cargo's room that's all you need I think another way in which this manifests itself is within the races that are tied to the menu books like I said given gt7's genius design you can ignore these races almost entirely but if you decide to do them you will start to notice something aside from the AI and how the race itself is structured which I talked about in the last video check it out if you want a full breakdown of that nightmare the selection of event types is what I mean here some people got the wrong impression in my first video where I talked about the impact of the drivetrain events so FF challenge FR challenge Etc implying that they didn't exist in gt7 clearly if you play the game you know that they do the difference is in what form they exist for example take the FF challenge in GT3 there are three of them in three different leagues getting harder and with faster opponents each time the car choice is open so you can use any FF car in gt7 the only FF challenge events are the 450 PP Japanese FF challenge why so specific that's because as I mentioned before the events in the gay game serve only the cars from the menu books in this case the Japanese FF sports cars menu if this menu didn't exist then this event would have no reason to exist either and most likely wouldn't be in the game and this is why so many of the events from past GT games were and are still missing another excellent example of this is the Camaro menu they needed to create an event for this menu so what do they do they could have used the past GT event like stars and stripes or even just make it a Chevrolet one make race no instead what they made was the American Sunday cup 600 PP Sunday cup 600 PP Sunday cup 600 PP the Sunday cup is the first event in the game strictly for beginners why is there a 600 Performance Point version of it halfway through the game that doesn't make any sense it's just not the Sunday cup anymore the name is meaningless oh yeah let me just get in my SRT Viper and do the Sunday cup and this happens a lot when you consider all of the events for the four-wheel drive challenge the only form of that is the Japanese four-wheel drive challenge 600 PP events because that only exists for the Japanese rally base cars menu that also explains why there's no Mr challenge because they never created a menu that would need it to exist this is why there is such a lack of events and event Variety in this game despite what certain game journalists may tell you this isn't true now and was even less true back in March 2022 and not only is there a lack of events catering for different cars but also for the different tracks I never thought I'd see the day where I unlock a track in Gran Turismo and there are no races for it how does this even happen it says a lot that even now many tracks in the game have barely any races take sankwire as an example this is an original circuit that has six different variations when the game launched there were only two races and both of them were the exact same variation why do they do this on purpose what is wrong with them since then they've blessed us with a third race and at a different variation this time imagine that but even still the variance is severely lacking so beyond regular events we also have championships returning after their Hiatus in GT Sports we have 10 championships at present not a huge amount but as long as each of them are great and a real challenge to beat then that doesn't really matter four of them only have two races two races in past games almost all events had at least three races and they're trying to pass off two races as a championship and both races are at the same track they're not particularly creative either because the final few are just generic events for 600 700 and 800 PP cars respectively and they added plenty of Standalone races for those events as well so they're not even unique to the championship oh and they removed the ability to choose an individual race from a championship to do without having to race through the whole Championship don't you just love it when developers remove features that were in older games for absolutely no reason now it's not as if the races even get significantly different as you progress in the game for example the final championship is about five races which each take around 10 to 15 minutes to complete so it's not that long but the main problem is the formats like basically every other career race it's one of those where you start at the back of the grid miles behind and you just have to catch up to the other cars I also find it so ironic how in the previous games where you had only five opponents and they all started right next to you you had the option to qualify but now with 20 cars on the track where qualifying would actually make a difference and be a nice parallel with say sport mode they don't one of the Talking Heads even mentions a qualifying session in one of the races I guess we just weren't invited then further devolving the experience is that these races don't even have tire wear and fuel usage so they try to Hype it up as the final championship the Pinnacle of racing in gt7 but the experience is pretty much the same as the Sunday cup but just with faster cars and slightly longer races maybe they should call this the 800 PP Sunday cup changeable weather is something that can impact these races but through the career as a whole it's very rarely even a possibility there is a difference between simplifying a game to make make it more accessible and just not using any of the key features gt7 does the latter and as such the sensor progression is severely skewed since by the end of the game nothing has really changed even if the game wants to convince you that it has and that you've achieved so much one benefit of all of this is that playing through the game again to get the footage it was far less time consuming considering I didn't even have to do half of the races in the final cut scene at the cafe after winning the last championship Sarah mentions that it feels like we only just met yesterday but the reality is that it's not even been nine hours since I started that sums it up better than I ever could But the saddest part about all of this is of course those we've lost along the way those which have provided us with countless hours of Joy over the years and memories we will never forget maybe we will see some of them again but there's a good chance that we never will so please take a moment with me now to reflect on and remember the Gran Turismo events we so dearly Miss [Music] all right [Music] friends [Music] hey [Music] baby [Music] [Music] so that's the main single player in a nutshell but beyond that what else is in this game you might have noticed that I haven't even mentioned the mission events so let's talk about those it's no exaggeration to say that for me the mission events are by far the best part of this game you get a variety of events ranging from callbacks to Gran Turismo 4 like the overtake and slipstream challenges as well as the fabled one lap magic where you race against much slower opponents who are given a head start and you have a short amount of time to catch them why does that sound so familiar we also get new challenges like drift events and drag races which are a lot of fun as well as these mileage Trails where you're tasked with going as far as you can with the limited fuel you have not the most exciting gameplay but I appreciate them trying new things to add more variety to these challenges my favorites though have to be the races these really showcase gt7 at its best a lot of them have changeable weather so your strategy plays a big part and many of the AI are programmed to use different tire compounds and strategies so it can be really unpredictable at times going back to update 1.11 one of the additions was a set of eight one hour long Mission races and again these are mostly greats with a lot of them featuring changeable weather and opponents using different strategies to keep you on your toes but this being gt7 it can't all be perfect starting with a minor gray the one lap magic events force you to sit through the whole Countdown Just Like GT4 guys I know many people consider GT4 to be the best game but you didn't have to do that as well I don't see why they couldn't give us the option to skip the count down and just simulate where the cars would be by that time surely a PS4 or PS5 can handle that now there are a few key differences between normal races in the world circuits and Mission races the first is simply that mission events don't play music apart from this one for some reason [Music] now that's a real driving music so if you normally play with the music on tough luck the second is far more important Mission events only give you a payout to the first time that you complete them that is a big deal because it means that if you win a mission race you won't get paid for any subsequent attempts so after completing these races once each all of the good work they put into making them fun and unique goes completely out of the window you can't justify spending a whole hour doing a race that gives you literally nothing when gt7 is a game where money is so important there is no replay value to these races whatsoever and that just sucks even when they succeed at something they still manage to fail in some way it's just unbelievable and it's not as if making these as regular World circuit races would make them op for money grinding because in the same update they introduced three races which give even better money versus time payouts which we will get to also the mission races that existed before update 1.11 have a ridiculously low payout for some reason even compared with other much shorter Mission events it seems as though they may have realized this issue because in a later update they added another one hour long race but to the world circuits instead meaning it can be replayed for more money but these human comedy races are still trapped in the Purgatory that is the missions and that's sad I've talked a few times now about update 1.11 and some of the changes implemented but I've yet to even explain why this came about in the first place I'm sure many of you will already know but this occurred due to complaints from the community that gt7 was too much of a grind as you couldn't earn much money and combined with the insane cost of some cars magnet collecting the cars you wanted became extremely difficult it was update 1.07 where some of the best paying races were slashed down that really generated the backlash towards a game which even before the update didn't pay out a great amount combine this with the game's servers being down for almost a full day due to an issue with the update and it was a PR nightmare for Gran Turismo needless to say they needed to act fast and only a couple of weeks later we got update to 1.11 this provides context as to why they added the mission races and boosted the payouts for circuit experience the point is that even though it was fairly easy to earn money early in the game later in the game and certainly in the post game the discrepancy between how many events there were to do and how much they paid out versus the cost of many of the higher end cars meant that grinding certain races over and over again was inevitable at this point I'd like to just explain why forcing players into a situation where grinding is the only realistic way to obtain something is awful game design there is a sentiment that I've seen from some people that grinding is just a natural part of playing a game and people who complain about it are just entitled and don't want to work hard or put in any effort for their reward now I can't speak for everyone on this but for me that's nowhere near the truth let's make a hypothetical so in situation A you grind a single race over and over again for let's say two hours because it's the best way to make money to buy a car you really want so you grind for the two hours you get the money and buy the car then in situation B you have to win a really challenging set of events or even a championship which takes twice as long so 4 hours and from that you win the same car to me situation B is far better and more rewarding even though it takes double the time the issue is not the effort you to put in but rather the way it's presented in the game giving players a unique challenge to earn something is much preferable than pretty much forcing them to replay an element over and over again if they want to buy it even if that would be less time consuming and easier this is where all the GT games were so rewarding because the idea of giving a reward based on a unique challenge was how they gave out prize cars when you finished a 100 playthrough on those older games you would have either won all of the cars or have enough money by then to buy anything you wanted of course not everyone will agree with that and ultimately it's up to you to play the game in a way which you find the most enjoyable if that's grinding the same race 20 times a day then go for it even in a previous video I talked about how I did the Clubman cup plus races a ridiculous amount of times just because I find them fun not everything has to be about getting some sort of reward but don't expect everyone to be on the same page giving people the choice between these two options would be the ideal outcome and that's how it should be but with gt7 there's nowhere near enough things to do for that to be a reality as series producer kazanora yamuchi agrees with this or at least he says he does in a statement he put out after the 1.07 disaster he said I want to make gt7 a game in which you can enjoy a variety of cars lots of different ways and if possible we'll like to try to avoid a situation where a player must mechanically keep replaying certain events over and over again so the question is why did they design the game in a way where this would be inevitable they have the metrics they know how much total money there is from completing every event including prize cars and they know how much every single car costs to buy so why was anybody involved in the game even surprised that this happened and that leads us to our next point the issues with the missions and circle experience are that they are only one-time payouts so once they're done you can't get the money again that would normally be fine but even after completing all of these you're still going to need a lot more cash to buy many of the other cars so after saying that they don't want players to mechanically keep playing certain events over and over again their next course of action was to add three races for you to specifically keep playing over and over again nice for them to add three I suppose but how do I know this for certain well a couple of reasons firstly the fact that they are by far the best in terms of a money to time ratio when compared to any other replayable event secondly is that regardless of how you drive whether you're smashing into opponents or cutting Corners you will still get the clean race bonus every single time they're not particularly subtle about it and thirdly is that since then 10 months later they are still the best races to grind despite the game adding more races which use faster cars and are arguably harder these are still the best options for making money efficiently so in my mind that part of it is obvious you know we've talked so much about grinding money that I forgot what we're even grinding for in the first place oh yeah that's right so like I've said the cost of certain cars is frankly insane but even Beyond just the top one percent the values have generally inflated quite a lot I mean 48 grand for a sprinter with 55 000 miles on the clock what of course a lot of this is down to the inflation of prices for certain cars in the real world and kazanori in that same statement made this link very clear the pricing of cars is an important element that conveys their value and Rarity so I do think it's important for it to be linked with the real world prices so my question to him is why why is that important that may sound like a stupid question since from even the original Gran Turismo the in-game prices have always somewhat reflected the real world value of these cars with those changing over time as well the point is that gt7 pushes this to a ludicrous degree I think now is a good time to take a look at how the value of real world cars are determined and try to relate this back to gt7 I've identified four main areas that impact a real car's worth firstly condition this one one is easy and how it relates to gt7 because used cars with higher mileage generally will have a less durable engine and body and as such are worth less to purchase when compared to an equivalent new car bought from Brand Central so that's a tip for gt7 secondly is performance that's another easy one as generally higher performance cars will be worth more in gt7 it's a racing game so driving and winning with faster and faster cars is a clear goal that makes sense thirdly I have Rarity this is where things start to get messy mostly because the Rarity of a real car is a big deal if a car is designed and built by a certain group of people at a certain period in time that can never be fully replicated in gt7 you can have an infinite amount of these cars existing far more than the number that exists in real life because it's a video game that's kind of the point this idea cannot be paralleled in a video game without artificially limiting the total supply of cars available to all players not that they should do that either dear God no but that's the concept and the final point is desirability historical significance again very contentious since the reasons and motors for wanting a car in real life can be drastically different from a video game if you get a 1930s Alfa Romeo in real life that's a big deal even people who don't know anything about cars would be able to tell getting one in gt7 is not because what the hell are you supposed to do with it and the only reason why anyone would care is because of the value not any significance attributed to the car itself arguably it reduces the importance of the car itself because at that point it just becomes a number something to flaunt and say look what I have the car itself becomes irrelevant which ironically is the opposite of what they were trying to achieve now not to say that any historical or even emotional value is completely irrelevant in a racing game these cars are supposed to be facsimiles of the real thing so any attachment or fondness towards a particular model should be reflected like in real life I'm not saying that you should find this outfit in the used dealership selling for 30 grand or something purely because it's slow by modern standards and also has no utility in the game game it's more that the value shouldn't be so directly linked to the real world value when the connotations of how the car exists in the game are so drastically different than that of real life the cost of cars is capped at 20 million credits but you get the feeling that without this some of them would be priced even higher than that you know I read a comment which was somewhat written in jest saying that gt7 is trying to mirror the real-life experience of classic slash prestigious car ownership but honestly the more I think about it the more that idea seems to add up when you consider how gt7 is designed think about it the cars are just sat in a dealership for a million billion credits waiting to be bought and when someone finally does they just put them in a garage where they can look at them I guess gt7 has a very few events for these historic cars so the main draw is clearly not to race them even if in real life people can and often do this is the only reason which justifies the decision they've made here and if so that's really sad it would represent a fatal misunderstanding of how people interact with racing games and why they even enjoy them hint a big part is the racing not for some faux historic car ownership experience nonsense well anyway Gran Turismo has shown that they now value realism in the most mundane ways above engaging and fun game design realism and how a player is forced to interact with and rewarded in the game is clearly so important to them so anyway about roulette tickets but you probably already knew that so instead of giving out meaningful prizes like cars which are relevant to the event World Championship which you won gt7 gives you a Forza Horizon wheel spin great but that's not fair and thought to Horizon because actually they're much worse these roulette tickets are given out near constantly complete a menu book here's a roulette ticket what about these extra menus roulette tickets your daily reward for logging in and driving a certain distance roulette tickets you don't need to go far to see that most people despise the roulettes and that's mostly for one reason they appear to be rigged to give you the worst prize almost every single time the truth is that they're predetermined from pretty much the moment you get the ticket this has been proven by people using their tickets and then restarting their game without saving when they open the tickets again their prizes are exactly the same now I'm not against the idea of roulette prizes entirely of course GT3 had roulettes as well when you won a championship the difference is that in GT3 the roulette was between four prize cars which was specifically chosen as prizes for that event it also was truly random and if you wanted a different prize you could redo the championship thus adding replay value or just safe scum the only drawback was that a lot of the time the prizes weren't exactly equivalent in terms of value or desirability T and that's how things like this happen and let's occur what is it ew ink it's a Toyota Vitz it's pink why is it pink how do I get to win one of four cars oh yeah not even gonna say it not even gonna say it [Music] fan tastic that's an amazing prize another pink fit well let's see what car I get [Music] well at least it's not pink so gt7 takes that part of it and turns it up to 11. as I said the prices are predetermined meaning that the other prizes you see are just set dressing sometimes you will even see prizes which are literally not possible to attain for that grade of ticket I should mention that tickets come in tears with one star tickets being the worst with the lowest value prizes all the way up to six stars which give the best rewards in terms of money I don't really care that much although it isn't much of a draw to keep playing and get your ticket every day when you know the reward is almost guaranteed to be hardly anything in fact I've calculated that in some cases with the lower payouts you actually receive less money per minute spending the time to just open the ticket and watch the animation then you get per minute from grinding the best paying races crazy but for me the real issue is the other prizes you can get gt7 has the best customization of any GT game and one of its key additions are engine swaps finally making their debut in the series at present there are tons of different interesting and unique engine swaps and they're adding more of them every month they really are an awesome part of the game which everyone can enjoy you can probably see where I'm going with this the only way to obtain them is pure luck and needless to say you're going to need a lot of luck back in June last year there was an exploit which allowed you to redeem pretty much infinite engine swaps this is how I and many other people manage to get so many of them as we stockpiled whilst we could but if we take those out of the equation playing the game how it was intended I've won maybe seven or eight engine swaps total in a game which at present has 55 possible engine swap combination I played this game for over 450 hours and that's all I would have and this is with intervention from polyphony you see they recognize how unbelievably lucky it needed to be to get an engine swap from a regular roulette ticket and came up with a solution was it to change the method of getting them from entirely luck to something more skill based no they just give out some tickets specifically for engine swaps now and so the trend of them identifying an issue but rather than solving the root cause of it they just plaster over it and act as if it's no longer there continues whilst this has helped a little because without these I would only have two legitimate engine swaps that I can remember getting from regular tickets not everybody is so lucky so the way of getting these engine swap only tickets is from completing extra menus oh boy they're back again ironically it was through these extra menus that the exploit for infinite tickets was found the big problem is that a lot of these extra menus require you to get cars which can only be found from the used car or Legends car dealership meaning if you don't have it already you have to wait days or sometimes even weeks to find the car you need and in the worst cases these are cars costing multiple millions of credits which you might not even want but need for the extra menu and on top of that the engine is decided at random so you may end up with one you don't even want or need so because of this it really doesn't pass as anything close to a solution not to mention that we've now seen the possibility of needing cars for extra menus which you can only get with a brand invitation what's a brand invitation some of you may ask that's a great question I wish politely would ask themselves the same thing essentially certain high-end cars in brand Central require these brand invitations for you to actually purchase them can you guess how you earn a brand invitation yeah this makes the extra menu solution even more ridiculous these invitations were also on a timer meaning that you only had 14 days to get the money to buy the cars from the point you got the invitation again pressuring you to buy cars you may not even want because you have no idea when you'll get another opportunity to do so once again there was a lot of criticism towards gt7 for this as well and once you again in update 1.11 they implemented their solution they extended the invitations from 14 days to 30 days that was it are you surprised with roulettes you can also win cars very rarely and tuning parts for cars that you may not even have and would never want to own these even include special Parts like ultra high RPM turbos and Stage 5 weight reduction and there are also special roulette tickets specifically for parts which again you can get from the extra menus it goes without saying that this is the antithesis of good game design and I hope I've conveyed that to you as well way to make your players feel like dirt who deserve nothing you could be goddamn ego Fragger and you'd still be subject to this not to mention how it completely contradicts the realism they're trying to create in other areas like the car collecting okay so I've got to save up 20 million to buy this historic car from the legendary car dealership which I can't really use for anything but if I want the spaghetti I've got to get an invitation to buy it which I can get by collecting other random cars or just driving 26 miles in a day and then playing a slot machine where I have a minute chance of getting it nothing is consistent to anything it's like they're trying to jam together puzzle pieces which don't fit they use the excuse of realism when they can make the game more tedious but suddenly when some form of reality check would really help that all goes out the window it's inconceivable so we've put the length about the problems what about some solutions uh trash the roulette tickets and let you buy the engine swaps job done okay it's not that simple I imagine a big part of them doing all of this is to try and stretch the content over a longer period of time so that people will keep coming back for more I don't imagine it's been very successful but that seems like the idea so any solution we come up with has to be with this in mind anyway still trash the roulette tickets and with the engine swaps what we can do is to tie the unlocking of them to certain milestones for that particular car so say you want that four rotor in your RX7 the challenge could be something like win 10 races with the RX7 or win a specific Championship or even earn a certain amount of drift points in it something like that that way you've got a reason to keep playing so players will stay invested and for a lot of people if they really enjoyed the car they'll just unlock it naturally anyway for the manufacturer invites we could give these as rewards for certain relevant things like collecting a certain amount of cars from a given brand or winning a certain Race For That Brand like for winning the Ferrari challenge you could get the invitation to buy the fxxk also once you get the invitation you could keep it forever so no more feeling pressure to buy the car as soon as as possible or getting invitations for cars you already have for The Unique Parts it's not a big deal but we could again tie this to some form of accomplishment with the car much like the engine swaps as we've now gotten rid of roulette tickets we don't have any incentive for people to play daily we could bring back the seasonal event races although that's probably asking too much to have those daily so they can be weekly or bi-weekly as they were before in terms of daily incentive we can make one chosen race from the world circuits have increased payouts they don't have to be insanely high but around the same level as the current best paying races and this can be shown as the daily special updating every 24 hours as Solutions I think those will work pretty damn well I mean give me a call politically and I'll just design the whole game for you while I'm at it let me know what you guys think and also leave your own suggestions in the comments but as far as it goes for gt7 a lot of what I've mentioned is how it fails to live up to previous titles and do things nearly as well as them but the reality is that it should be doing things better and bringing new and interesting experiences Beyond getting shafted by the roulette I mean while it's managed to evolve in so many ways it hasn't really brought anything fresh to the table to offset that either and there's no shortage of ideas here's an easy one larger grids and multi-class racing this isn't even entirely new because they did dabble with it in GT Sport where there were a couple of multi-class races and one that even featured a 30 car grid now it's possible that having gt7 on PS4 as well meant a trade-off had to be made here but that is giving them the benefit of the doubt that it was even on their radar maybe they were just laser focused on getting Ray tracing the replays instead or some other like that which nobody cares about even upping it to a 24 car grid I would have expected since they managed to do that on GT Sport briefly for even online races back in the day at the end of every FIA season they would have these top 24 Superstars races for the best drivers in the region I was actually fortunate enough to have competed in one of these as well and when it comes to multi-class racing the best we have on gt7 is a couple of missions which I guess are multi-class but maybe that's for the best since the AI clearly weren't programmed with that mind it seems like the slower a car is going the more trouble they have trying to overtake it's bizarre I know I should have mentioned this in the AI video but here we are anyway I was recently watching some gameplay from GT5 prologue and saw something quite interesting well aside from the fact that basically all of the menu music from there is reused in gt7 what I saw was an event type that's never returned to the series since then the event was sort of like a time trial but the difference was that you had 10 minutes to beat the lap time and there were other cars on the circuit as well it sort of reminded me of a Time attack session this alone is interesting but really they could take this even further such as instead of aiming for a set lap time you have to beat the opponent's lap times they could even have whole events and championships based on this obviously it won't appeal to everyone and would probably just end up as a mission but still it's those sort of interesting ideas I was hoping to see more of in gt7 but all we got to spice up the experience was nonsense like this if it's not clear enough I'll state it now Gran Turismo 7 had the potential to be the greatest racing game of all time and even despite the Never End leading series of blunders it seems to go through it's still decent the bass they're working with is simply incredible in terms of its technical output but in almost every design decision it seems to take the wrong turn and sabotages itself in truly unbelievable ways so what was the goal I find myself asking this so often with respect to gt7 with actually good games the goal is obvious to make the game as fun and rewarding for the player as possible and all design decisions are centered around that clearly this is not the case for gt7 so an obvious one we've mentioned is to keep players coming back gt7 has been described as a live service meaning that it will be consistently updated over time and new things will keep being added to draw players back in it also explains a lot of these bizarre design choices in terms of actual content and rewards since they're trying to stretch the player experience over a longer period of time but you don't need to look far to see the floor with this logic because if they don't add new content regularly or the new content they do add isn't very interesting then the game is basically dead in the water as we've seen when there was no January updates and even when there has been updates it hasn't done much to improve the state of the game most months you can get through the new content in about an hour and that's all there is now this wouldn't be a big deal if gt7 was a complete game from the get-go but as we've seen it is far from that so it kind of lives and dies by its post-launch supports and that support hasn't been particularly strong each month we get a handful of cars and very occasionally a new track which I don't have too many issues with people can and often do complain endlessly about which cars and tracks They want in the game but to me the issue is not what they do add but rather what they don't add to the game through none of the recent updates have they solved any real issues with the game or even given the impression that they might and nothing they add feels fresh or gives players a new experience going back to update 1.11 where they added a new set of mission races we have promised that there was plenty more to come ten months later and we're still waiting for anything new or meaningfully different whilst they just keep recycling the same Bland style of races over and over and over again clearly Gran Turismo 7 is not alone in this looking at video games as a whole this is the approach that many franchises have switched over to and very few of them pull it off well and it's not as if this is the only option you only need to look back at games like GT3 and GT4 in particular that are still way greatly played and talked about even decades later the staying power of these well-designed and fully fleshed out games is immense now imagine if they could design a game like this and then support it with additional content adding new and interesting experiences the results would be incredible but simply put it seems like they don't want to put the effort in to do that so instead they defer to the cheap tactics that we've seen to keep people hooked and this doesn't even seem to be working I've received countless comments from people stating that they've given up on gt7 and sometimes even the Gran Turismo series as a whole and to be honest I can't blame them when it feels like they've implemented mechanics to make the experience worse and then refuse to change or even accept any form of feedback on this many players will understandably not stick around it's not a coincidence that pretty much all YouTubers covering gt7 focus on the online stuff because at the moment that part of the game is the only thing that holds any value to most players since I'm pretty burnt out on online racing from GT Sports I don't really have much to do even if there are more cars to collect I respect my time too much to waste it just grinding which I've already done a fair amount of to be honest the only thing that keeps me coming back at this point are the time trials where I can earn an easy couple of million and they keep me from getting too rusty now I imagine through the course of these past couple of videos there'll be people practically screaming at their screens by this point with one thing in mind what about the micro transactions The Narrative for a lot of people and certainly this was the case with the complaints just after launch was that gt7 was designed like this specifically to force people towards buying in-game credits and was entirely fueled by greed so this is going to make me very popular but to be frank I don't agree with this for the most part at least to be clear I don't blame anyone for feeling this way and certainly the evidence for this argument is very strong having the prices for a lot of cars jacked up to insane amounts having races which don't pay out very much and then even reducing those payouts as well it's obvious to see why people thought this way and combine this with seeing this happen to many other games before there was very little trust to go on so while I think this is mostly a misunderstanding I do not feel sorry for them whatsoever since they brought this entirely on themselves hiding the cost of these micro transactions from reviewers and only revealing them after the fact was a very scummy thing to do as was reducing the payouts although it didn't really make sense for this random dirt race to be the best Money Maker hence why they nerfed it the fact that they didn't replace it or increase payouts for many other events was incredibly short-sighted and that's entirely on them but as for the accusations firstly an incredibly stupid one was that gt7 was pay to win pay to win what this classic car which I can't even do anything with it is by definition not a pay to win game as for the more grounding complaints let's have a look at the pricing of cars so regarding this statement from kazanori about reflecting The Real World prices of cars whilst I completely disagree with it as I've stated I 100 accept that this is truly what he believes whilst Others May view it as a cop-out or an excuse to me it seems to line up with his vision for the series we will talk about his vision another time I am sure because that's a whole other can of worms I think part of the problem was that it escalated Beyond just the realm of racing games and into the wider gaming sphere to people who've never played a Gran Turismo game and never even heard of kazanori or polyphony digital this meant that a lot of assumptions were made and a lot of those without the creators had bad intentions with all of this let me just say that I started playing this series with GT3 back in the early 2000s and have kept up to date with it almost religiously since about 2009 on the run up to the release of GT5 this includes reading and watching basically every article and interview about the games that I could possibly get my hands on and what that means is that over the past decade and a half that I've been following the series what most people would agree to be the most turbulent era of the series I feel like I got a pretty decent handle on how kazanori thinks and makes decisions or at least I think I do one thing I know for certain is that when he makes a design Choice he does so with the utmost conviction in his mind he has come to a conclusion and formed a vision of where the series should go and what the game should be like and will not be convinced otherwise this is the reason why Gran Turismo came to be in the first place and also became so great but also how some of the most baffling ideas for the series came about a recent example is with the car valuation service people have been desperate to sell cars in gt7 for various reasons and it took months for them to finally Implement a seemingly very simple feature but instead of a simple sell car for percentage of what you paid system they developed this Dynamic in-game ecosystem where prices fluctuate based on market trends an interesting idea but not one many people were asking for in practice it functions fairly similar to the old way as you're always paid a bit less than what the car is actually worth it also makes you wonder how they determine price changes for cars which don't actually exist and never have kazunori's idiosyncratic way of thinking often leads to ideas and mechanics that nobody else would realistically think to put in a racing game and combined with a real lack of transparency tends to lead towards missed expectations and general confusion all of this is to say I can Envision a version of gt7 where microtransactions were never even mentioned in the design process but the game still ended up the exact same way the Assumption has been that they're only in the game at the request of the higher-ups at Sony but this can't be proven for certain I will say that through my research kazanori and polyphony have never struck me as being so money oriented just more interested in reaching as many players as they can essentially I'm arguing for incompetence rather than greed and deception on the part of polyphony I mean you have to admit if you still genuinely believe that all of this was fueled entirely by greed they have done a monumentally bad job of Designing the game around this either think about it the cars which are so overpriced the main Crux of all of this have no purpose in the game there's no reason to need them and unless you have an attachment or interest in a particular model already the game gives you no reason to even want them you could remove all of the cars from the Legends dealer from the game entirely and nothing would change it's almost as if they designed the whole thing so you wouldn't want to buy or own any of them it's just incredible and also with other decisions how does making the game extremely linear and boring make people want to buy credits the lack of original events how does that play into it even the roulette tickets with its maddening false realities don't seem to fit I mean if you could buy roulette tickets thankfully they didn't do that by the way but if they did then you could at least say oh okay that they're just money hungry bastards then but they didn't and that's what makes their inclusion even more dumbfounding what was the point of any of this if I had to make a top 10 list of the weirdest design decisions in racing games that I've ever played gt7 would have like eight or nine of those if you're ever playing gt7 and wonder to yourself why doesn't this feel as fun as the older games or at least as fun as it should be just remember this video because even if the mainstream and game reviewers don't value game design in racing games gt7 proves that it matters a whole lot more than they can ever imagine did you think I was finished Gran Turismo 7 is one of those games which I could just talk about forever even though we've already covered a lot of the main areas of the game that have the most egregious issues especially when comparing them to the previous titles there is still a whole lot more to talk about as you can see from the runtime of this video for a game which on the surface appears so polished and refined it's incredible just how many areas of it are not Beyond even the main single player experience which I've already covered in detail for a series which Prides itself on its attention to detail gt7 manages to get a lot of those details wrong we're talking about a general lack of Polish areas where clearly not enough effort has been put in features which are outdated broken and in some cases missing altogether now if you're one of those people who complains about nitpicking when others make critiques then this video is not for you because there's going to be a lot of those if it were just one or two things then sure they wouldn't really be worth mentioning it would be like me talking about how it's annoying that when you take a car which can't have custom wheels to GT Auto they don't gray out the option for the wheels like they do with the other modifications so you're just hit with disappoint appointment when you go into the menu and realize that you can't put any of them on I mean that would be ridiculous I've never put a complaint that hyper specific into one of my videos oh wait a second anyway not to say that the previous games were completely Flawless but with gt7 you'll find a mixture of issues from ones that have played the series for decades to new problems they seemingly invented just for gt7 these sorts of things won't be that apparent if you just play it occasionally but if you are quite invested in the game and the series as a whole it will grind you down over time let me show you what I mean let's talk about video game soundtracks if you were to ask most fans of racing games they would probably tell you that they're not as good as they once were what recent game in particular has taken quite a lot of flack for its in-game music regardless of what you think about that it's clear that the days of games like Ridge Racer Type 4 are sadly a very distant memory if you see my video about the music of Gran Turismo you'll know that this matters quite a lot to me that video focused mainly on the music from the first four games and the work of one composer in particular who I adore and think is sorely underrated check it out if that sounds interesting so the gt7 it isn't a case of the soundtrack just not being to people's tastes or not being as good as the older games although you can of course make that argument no the issues much like many other things about the game are a lot more complicated than that firstly let's talk about the in race soundtrack The Music you hear when you're actually driving there are 58 songs in total which is quite a lot but if you're not a fan of daiki Cacho then you're pretty much fortunately I do like daikashu's songs so not a big issue for me right well here's the kicker none of this is new music not even remixes or remasters these are songs which have been carried through from Gran Turismo 4 5 and 6. the same songs which we've been listening to for literal decades and it's not just cashew's songs there's tons of reuse stuff from natoku and nue Masahiro Ando and other artists as well you might not be familiar with their names but if you play the older games like GT4 through 6 you'll be very familiar with their work the thing is that I actually like a lot of the music but at this point it's just so stale and makes the game feel a lot more dated than it actually is even if you haven't played the older games this will be quite apparent how out of touch it seems to sound I'm not against them reusing some music the best and most memorable songs in the franchise would be cool to keep but this is taking it too far in fact 75 of the in-race music is reused from the older games 75 it makes it feel like a best of album rather than a newer fresh experience if you you ask me you might look at this and say sure it reuses a lot of music but we should look at that stuff as a bonus on top of the new music we have in gt7 if you don't want to hear the old stuff then just turn them off so what about the new stuff then well when we take out the ReUse music we are left with a grand total of 14 songs for context the pal in race soundtrack for Gran Turismo 3 back in 2001 had 17 songs all of which being new to the series at that point the pal soundtrack is the one I grew up with and I think it's excellent but you know what was also really good the North American soundtrack for GT3 which had 25 songs and check this out only five songs were used in both versions of GT3 so when you add it all together they had 37 unique songs most of that fully licensed and a handful of created for the game all never before heard in the series at that point gt7 has 14. if they could do that back then why not now whether it be due to time constraints or they just didn't really care either way it comes off as very lazy but hey maybe it's quality over quantity right no to be clear I don't hate these new songs I think life's coming in slow by nothing but thieves is awesome and for me by far the standout and there are a couple of other good ones but it's mostly pretty forgettable the only others that I remember are because of their mean potential Bugatti hmm or for making me think that this soundtrack is actually a cry for help from the people working at polyphony [Music] what are they doing moving on to the menu OST the issue is similar but slightly different there are a whopping 170 songs used in the various menus with 74 of those being all new to gt7 still not a great percentage versus what's been reused but still better than the in-race music and 74 brand new songs is pretty impressive but how then does it manage to feel even more stale and repetitive than the in race music the main problem seems to be bloat the soundtrack does not need 170 songs especially when almost 100 of them are again the same tired old Lounge music we've been hearing since GT5 prologue and again a lot of this music is quite good and I know a lot of other people really enjoy them as well but they really need to give it a break it just feels so stuck in the past and like the series hasn't moved on from the PS3 era but the strange thing is even though there's plenty of new music to offset this whenever I boot up the game I almost always get one of these old reused songs how come this takes us to our next issue which is how and where the music is used so unlike the in race music I think the new music for the menus is generally pretty good of those 74 new songs most of it was composed by Lenny ibizarre especially for gt7 now Lenny had featured quite heavily on the GT Sports soundtrack as well but from what I can tell most of his music wasn't made for GT Sports and being honest I didn't think it was very good this was mostly down to the application ambient music is not my thing and I don't think it works very well in a racing game either I mean there were songs that had animal cries and other weird noises it was very strange [Music] foreign anyway his original songs for gt7 are Miles better in my opinion they feel modern and give the game a fresh twist while also having that signature Groove that was so prevalent in the first few games check out his songs epic U Event Horizon computers have control and New York dub to see what I mean alongside his original music he also did some remixes of classical pieces some of which are quite interesting as we've heard with his version of Adagio for Strings is pretty good the point is that his music only gets heard in a few menus such as for sport mode and the mission events similar to the new music by other artists in places like brand Central and the license center to me these menus have by far the best music with very little of it being reused but most of them are places in the game where you don't spend a huge amount of time conversely the main map and World circuits menu where you're likely to spend most of your time outside of racing is where they use so much of the music from the past games it's really frustrating a very painful example of this is with what I think is Lenny's best song on the soundtrack called galabria [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] I'd recommend listening to it in full it's incredible maybe even the best song in the entire game so where does it get used the pre-race menu for one Championship that's it a menu which you're not likely to spend any more than 20 seconds in that is criminal remember the cover of Moon Over the castle by Beyond the Horizon which they hyped up massively before the launch and featured a lot in the promotional material for the game same thing pre-race music for the final championship it does work but the fact it's only heard in that one specific place and nowhere else is just astounding I've heard the song more times on the run-up to the release of the game than I've heard it in the 500 hours I've spent playing the game since it came out ridiculous but actually there is one other place where you can hear these songs the music replay you know that feature in the game which you only now remember because I just mentioned it that one there are also a few songs which are exclusive to the replay modes like a couple of daiki cashew songs from GT3 and also another classic Korean 6 by Lenny there's a very good chance that even if you put hundreds of hours into this game you would have never heard this song that's because like I say hardly anyone uses the music replay and also the only two places I could find it re-uploaded it has a combined viewing of about 700 but plenty of games have hidden and unused music so what makes gt7 so different well in the case of most other games they're not placing their most overused songs from the past front and center whilst having the new and interesting stuff hidden away in the corner for hardly anyone to see I mean most people would have no need or want to even interact with sport mode yet that's where a lot of this new original music is it would be like the machine test from GT3 having all of the great songs like light velocity and slipstream and then the main GT mode and go race menus stretch thin with mostly reused stuff from GT1 and 2. in a lot of ways you can draw parallels between the music and the cars and tracks in gt7 it stems from a mismanagement of the Assets in the same way that there are tracks which only have one or two races with tons of unused variations and cars which have basically no proper events to race them in there's plenty of new and original music which hardly gets used you would think that since they spent the time and money to create and license these songs that they would want to use them as much as possible but seemingly they don't and I can't understand why but do you know what goes hand in hand with the music the visual design it's been a bit of a running joke though recently racing games aware visual design goes to die most are very Bland and uninspired and in some cases very cumbersome to use to be fair gt7 is by far not the worst in this department it does actually try but there are a few places where it kind of doesn't do you like gray on Gray well I've got some great news so for brand Central they meet this really cool 3D environment and used it for one cut scene and the background for one menu book collection that was it what they did instead for the brand Central menu was just copy over the one from GT Sport and paste that on you can actually see this 3D environment faintly in the background but that's all you get on the topic of reusing assets from GT Sport here's the heads up display it's almost identical I didn't expect them to completely redesign it from the ground up but coming from GT Sport to gt7 it just feels exactly the same despite a difference of five years and a whole console generation they only did the bare minimum adding a gauge 4 track water depth and a wind speed indicator with the return of variable time they didn't even bother to add an in-game clock despite having the functionality for that as you can see when you drive a car that has a visible clock in the interior if you already programmed it why not just put it on the main HUD from reusing so many of these basic things including the music it almost seems like they hoped people didn't play the previous games despite trying to appeal directly to those people as we can see from the obvious Nostalgia bait in the trailers however something that is completely new is the main GT mode map honestly it's pretty nice my only issue is that they already made a better one this will be personal preference but I think the one they showed off in the announcement trailer for gt7 is more subtle and more beautiful I think what's worth noting with this menu is is that it doesn't have a visual style as such it's just trying to look sort of realistic the problem they can have is that in 15 20 years it will appear very dated whereas GT4 stylized design still looks as good as it did in 2005. I mean that is assuming people can even play gt7 at that point in the future but still speaking of lacking a visual style here's the garage I hate it that may seem over the top but let me explain it's one of those things which I've disliked more and more over time so essentially we're in a gray lifeless void whilst classical music is playing does anything about this scream garage the gray void as I call it has been around pretty much from the start of Gran Turismo but I'm not really sure why they decided to bring it back now in fact if you leave the main menu for a few minutes you'll see a cinematic of a random car in a proper garage environment if they made this why don't they use it for the actual garage instead of this eternal void here this is a mock-up I made of how it would look and with more fitting music [Music] thank you [Music] I don't know about you but I think this is leaks better ever since probably GT5 prologue the series has tried to push this Art House Field to make you appreciate cars as more than just mechanical machines whilst I get what they're trying to do it just doesn't work this seems like the reasoning for why the garage feels like some sort of grandiose Art Museum where we're admiring a da Vinci but in reality it's a Honda Fit it's really starting to feel like a parody of itself this is why some people say GT has gotten pretentious and based on this evidence it's hard to argue against that so we've talked about more thematic ideas with the music and visual design but what about some more functional design choices well how about painting your car that's a simple one Gran Turismo has always been a bit behind the curve when it comes to this sort of thing I mean you couldn't even repaint your car until GT5 from 2010 and that was only allowed through this frustrating paint collection system where you would only get paint to use from the different cars you earned and if you used it once then it was gone gt7 has moved on from this quite a bit with way more customization options and a fully fledged Livery editor this part of the game is honestly one of the best things about it even still it does manage to mess up something very simple repainting your car let's have an example here's my Honda Integra and I want to repaint it in Championship white so let's go to GT Auto and do just that first step is to buy the paint of course the first problem is that for some reason you can't preview the paint on your current car and the game instead loads these three other cars to preview it even though my actual car model is already loaded right there GT5 had something similar wearing it would preview the paint on a Model instead of the car they fixed this for GT6 but have now made it worse again great after buying the paint the obvious thing would be to have an option to apply it then and there but gt7 doesn't allow this so you have to go into delivery editor and do it there but when I try and repaint it this happens yep it removed the type R decal why I'm not trying to create a livery just do a simple repaint the same thing happens when you have cars with two-tone paints and Stripes it's really annoying and I don't know why they don't have it as an option to remove them instead of being the default but after that we then have to find the specific paint we've bought and apply it and then we're done nope now you have to name your Livery even though I'm just repainting the car not making a full Livery then it needs to save and apply it to your car and then when you leave GT Auto it needs to save again and now we're finally done do you see how gt7 manages to take something so simple and make it so frustrating and time consuming it's a mixture of issues from previous games and new problems that are specific to gt7 doing it once is bad enough but imagine having to do this every single time you just want to repaint a car it's infuriating a new paint option for gt7 is carbon paints which look like these a great option to have but some genius at polyphony decided that you can only use it to repaint the whole body so if you want to have just a carbon fiber Bonnet or Wing you're not allowed because the whole card needs to be painted unless you feel like then doing a decal wrap over everything else which is time consuming and also means you're limited to the few decal surface options so no metallic paint chrome Etc the term I've always used for things like this is pointlessly restrictive throughout the history of Gran Turismo there have always been design decisions which fit this term for example in GT4 concept cars aren't allowed in most events they had been allowed in the games before and since and there's no functional reason as to why they can't be allowed so pointlessly restrictive in GT5 and 6 you weren't allowed to put custom wheels on racing cars even though you could in all of the games before that they just removed the ability to do so again pointlessly restrictive polyphony are the kings of making their games less enjoyable with no obvious explanation I can't see any technical reason why they wouldn't allow carbon paint to be used on any part including wheels so this is just another one on the pile but whilst we're on the topic of not allowing people to do things how about we talk missing features you see between GT Sport and gt7 a bunch of useful stuff was cut out of the game one of those being basically all the Telemetry from the replays I'm sure only a fraction of people use this stuff in GG sport but it was quite useful for competitive racing so why they decided to trash all of it for gt7 is beyond me same thing with the position chart which you can see at the end of each race in sports it was always interesting to look at and observe where people were at any given point in a race but again it's gone from gt7 back to replays and GT Sport actually had two options for replay cameras standard and variable standard is a mix of dynamic angles both far and near whereas variable is a lot more focused on the cars themselves gt7 took out the variable option why again no idea but it means that sometimes when you're trying to get a decent angle on something the game just refuses and gives you the least useful shot it can possibly find the main reason why I bring this up though is that we saw the consequences of this change on no bigger stage than the grand final of the Nations Cup World Series these are the final few corners of the final lap with three cars battling for the win take a look at this incredible the most intense moment from the World Series maybe ever ruined by a tree because the camera angle that the game chose was absolute this was extremely funny to me to be honest it's much a human error as anything since I'm sure the directors for this event could have manually chosen a different angle but for some reason they didn't okay now it's time for a lightning round let's go firstly in time trial even if you select the same time of day and weather the track conditions will be slightly different each time some would say that the whole point of time trial is to Benchmark yourself for different cars in the same conditions so it completely defeats the point when the track temperature and wind direction can be totally different between runs another is that when searching for things like liveries and decals on the community tab you can't sort them in any order such as most liked recent Etc the order you get seems to be a confusing mixture between most popular and most recent other games have done this far better I don't know why this is so difficult The Livery editor has an excellent free moving camera feature allowing you to see any part of a car in detail for some reason though they don't use this feature in any other part of the game it would be great in places like the garage or the dealerships to check out a car before buying it or we get in those places are an assortment of Scapes and movies which are chosen at random and an extremely slowly rotating camera which takes 10 years to get around to the back of the car I often enjoy watching the intros to games to get hyped up before I play them unfortunately you can't really do that for gt7 because it's really long and half of it is the slow build up going through the history of cars GT's intros have gradually gotten more drawn out over time and at this rate I wouldn't be surprised to see the intro of gt8 be a two-hour documentary about how they made the game the performance points or PP system is completely busted for a number of reasons the original goal was to be able to measure the relative performance of any car in any state of tune so that you can see how small adjustments will affect the performance of your car this became very easy to exploit so they had to backpedal and now tuning the transmission Mission differential and suspension has no impact to the Performance Point level aerodynamics still do however and you can see here how easily it can still be exploited also individual Tire compounds within the same grade like racing hard medium Etc have different PP levels based on the grip of the tire this completely ignores the whole point of the different tire compounds which is that the raw speed is a trade-off with Tire life this means in a PP limited event where tire wear will be a factor there is literally no reason to not choose the hardest compounded tires and then make up the rest of the pp deficit by upgrading your car so it's no slower than cars with the softer compounds but has way more durable tires and they made the wet and intermediate tires have a lower PP than the dry tires even though this PP level is surely relative to its performance in the dry when you would never use these tires anyway so that doesn't make any sense same thing with dirt tires they reduce the pp level when compared to regular racing tires but that must be based on its speed on tarmac where you literally cannot even use them speaking of upgrades am I the only person who finds that the majority of the time when I try and upgrade a road car it normally makes it harder to drive and I'm not just talking about adding power even handling upgrades like better tires and suspension can cause this in the worst cases it almost feels like the car is steering itself and my inputs are merely just the suggestion of course fine-tuning can make it better but a lot of the time cannot fix the issue completely in my opinion the base setup you get with things like the suspension should just work as standard and any fine tuning should be to optimize it and make it faster I spent countless hours doing this in GT6 and that's exactly how it worked but in gt7 it feels like so many cars are just straight up broken when you do the same upgrades I don't really understand so my final topic for this video is the car list I know that I've ragged on people before for complaining about the car list because it's a very easy thing to do and I don't believe it's that important when compared to many other issues with the game ultimately no matter what polyphony does there will always be people whining that this or that car isn't included but that doesn't mean that there aren't any valid complaints about it personally one that annoyed me is how they brought back versions of the jgtc Supra and R34 GTR but not the NSX which would round out the trio of old-school GT500 cars and is also my favorite that one's a bit rude but if the leaked car list is to be believed then we should be getting the Castrol Mugen NSX back at some point as well as many others but a more wider complaint is that gt7's car list already feels outdated and lacks many newer models updates included as of now there are only seven cars from model year 2021 and onwards excluding Vision GT cars and fictional racing variants of course a big part of this is down to how long it takes to model each car 9 months is how long as technology and techniques have improved so has the time required to create these Ultra detailed models back in the PS2 days it would only take a single month for one designer to model a car from scratch a trend that I've seen among certain people and Outlets is heaping praise onto the game for its detail and immersion and of course the recent release of VR for gt7 has only added to that but a lot of them are the same people who were drone on endlessly about the lack of newer cars and their favorites not being included in the game how can people not realize these two things are directly related you can't have one without making sacrifices to the other anyway this hyper fixation on detail has led to what I like to call the two-year tax the premise is simple from the point the game was released you'll find very few cars from the past two years included this started to become more obvious with GT5 where a large number of the new cars racing cars in particular capped out at 2008 despite the game releasing in 2010 when the new breed of GT500 cars were introduced into GT Sports they were again two years out of date the worst offender was the Lexus RCF which was retired at the end of the 2016 season and superseded by the Lexus lt500 despite GT Sport releasing in October 2017 it took another six months before these cars were included in an update they were already outdated when they arrived and five years later we're still waiting for their Replacements so if we look at the car list of say Gran Turismo 3 and again look for cars from the past two years so model years 2000 and 2001 we can find a whopping 69 cars again with no fictional racing variants included or multiple versions of the same car that obviously Blues gt7's 7 out of the water and even if we give gt7 an advantage to offset the time needed to make the cars and include model year 2020 as well this only Rises to 13 cars including DLC so it's clear that even without the time investment needed to make these cars that they don't have too much of a priority to keep the car list currents but why is is that well it seems like because all of the modern contemporary cars were carried over from GT Sport they don't see much a need to keep them updated and instead focus on expanding the car list in other areas when you see a car in gt7 which is a model year 2014 2015 2016 more often than not these will be the type of cars I'm talking about but when you look and see that the newest McLaren is from back in 2016 then it isn't really good enough sadly there aren't many solutions to this issue suggesting that Gran Turismo should start lowering the quality of these models to be able to make more would be foolish to anyone who's familiar with the developers we can only really hope that as the quality of the models have reached a point of diminishing returns that the focus is now on to how to produce them quicker rather than adding even more detail some car models made for GT Sport were outsourced so hopefully this can be continued longer term or polyphony can just hire more employees anyway all of this effort is worthless unless they're adding cars that people want to use and actually hold some sort of value in the game but kazanori is now admitted that SUVs are going to be included going forwards simply because they're driven quite often in real life but not on race tracks and not by people who have any taste we truly are living in the worst timeline foreign [Music] for the big one how did Gran Turismo 7 end up the way that it did if we were to boil it down to the most simplified explanation the root cause that dictates almost every poor decision made with the game then this is it Gran Turismo 7 was not designed with fun as a priority some of you may already know that and think that it's obvious and others may be confused as to why I think that a game which aims to simulate driving is not designed to be fun despite the act of driving to many of us being one of the most enjoyable things out there I want you to take this idea of gt7 not being made with the aspect of enjoyment in mind and just hold on to that as we talk about the game further one of the key themes that I've taken away from gt7 is sacrifice what do I mean by that well a common idea for people who played the older GT games was that wouldn't it be awesome if we could have a game like this but with super realistic graphics and handling but what was never talked about was what would need to be sacrificed to make that a reality one obvious thing is of course the time needed to produce it most obviously with the car models I've mentioned this before how the time needed to make each car increases and as such the carless becomes dated much quicker and overall doesn't feel quite as connected to the car culture and Motorsport of today whereas in the older games where cars could be pumped out at a much faster rate including cars of that time those games felt a lot more attached to the Zeitgeist than what was really new and interesting back then if you look at the tracks there are more sacrifices not only relating to the sheer number and relevance due to how long it takes to make them but also in what form they take the fact that Beyond The Real World circuits a lot of the new Originals have a fairly similar template of being fast and open with plenty of hard braking zones and many of the returning Originals have been modified bring them more in line with this ethos as well this was done mostly to better suit them for online racing and sport mode in particular I made a more in-depth review of the whole situation as a separate video so take a look if that sounds interesting a few people also raised my attention to an interview with series producer kazanori yamo sheet in which she explains why there is such a lack of proper Street circuits in gt7 which relates to how much time effort and resources needs to be put in to make them due to the sheer amount of detail required to make a street circuit in a built up area to today's standards kazanuri equates it to making five permanent circuits So currently it simply isn't worth doing very sad considering the importance and history that circuits like these have had in the series in the past and yet another sacrifice made to the Moors of increasing visual Fidelity and immersion but beyond purely just the visual stuff there are more losses for the sake of realism another that I've covered is car collecting how many Classics and cars that are rare in real life have their prices jacked up to insane amounts and then shoved in a legendary dealership only for you to save up the cash purchase them and realize they're almost entirely useless in the game it mirrors reality yes but from a game design standpoint it's absolute dog shot and what's truly incredible is how they recognize this issue in the older games and as such handled these types of cars in a way that felt more natural and reward thing car collecting I feel is a really core idea of Gran Turismo hence why my first video in the series was about that the idea I really wanted to convey and may not have done fully come on it was my first proper video after all was that collecting cars in and of itself doesn't have any inherent meaning but the context in which you earn them and the ways in which you can then use them add that meaning of course some people will enjoy collecting cars for the sake of collecting and no other reason and that's totally fine but the issue comes in where the game is then designed around that specific way of playing car collecting in gt7 is completely shallow because there's very little context to the act of collecting and then enjoying what you've collected the cars you don't need to be a game designer to understand this but it can help to explain it foreign [Music] [Music] how cliffny doesn't seem to grasp this I'm not sure I'll ever understand also having permanent modifications is a bit weird and I'm not really sure how to feel about it on one hand it is again realistic and means that you need to think more about what you choose to upgrade but on the other hand it makes the game more restrictive and you can end up with biased remorse like when you put a wide body on a datamasu Mangusta because you thought that was a good idea somehow it means that I often end up having multiple versions of my favorite cars which just seems wasteful you have to look at each of these sacrifices and ask yourself is this really worth it clearly polyphony seems to think so but I don't believe that it's as black and white as they make it out to be but of course realism doesn't explain all of the issues here in fact in some cases an injection of realism would really help putting GT Sophie to one side as it's just a gimmick for now the normal AI is terrible mostly and the unrealistic racing scenarios that the game puts them in really doesn't help and neither does drastically altering their Pace depending on their position relative to the player roulette tickets they're just like real life where you had the chance to win a whole engine or rare part that can't be attained anywhere else but you actually just end up with someone's pocket change instead I don't think you can make a better advertisement to discourage gambling if you tried as you go through the game you have these real-life GT world series drivers as your opponents and they'll often have things to say in the various events most of the time it's pretty standard and forgettable by the odd meme worthy line seriously this one has some real shorts or comfy and easy to wear energy the point is you can pretty much ignore them entirely and not much would change other than the final cut scene making even less sense the reason I bring them up though is because gt7 can't seem to keep their narrative consistent in one place they're these pro drivers the game wants you to look up to and learn from and in another their fellow aspiring races try to make a name for themselves in the world of GT they can't commit to either story so they just do both let me know if anyone else noticed this as well ah the menu books they railroad you through a mediocre time and then conclude way too early does that sound familiar to you you it really is a master class in how not to do something if you want to express how fascinating and Rich the world of cars is why don't you show us show don't tell it's one of the Cardinal rules when trying to express something through media but gt7 fails at this spectacularly I know what you're thinking I haven't complained about the menu books enough well I've actually found a new angle to look at it some of you might know that I'm playing through Gran Turismo 3 currently my beloved and one thing that I really appreciate about it and the other previous GT games is how fluid it feels if you want to you can just go from One race to the next to the next to the next continuously with no interruptions just that constant gameplay Loop whereas in gt7 because of the menu books that momentum is just brought to his screeching halt every time you go to the cafe in some of the early menu books you might spend more time navigating out of a race over to the cafe collecting your reward watching The Cinematic and being lectured and then starting the next menu book then you actually spend in the race itself how did they approve this it's so aggressively terrible and nobody questioned it if you ask me you can almost directly trace the quality of a Gran Turismo game against the richness and importance of the single player experience in said game the main reason for this is that I believe a good single player adds meaning to other features in the game since probably GT5 the single player aspect in these games has gradually gotten less important over time with more Focus shifted onto things like Photo mode customization showcasing and learning about cars and of course online racing with the exception of the online stuff each of these aspects can gain a stronger importance if the core single player experience is itself stronger most players will have a much bigger urge to check out Scapes or design a livery for a car that actually feels like it's theirs based on the experience they've had with it in the main GT mode if you're just getting cars thrown at you constantly there's no reason to develop any sort of attachment towards it especially when it will be made redundant after a few races even more so if it's a really expensive car that you've bought and then find out there's hardly anything to do with it why would you care at that point it might be more out of obligation since the game clearly doesn't intend for you to race them so you might as well do something with it the issue is that rather than these features feeling like an addition to the single player they instead dilute it because it appears that polyphony believes they can get away with putting in far less effort because there are so many other things to do this idea is further reinforced with how the game was marketed find your line with the tagline essentially meaning find the aspect of gt7 that really appeals to you or even find something you already love within gt7 for example if you already love photography here escapes that sort of thing the true irony though is that for people who loved the Classic GT games with their lengthy and rewarding campaigns well you're out of luck guys we can't find our line if you don't actually put it in the game it's clear that gt7 is not a game that'll appeal to the hardcore GT fans much in the same way GT Sport didn't but how this gets messy is that's not how they advertised it in the announcement trailer the first time we ever saw the game they threw it up in bold letters Gran Turismo is back let's be clear Gran Turismo hadn't gone anywhere in June of 2020 GT Sport was still receiving semi-regular updates so the message was clear Gran Turismo as we knew it was back that alone is pretty funny or pretty depressing depending on your perspective considering what they did with gt7 but it gets worse much much worse Gran Turismo 7 will represent the Pinnacle of the GT Journey we think of it as our most complete GT to date our aim was to create a driving simulator that all players can enjoy whether you're a hardcore Gran Turismo fan or brand new to the series I think Gran Turismo 7 will be enjoyable for everyone this is ultimately the Classic GT campaign mode but gt7 has more to offer um [Music] honestly watching these trailers again knowing what we know now it's quite surreal what if they're straight up lying to our face or trying to squirt around the more controversial items in the game like the roulette tickets and Associated engine swaps brand invitations Etc one of my favorite things is in the state of play where they show the custom race feature being used to make a multi-class race with lmp1 and GTE cars if you've actually tried this in gt7 you'll know why this is so funny because if you choose to be in the faster cars so lmp1 in this case your opponents are incredibly bad at overtaking the slower cars sometimes getting stuck behind them for minutes and if you choose to be in the slower class you'll encounter the speed manipulation issue which I covered before meaning that your supposed opponents will crawl around the track and you might even catch up with the faster cars but more likely you'll just end up between the two in the middle of nowhere the fact that they hardly mention the main single player experience outside of the menu books should have been a bad sign now I'm not coming in here as Mr hindsight saying that we should have known what would happen from just these trailers because I really didn't expect them to mess it up so badly either the main point is that they had all the pieces to make gt7 incredible they just needed to put it all together even the menu books despite how much I despised them could have fit into this all they needed to do was take the Classic GT campaign mode and add the menu books to it not restructure the campaign entirely so the menu books are the only way to progress what I imagine is the campaign from say GT4 with all the same events and locking in the same way but with the menu books on the side as an optional activity if you were a new player to the series you might be enticed to follow the menu books as they would give guidance and help you through the game but if you are more experienced you could just ignore it and do what you want earning cars in a more natural way even still you might want to check in and claim some rewards for cars you've earned but the distinction is that you would have gotten those cars anyway rather than being forced to do it then and there to progress also a better system would be to give you the option of multiple menus to choose from at a given stage or doing multiple menus at the same time to keep things from getting stale the thing is that from these trailers the obvious conclusion would be what I just described a blend of new and old appealing to both sides of the spectrum and anywhere in between it really is that simple so why they butcher the formula to make the menu books The One and Only priority is just an unnecessary limitation but the truly bizarre thing is that in interviews with kazanori he talks about gt7 as if this is what they did a true mixture of new and old that appeals to everyone if you play gt7 and of course the older titles that it supposedly pulls from you know this is far from the truth so how can he be so barefaced in saying this is it deception or simply delusion well to me I feel that when he says this he personally believes he is telling the truth but he designed those older games how could he not understand the core appeal well my theory has been that he never actually went back and played them since he finished their development and has just been making assumptions and for a while that did just stay as a theory since there was no way of confirming it I until recently when I came across an interview around the launch of gt7 that shed some light on the situation when asked about the older games inspiring gt7 he States our developers know all the Gran Turismo games and have played them I prefer to look to the Future myself so whilst it doesn't outright confirm it that doesn't play that he didn't go back to play and fully understand them himself I understand that Kaz is very forward thinking but if you're making a game that pulls inspiration from its predecessors do you not think it would be wise to go back and check this for yourself some might say it would be negligent not to if this really is true it would explain a lot of why gt7 ended up the way that it did I would liken it to Chinese Whispers where other people on the dev team may tell Kaz about certain aspects of those older games and he of course will have memories of them as well but since he doesn't fully understand them anymore he can't translate it correctly to gt7 this is why it seems to hit all of the same beats like winning races to earn cars doing championships license tests missions having all of that but doesn't put it all together in a way that is cohesive or seems to understand the core ideas and that then becomes very obvious when you actually play it this of course is not specific to just me whilst I'd love to sit here and take credit for everything in these critiques as my own original ideas I'm clearly not the only person who feels this way anyone who played and loved those older games will understand I did play Gran Turismo 7 and honestly as someone who's a long-term fan of Gran Turismo 7 playing through the single player experience I honestly felt insulted I don't mean this isn't like the game said something about me or disrespecting my family or anything like that I mean insulted as a fan of the series as someone who sat through delay after delay after delay of every single Gran Turismo game like ever being pushed back years that I was playing a game that was so blissfully unaware and just didn't care I actually got to the point where I couldn't tell if Gran Turismo 7 was making fun of Gran Turismo like it was a parody of itself which is a really weird thing to have happened with a video game to say the least especially one that clearly tries as hard as Gran Turismo clearly does half of Gran turismo's appeal really is just navigating well-crafted menus listening to relaxing music while steadily progressing from used Dodge Neons to Pikes Peak monsters except that doesn't exist in Gran Turismo 7 because GT life has been replaced by these Infamous Cafe books that's effectively just a battle pass drip feeding you minuscule rewards and wheel spins that manage to be even more insulting than what came before there's no sugar coating this the menu book concept is complete utter failure in game design polyphony have managed to make a 22 hour tutorial almost completely stripping away player agency and expression it's a tutorial that concludes not by releasing the player into the game's sandbox nearly uninhibited and free to explore but by Rolling the credits and dumping them back into the game feeling as if the decisions were made for them before they even purchased it you can't just half-ass it and then pretend it's anything like those older games people will notice and they won't be happy the best analogy I can give for gt7 is that it tries to wear a Pastiche of the older GT games like a Halloween costume with no deeper understanding of what they actually stood for and offered I mean if their idea of calling back to the history of GT is slapping Sunday Cup on a completely unrelated event or choosing between three starter cars when you're forced to get the other two within the next five minutes then you've got to wonder why they even bothered it's almost like they're making fun of you for liking those previous games given what happened to Grand Valley as well we're at a point where there are people actively wishing we don't get back any more original Gran Turismo tracks for fear of what polyphony is gonna do to them sure that is an exaggerated way of thinking but I kind of get it polyphony doesn't understand why people like Gran Turismo so by pretending it gets us by doing things like this and failing miserably it just becomes insulting on my second playthrough to record footage when it asked me if I'd ever traveled the world of Gran Turismo before I said no partly because I was interested what it had to say and partly because if I chose yes I was concerned that polyphony would send someone to my house to personally spit in my face throughout the series you will have noticed that I've mainly used Gran Turismo 3 as a point of comparison against gt7 as I've said GT3 was my first Gran Turismo and my personal favorite but there is one specific reason why I use it to compare you see if I use GT4 to frame all of my issues with gt7 some could say that's not fair GT4 has way more cars and tracks of course it's going to be a much more complete Game you can't make that argument when looking at gt7 against GT3 there is absolutely no excuse for why gt7 should not be as big of a game and as much of an experience as GT3 if not even more so given the inclusion of so many new features since then this is one of the many reasons why I absolutely adore GT3 it uses its limited content to the fullest not a single car or track goes to waste because it's simply can't given how little content there is at least by modern standards does it go over the top on occasion sure I mean 10 laps of the test course in a Toyota Yaris was not a good idea by any means but this is still far preferable than gt7 which goes in the complete opposite direction it's no surprise that challenge runs of these older games have blown up in recent years because they have so much depth and there are so many different ways to play them in gt7 challenges like these simply won't work aside from the try not to fall asleep and or die of boredom challenge to be fair though that one is quite hard the sheer amount of content that goes unused or hardly used in the main single player is staggering I personally feel really bad for those developers who pour their heart and soul for the better part of a year crafting an Immaculate 3D model and then the car gets functionally knee-capped by ending up insanely overpriced and having next to no utility to 99.9 of players would have literally no reason to want it or try to get it it's just embarrassing maybe having SUVs in gt7 isn't such a bad idea after all because much like SUVs gt7 is an Ode to wasteful excess having something for the sake of just having it with no deeper meaning or actual functionality inefficiency at its most egregious standing in direct contrast to the games that came before it it's safe to say that things have changed a fair amount since I first started working on the series around the beginning of December 2022 not changed within gt7 no that stayed pretty much the same but a couple of minor things that have been altered since I mentioned them what I really mean is the discussion around racing games in general has shifted drastically in that time 2023 it seems as the year of we expect more from racing games and I'm really glad to see this I myself am of course part of this as well but there have been plenty of other creators giving their own thoughts on this topic and I hope more continue to do so that video by racevik I showed before is an excellent Deep dive into the state of the genre from True arcade races all the way to hardcore Sims and everything in between it should really serve as a wake-up call how behind the times these games really are not only to the developers and Publishers but the players as well and that's a key point we as players should expect more from these games no it's not enough that a racing game looks beautiful and drives well do you know why because it's a game not a tech demo it has to work functionally as well as technically it would be like playing an adventure game and saying it's so fun to run around and kill enemies and look at the scenery but not paying any attention to the other key elements like the story the items the side activities the characters all of these factors which go into making the game a game of course that's not a perfect comparison as the driving in a driving game does have a larger importance relative to comparisons in other genres but you can see my points unfortunately those who are paid to review these games often don't this should go without saying but don't take mainstream game journalists too seriously it is a meme at this point but I find it's even more true with racing game reviews how can it be that these highly anticipated games come out whether it's gt7 or Forza Horizon 5 or whatever they have these glowing reviews as they're seen as near perfect masterpieces within a month or two down the line nobody is really talking about them the only people who still are are those dedicated enough to stick with it documenting the numerous issues how the game is flawed lacking not enough of an evolution from the previous games and in some ways worse how does this keep happening to me it seems as though if a game is anticipated to be amazing it will be reviewed as such regardless of the actual quality again nothing new in games journalism but what can we as players really do don't pre-order games for one gt7 is the only game I pre-ordered since Gran Turismo 5 and I still regret it try to avoid the hype this should be a cautionary tale by now but given how many times it's happened when looking at video games as a whole I don't think that's going to change anytime soon still at least try and wait for a game to actually deliver on what it promises because the discrepancy can be quite big and finally don't listen to games journalists not only because they don't often understand what makes a racing game truly good but because they only get a short amount of time to play a game before reviewing it and game designers know this this would explain why gt7 seemed a lot bigger than it actually was since nobody was expecting it to just end almost as soon as you get into the racing cars as someone who's been through what most long-term fans would consider to be the decline of Gran Turismo since GT5 I've pretty much seen everything to summarize briefly GT5 was massively overhyped due to the numerous delays and wild promises and had no chance of living up to its expectations even still there were some odding confusing design choices like the level system the GT mode being noticeably smaller and of course PS2 era car models to be fair the issues for developers working with the PS3 have been well documented so some of this is understandable and I know that GT5 was the first GT game for many people and is still fondly remembered despite everything it was still Gran Turismo and understood what that stands for as well as introducing a few new interesting ideas and full online play GT6 were just more of the same it wasn't that ambitious and almost every issue you could find with GT5 was carried over to GT6 as well as the main GT mode being shrunk even more even still it did have that magic with a real sandbox Vibe sort of like GT2 given the ridiculous selection of cars and ease of obtaining them again it did have a few good ideas in there and I believe as time goes on people will appreciate GT6 even more for being a type of game that basically cannot exist today due to the sheer amount of content it's what many people consider to be the last true Gran Turismo game that followed the established formula GT Sport came along in 2017 and then took the formula and threw it out of the window it was always very clear what GT Sport was not really a sequel to the previous six titles but its own thing entirely they could have called it gt7 internally it was even known as gt7 SP but doing that would have been foolish and misleading to longtime fans so they were right not to sport had a much larger focus on online racing and with that came a bigger emphasis on more realistic circuits and contemporary racing cars the Classic GT mode wasn't even included in a technical sense though it was a complete Revolution over GT6 and as time went on polyphony would continuously update the game adding much requested cars and tracks and even on a March to the Classic GT modes of the past you can hear from just those descriptions what that era was like it never felt as though Gran Turismo was living up to its true potential and couldn't really commit fully to a clear Direction but at the same time still making games that felt connected to the Past except for sport which was something completely different that divided the fan base but was at least new and interesting and was clear in what he was trying to achieve gt7 seemed to offer a unified vision of what Gran Turismo should be on paper it seemed perfect there was no way they could mess it up because they had so much in their favor they already designed a brilliant Baseline to work from with sports they had all of the Classic GT games to draw inspiration from and build upon they had a fan base which was craving a game of this type after being starred for so long and what you might forget is that they had no competition and still don't until the Forza Motorsport reboot comes out later this year there is no reason why gt7 couldn't have been at least equally good as some of those older GTS if all they did was copy GT3 or GT4 for the current day that would have already been better than what they actually made not even mentioning the ways in which they could easily improve upon those games obviously just copying them to make gt7 wasn't going to have happen but my point is that even putting in less effort they could have produced a better product at this point it's no exaggeration to say understanding how and why gt7 turned out as it did has become an obsession for me that's kind of why I made this series in the first place so I could get these thoughts out of my head and move on with my life we've now covered the how in excruciating detail but what about the why why did gt7 end up as it did and what was the motivation through making this series I've heard every possible explanation from people whether that be in my comments or just anywhere else gt7 was clearly rushed and that's why the single player is so lacking well it's been well over a year and hardly anything I've talked about has been improved outside of the first few weeks after launch so no that's clearly not true gt7 wasn't given enough development budget as a first party PlayStation exclusive I find that very hard to believe and just looking at the game makes that even harder not only that but when you consider the extremely lavish and highly produced GT Championship Live Events events in which not even the competitors are getting paid that argument completely falls apart if there is any truth to it whatsoever there would be more a case of polyphony not using that budget correctly and not prioritizing what's most important they did make the music rally after all which I've used as a punchline a couple of times because that's all it really is I can imagine something like it in say GT4 where it be viewed as a novelty and a small distraction courtesy of quirky old polyphony and initially that's how most people saw it but when you look at it again in the context of how undebaked gt7 is in so many areas it really makes you wonder why they spent any time and money on it whatsoever I've also seen people try to justify where they chose to design the game as they did it's supposed to appeal to younger players who want insta gratification and access to the fast cars very easily no it's aimed towards more mature players who work a regular nine to five and don't have time to slog through long championships and endurance races this is again despite the older games like GT3 having a complete arcade mode which granted instant access to a lot of the faster cars and even had its own form of progression honestly all of these seem like excuses to me and I don't really believe anyone actually has a clue why it truly is the way that it is I don't fully to be honest but through my research I feel like I've gotten as good a grasp on it as anybody at least anybody who doesn't work at polyphony to understand gt7 we have to understand the man behind it kazanori yamochi the tree kicker himself that is far easier said than done especially for someone who lives on the other side of the planet and who's never spoken to him and at this rate probably never will so whilst we can't understand him truly on a personal level we can understand him on a professional level from his various interviews and appearances of course Kaz isn't necessarily liable for every design decision but he does oversee the whole operation and gives the ultimate approval so he has to take this responsibility one of the best places to gain a deeper Insight on him is the 84 minute documentary about him from 2014. although it is almost a decade old at this point it still represents a lot of the same core ideas which we can observe in much more recent interviews and is well worth a watch his strive for realism above all else I mean it's in the title pushing the virtual divide is clear to see and very obvious if you've seen his games and know the story of Gran Turismo there's one pie that I found quite interesting where he talked about how as a child his parents would put up sheets of paper on the walls for him to draw all over and once he filled up the pages they'll be taken down a new clean paper put up to replace them I'm not a psychologist so take what I'm about to say with that in mind but it is quite fascinating how these small things when we're younger can have a massive impact on how we are as people when we get older and our general mindset understanding this then it's not so surprising that Kaz ended up as the creative individual that he is and that seems to be the message that the documentary is putting forward but a very interesting parallel that I can ignore was how this idea relates to Gran Turismo pulling it down and then starting from fresh sound familiar also how Kaz describes his parents taking down the pictures and replacing them there's no attachment to him merely that's done now on to the next it's this idea of not putting your previous work on pedestal and the description pretty much says this as well and again it's another mirror to Gran Turismo since mentality is very powerful but it has to be used correctly it's not healthy to Simply Revel in Nostalgia trying to escape the present and the future but at the same time if you don't learn from the past you're doomed to make the same mistakes so you have to keep it in mind there's another part further in in which Kaz Muses about car designers pulling from the past for their new designs I'm gonna play this part in full and as I do please think about this in the context of Gran Turismo where the cars being the games and the car makers being Kaz and polyphony foreign foreign you might be able to see where I'm going with this cash talks about this so naturally in the context of Designing cars and I believe he's right in his assertions pulling from the past and building on that but how then did he manage to completely contradict this philosophy with gt7 with gt7 they're not adding something original to the Classic GT formula they're taking away from it and as I've shown he didn't even seem bothered to go back to these jewels of the past instead leaving that for other people to do whilst he continues to rigidly look forward if you're always looking forward into the future it can be very easy to lose sight of what's directly in front of you with Gran Turismo Cass seems so preoccupied with looking forward to what Gran Turismo can be in the future and what new possibilities can be discovered that he's lost sight of why most people even played the games in the first place despite this Kaz has always tried to emphasize the importance of the realism and the technology behind it but this was never the main draw for a lot of us particularly those of us who started with GT1 2 or 3. it for sure plays a a role and always has but this documentary really highlights his obsession for these things if we refer back to the same interview where he talked about SUVs and gt7 he's also asked about the possibility of Taurus trophy 2. for those who don't know Taurus trophy was essentially Gran Turismo on bikes and was actually built on the game engine of GT4 the game was very well received but sadly is yet to achieve a sequel his response was essentially we very easily could but we don't have a control method for bikes that conveys the same feeling as a steering wheel for a car so until something like that can be developed we won't you know there's a very famous quote by Reggie fesame former CEO of Nintendo of America you might have heard it before if it's not fun why bother with Kaz his Mantra seems to be if it's not realistic why bother that's effectively what he's saying here if that's what he believes then fine but what does that say about games with motorbikes as a whole should nobody even bother since true immersion is so far away was the original Tourist Trophy a mistake no of course not games are fun if people want to race bikes in a video game then those games deserve to exist complete realism be damned it's Times Like These that I'm truly glad not every game designer is like Kaz what were the state of video games even look like at this point listen if they actually want to make Tourist Trophy too and this is the only obstacle they should just make it loader people are still holding out hope for it and I'm sure after 17 years since the first game they should have plenty of interesting ideas for it or they might not but that didn't stop him from making gt7 from watching the documentary one thing that's clear is how Gran Turismo is a reflection of kaza's own interests from sport mode which mirrors real-life professional Motorsport as Kaz has taken part in to escape switch an embodiment of his passion for photography and appreciating cars as art the only conclusion I have is that Kaz doesn't have any interest in those long structured campaigns of the old games or at least he doesn't anymore as much as games these days are often designed by committee it really seems like gt7 has the opposite problem it's designed purely to his own vision of what it should be and there's no one who can step in and say okay but what about these key features that people loved those older games for how can we just leave those out or more often the case with gt7 warp them into something else entirely all of this has led me to believe that the only reason the older GT games were structured the way they were was because they had to be in a lot of interviews you often hear Kaz saying things like oh we were limited by this or that in the older games because we didn't have the technology to make what we really wanted but now we do when you don't have online play serious customization a fully fledged Livery editor or photo modes there are no distractions from the main GT mode it has to be fully fleshed out with an engaging structure and progression and sometimes hundreds of hours of content because that's all there was dollars they were made out of necessity I hope that this isn't entirely the case because that would be quite sad but given the diminishing importance of the main single player mode from GT5 onwards the trend is clear what's also clear is how Kaz views Gran Turismo is not just a game but a platform for automotive culture he really wants it to have some sort of higher importance Beyond just a game where you have fun driving cars to a lot of people driving as a chore akin to brushing your teeth but with a caveat that if you make a mistake you could die racing games clearly won't appeal much to these types of people but Kaz seems to have a real motivation to change the discussion around cars and Gran Turismo is his tool to do that being honest it is quite a noble goal so on paper that's not a bad thing but how we can go about doing that maybe if we go back to that interview where he talks about SUVs which I'm sorry to bring up again but it just highlights so many of my points he seems to have this real urge to represent the changing landscape of car Culture by talking about adding cars like these but it doesn't seem to consider if people would actually want them would use them or how they fit into a game like Gran Turismo at all if gt7 can have racing cars specifically designed for racing on circuits that have basically no purpose within the game at present then what hope do SUVs have it's just more pointless bloat that nobody is asking for when you could spend the time adding cars and features that people actually want but no we can't have cars like the Toyota Chaser because that's not connected to the Future Kaz in drifting circles cars like the Chaser and Mark II are basically God and they'll probably continue to be for a while to come you can't say they're not connected they're not with the times when they categorically still are the fact that they've lasted so long in car culture should tell you all you need to know and the fact that people are still asking for cars like these should be an even bigger hint that they are still culturally relevant the fact that pretty much all of the 90s JDM Legends have ballooned massively in value over the past few years something that you've directly recognized and reflected in gt7 means there's no way that you're not aware of this ultimately this isn't even really about The Cars Since if they add one or two SU these or don't add the Chaser it's not a big deal the more his philosophy that really pisses me off it's the closest thing that I've seen to him giving a middle finger directly towards the fan base you can't just decide what's relevant to everyone within the automotive space based on your preconceived bias that everything new is better and everything old is outdated and serves new functional purpose ask people whether they want to see a Toyota Chaser or a BMW X8 in their racing game because you're not going to get the answer you want to hear not as if that actually matters to you to try and shape your game around these ideals is incredibly short-sighted people know what they want from a game like Gran Turismo and in most cases it isn't SUVs but not only can we see shifting priorities within the game but also Gran Turismo as a whole Gran Turismo is a brand no longer just a game and over the coming years I believe the brand of Gran Turismo will grow even further with the games just being one side of it Gran Turismo has its fingers in so many pies they're this honestly quite hard to keep track of they of course have the movie coming out later this year the GT championships technical Partnerships with Michelin and Brembo Partnerships with Toyota Mazda Genesis BBS imsa super formula Sony AI with GT Sophie and a bunch more car makers through vision GT of course a lot of those make sense for a racing game but a few are questionable I have no issues with them making a movie it may even be good but it's more what that represents that has to be concerned Kaza said that a big desire to have a Gran Turismo movie is to make more people aware of Gran Turismo as a franchise fair enough but if this becomes a normal part of Gran Turismo I have concerns that it's going to further reduce the importance of the games in the same way that adding more features to the games have reduced the importance of the main single player aspect but that remains to be seen anyway Vision GT is probably the one that I have the most feelings about I'm planning to make a deep dive into Vision GT as a whole given 2023 is its 10-year anniversary but for now I'll just say this Vision GT is not for us players it's for Gran Turismo to build and strengthen its relations in the automotive industry and have even more influence which Kaz clearly desires the concert it produces for the game and the impact it has on us as players is almost irrelevant most Vision GT cars serve no purpose in gt7 and neither did they in GT Sport the brief is to design the Ultimate sports car for Gran Turismo so what the hell is the point of a 1200 horsepower rocket ship that's way faster than any other Road car and also has an off-road version in what universe will this ever fit into gt7 even with something like GT Sophie which undoubtedly has the power to make the game better I still have that feeling of cynical intentions in the back of my mind the idea that they're again not making this specifically for the players or to make the game better but rather just to flex their Tech with Sony and again build relations in that industry I'm yet to be convinced that they have a way to make it work in the game long term but I'd love to be proven wrong you know a common I sometimes get is people saying that polyphony and Kaz should watch my videos or even hire me this is probably the best compliment I could ever receive so thank you very much for all of these creating or at least helping to create a racing game is a dream of mine but it's unlikely that'll ever happen but somehow what I find even more unlikely is the developers watching and responding to my videos we're talking about a game and a creator that won't even fix the simplest of issues that could be solved in minutes even when people are contacting him directly to tell him sure you can't listen to every Rando off the street but in this case it's just so obvious people shouldn't even need to tell him polyphony has been notorious for the lack of communication and not responding to feedback and that's never been great but with gt7 it feels like we've reached a Tipping Point if the interview from earlier didn't make this clear already they don't care what you think Kaz doesn't care polyphony doesn't care Sony certainly doesn't care as long as it gets sales and frankly unless there's Mass outrage in the vein of last year just after launch they have no reason to care they will only take action if people are burning down their houses metaphorically speaking don't actually do that ultimately if the game were incredible and widely loved by all then you could argue that communication doesn't really matter and they'll be right to not listen to anyone else leave them alone because they know what to do but gt7 is not that game it is fundamentally flawed in ways that stand in direct opposition to the games that came beforehand and makes you question if polyphony even understands why people like these types of games but they just continue onwards doing the same thing blissfully unaware of anything anyone has to say with the game not being majorly changed since April 2022 it's sheer arrogance and when you then consider the multitude of minor issues that are obvious to anyone and can be fixed near instantly if they actually cared it becomes clear that it makes them look not only incredibly stubborn but extremely inept it's my belief that the people working within polyphony are actively discouraged to look at feedback and instead told to just focus on their work this seems like the obvious conclusion given that action or should I say lack of action in the face of what I and many other people including other content creators have said and I kind of hope this is the case because if it's not there's only one other possible explanation for this and no matter how much I dislike the decisions made for gt7 I simply don't want that to be true many people absolutely love Gran Turismo 7 and I appreciate that people play these games for many different reasons and I'm not trying to take that away from anyone it's simply that what I personally play these games for and consider to be the most important aspect of them is seriously lacking in gt7 so much so that when I think about what gt7 does well it almost makes me angrier when I consider what it could have been and what a colossal missed opportunity it was a comment I also sometimes get is along the lines of I see where you're coming from and I agree with what you're saying but I still love gt7 that's fair enough but I really do like these comments because it tells me that even within people who adore the game and may have their own biases coming into my videos they can still appreciate what I'm saying it's still getting to them on some level and to me that's probably the biggest effect I can have with this series what I and so many others really value about Gran Turismo is clearly not being valued anywhere near as much by polyphony and nowhere is this more obvious than with the updates they're bringing to the game as of writing the most recent update was in March update 1.5 three one let's dissect it and you'll begin to understand what I mean not considering minor tweaks like to the handling model and performance point system there are three major things I want to talk about the first are the cars five of them in fact and a great selection I have no issues with the cards introduced the Porsche 904 GTS being my personal favorite that really scratches that itch for me but of course this will be different for everybody the second are the new tracks the words new and tracks being in air quotes two versions of the Nurburgring incorporating a cut through on the GP course to make a shorter variance this version was in GT5 and GT6 and despite the Nurburgring being carried over in its entirety to GT Sport this layout was left on The Chopping Block five and a half years after the release of GT Sport now they finally bring it back to the series why the delay who the hell knows and at this point who knows why polyphony does anything anymore it was the same thing with the rotating camera which was only present in the closed beta for GT Sport in early 2017 and then didn't come back until well over five years later in an update for gt7 they just take stuff out with no explanation and then add it back in with no explanation maybe they have their reasons but will never know because they don't care enough to actually tell us but the thing that really speaks the most to their mindset and lack of action when it comes to some very obvious complaints is the third and final thing the Races they added in this update four of them four races that was it in this update they added more cars than they did races even without the context that gt7 is still severely lacking in races and events it should be obvious why it doesn't make any sense to do this and not only that but none of these races and new events just more races for event types we already have at this point I feel like I've already shown just how needed more races and events are in gt7 that serve a wider range of cars and actually give them purpose the last time a completely new event was added to gt7 it was update 1.25 back in October seriously it's that bad and aside from the races that the returning Nurburgring layouts they continue to overuse certain variants whilst ignoring other ones that still barely have any races or in some cases don't even have any races at all take a look at Tokyo Expressway before the update the East clockwise layout already has three races whereas East anti-clockwise had no races so what did they do add a fourth form race to East clockwise it's a similar case with the Porsche cut race at Kyoto which again reuses the layout with plenty of races already whilst a few others still have none one of the cars added was the 2019 Audi RS5 DTM which is the first new car to be added to group 2 since the game released considering that what do you think would be an obvious event to add that has been missing since day one as if it's like they're trying to do a bad job on purpose also the extra menu featuring The GT500 group 2 cars doesn't even talk about the actual cars but instead racing cars in general which is really odd do they have some sort of agenda against the these cars and so won't make events for them well actually it's been proven that's not the case you see thanks to nenkai over on Twitter we're able to see a few events which are hidden within the code of gt7 these events are for the Red Bull X 2019 a classic car event an all-japan GT car event and even a full championship for historic racing cars whether these were cut from the game or they're waiting to be added is still unknown but they were discovered back in November and they're still not in the game and as nenkai shows they seem to be almost completely finished so there's no reason why they couldn't be added tomorrow it wouldn't solve the issue but would certainly be a good start in giving many more cars actual purpose through races to use them in it's no joke to say that I believe this is one of the biggest if not the single biggest issue with gt7 at present and polyphony are seemingly completely unaware of this there is no possible way that they could have released gt7 in the state it was ending after a single championship for group 3 cars and not having any events for anything beyond that and not known that people would be pissed off of course I was when I finished the game but I always thought okay whatever they're gonna slowly drip feed the rest of the game to us over time a scummy tactic but eventually it'll be more complete but outside a couple of races for group one cars they just haven't at this point what the are they waiting for World War III a nuclear apocalypse the inevitable heat death of the Universe I don't get it and furthermore the Races they do add are just the same where you start miles behind the opponents and they crawl around the track as rolling roadblocks until you pass them and finish the race no Nuance no Intrigue no tension no excitement but I've got a pro GT driver telling me how luxurious the Toyota Alphard is wonderful in isolation this doesn't matter but given everything else it just shows how far their priorities are skewed with gt7 and yet you still have people praising them it's like some people's standards in regards to gameplay are so low that they almost don't expect anything when it comes to actual races in the racing game sure the cars are good put a great selection of very well made and all as a free update but if the ecosystem that they exist in barely exists itself then there's hardly any point for them to exist either even I felt myself getting a little excited when I saw the silhouette teaser but quickly snapped out of it when I remembered the state of the game they're being added to I've driven that 904 maybe twice and despite it handling great and being fun to drive I have no desire to go back and race it because the game gives me no reason to it says a lot that from my 500 Plus hours of playing this game 300 of that was spent not even driving making more events is most likely the easiest cheapest and least time consuming part of making gt7 far easier than modeling the cars and tracks or building an authentic physics simulation so why they give us even less than the bare minimum when it comes to them is unacceptable and there is no excuse that can be made to justify this oh and also don't be that guy who says just use custom race because that isn't an excuse either not just because custom race is flawed and broken in so many ways to the point that trying to make a decent race is like trying to pull out your own teeth with a pair of scissors but also because it's not an excuse for polyphony to not give us a full game by just giving us the tours and telling us to design it ourselves despite my best efforts to do just that this is why I may seem dismissive to things like VR Ray tracing super detailed physics simulations and other technical stuff which is undoubtedly good because ultimately if the game isn't good I'm not going to play it just for those things it still needs to stand on its own as a compelling game to play through it's sad to believe that there are people who think that by adding VR all of my complaints are somehow negated when in reality it only strengthens my point of view and that's not even mentioning other aspects of this Triple A first party PlayStation exclusive where they clearly didn't try at all and just kind of hope nobody would realize I mean remember when they try to have a proper damage model in Gran Turismo 5. after that they pretty much gave up entirely and now slamming into a wall at 250 miles an hour results in a cracked headlight Now That's What I Call realism because of external pressure from car makers a full damage model with proper deformation is realistically never gonna happen again in Gran Turismo and Kaz knows this which is why he seems so uncomfortable whenever the topic gets brought up and you get the feeling he wishes people would stop asking him about it even still that's no excuse for why the mechanical damage is so simplified and again has barely been improved since GT5 people have mentioned that I of course only talk about the negatives of gt7 and hardly ever the positives the main reason for that is this is a critique not an impartial review so I only mentioned the positives when I can use it to frame the issues another reason is that if you want to see people talking about the good parts of gt7 you can basically go anywhere for that I would just be repeating what so many others have already talked about and that's not my style and contradicts why I decided to make videos in the first place not to mention the amount of Gran Turismo Bootleggers who seem so desperate to praise the game with every small inclusion regardless if it actually makes the game any better what's the most obvious issues go completely unnoticed I mean gt7 is still winning Awards look I know 2022 was not a good year for racer games so they're pretty much guaranteed to get these by virtue of just being a Gran Turismo game regardless of the quality they are truly meaningless despite the this I can't deny that what gk7 does well the immersion the simulation Etc it does incredibly well and at the same time what it does bad it does unbelievably bad the crazy part is though that what it gets right is typically the hardest part for developers I don't think there are any other developers that do or can make racing games with a level of detail and precision that polyphony does and beyond that gt7 does have some good ideas things like the mission events which although not perfect are designed primarily around having fun not just showing off its immersion and realism or forcing its sense of higher importance and how it needs to Define car culture in your face card design is appearing in the cafe to share their thoughts about certain cars is a great touch and how they just leave it for you to discover is even better the insights they give often do make me think about cars in a different way and more importantly they feel real because they are not like the menu books which sounds so corporate that it seems like they're reading from a sales brochure the small cutscenes for each Championship is a great idea too although it does feel like they didn't put as much effort in the final few but other than these few examples gt7 is proof that yes you can in fact polish a turd and even trick some people into thinking it's a diamond but when you look at it for what it really is it's still a piece of what you'll find is a common feeling from the community that they completely up the easy Parts I'm being 100 serious when I say that I could take a week to sit down and create a blueprint for a game using the same raw assets as gt7 and come up with something 10 times better I think that most people who love the older games that understood their appeal could do the same I'm talking about the overall structure individual races events leagues opponents prizes unique and meaningful challenges and a rewarding progression to tie it all together these are the aspects that I believe the fanbase understands far better than polyphony currently do I'd surprise people haven't tried to make their own version of a Gran Turismo game yet to show polyphony how it can be done if anyone is please get in touch because I'd love to be involved what's very clear is that they don't hold the older GT games to the same reference that the fans do where this gets ugly is despite them not really caring about these past games they very clearly try to cash in on that Nostalgia we saw the obvious iconography in the trailers we heard how Kaz released gt7 to those older games in the interviews and it's all just completely Hollow since they didn't deliver on this and more importantly they don't even seem to understand it themselves a great example in the game itself is with the roulettes GT sport had roulettes as well but this is clearly trying to call back to GT3 sure that had its moments but there was nothing like that feeling when you'd battle through a long tough championship and you come out the other side and end up with an incredible prize car that couldn't just be bought and in some cases you might not have known was even in the game you earned it it was yours gt7 takes that visual idea and then Waters it down and morphs it into something completely cynical frustrating by design that objectively makes the game less fun for the sake of drawing out the experience in the hopes you'll keep coming back it's pathetic and so many things in this game do something similar for other aspects of the older games they just don't understand and more significantly they don't want to also why is nobody who's had the chance to interview Kaz called him out on things like this sure I get that Outlets don't want to cause trouble and end up blacklisted but there are so many ways to approach the subject something as simple as so what was the idea behind the roulette tickets and putting unique rewards behind them like engine swaps and tuning parts rather than being able to buy them or win them from events I personally would love to hear how he could possibly try and justify things like this we were given a tease of the good times not only by the trailers but even the intro to the damn game showcasing races and events that simply don't exist in gd7 not unless you already own literally all of the cars and can then set up something similar as a custom race you'll sometimes even see races like these in the attract demo so these race presets clearly exist within the code but just aren't made into playable events Gran Turismo as a series means a lot to me there were times in my life where Gran Turismo was the only game I played since then I've broadened my horizons not only with other racing games but other genres as well last year I became really fascinated with game design what goes into making a game fun and compelling to play I've watched countless hours of videos on this topic sometimes about games I've never even played and just understanding some of the successes and mistakes of various games that can be seen based on what people expect of certain series and genres naturally I applied this to Gran Turismo and racing games as a whole to understand why those older GT games meant so much to me by doing that I really solidified what I want from a racing game like Gran Turismo and how that contrasts with almost everything gt7 does wrong if you play other types of games it'll be easier to understand my complaints with gt7 in some cases you might dislike something about it but not fully recognize this until someone actually points it out it is a balance though there's no point in making an excellently crafted racing game that has tons of unique and interesting challenges and things to do with a fun progression that looks like complete and handles like driving emotion Type S that is to say also complete a game like that would serve as much purpose as gt7 which does the exact opposites but through all of this I have mentioned the other sides of the game things like sport mode The Livery editor escapes Etc it might be easy to say that I don't care about them at all and just want one specific thing from the game but that couldn't be further from the truth throughout gt7 and GT Sport as well I have taken hundreds of pictures both in races and in Scapes and then spent time editing and filtering each of them to my liking I spent hundreds of hours designing intricate original liveries and honing my design skills I have dedicated months of my life to sport mode practicing near endlessly until I reached a point where I was at my Peak when I was racing and sometimes beating the best players in the world I have done everything there is to do in Gran Turismo and through all of that I still come back to the main single player because that is what made me love cars and love Gran Turismo Above All Else the core single player is the heart of Gran Turismo and everything else in the game should be built around it but if gt7 messed up so badly why do I still play it simple I pretty much don't anymore the only times I do is to record footage for these videos do time trials every couple of weeks and check out the six minutes worth of content that they had with every update but despite that gt7 still gives me what I want from a racing game better than anything else currently out there that's because it's the only racing game of its type being made if you want a game like gt7 that isn't gt7 you have to go back and play the older ones and that's what I'm currently doing and since they're so much better than gt7 I have very little reason to play it if there were current Alternatives then I would certainly have jumped by now but that Gold Rush of GT style games from the early to mid 2000s has never seemed further away how I wish we could go back to the days of the GT versus Forza tribalism sure there are a few people who still think like this but more than anything most people just want these games to be good they don't care whether it's GT or Forza just make it fun well the FM reboot live up to this I haven't been particularly inspired by what they've shown off so far just more of the usual peacocking look at our visuals look at our handling model look at our sound design that one's a bit more difficult given the presence of the now Infamous Forza Wing which they showed off so proudly they seem to lack self-awareness much in the same way as Gran Turismo we know almost nothing about the main single player Beyond one line so I don't want to judge it too early because that's what happened with gt7 and we know how that went so let's just wait and see what they can deliver anyway gt7 clearly doesn't work as a true successor to the previous games so it really has to be asked what do Chasm polyphony really want to make if we look at gt7 I think a game which functions as a virtual car museum is probably what they're aiming for so why not lean into that more the worst sin of GT E7 is that they weren't upfront about what it really is like they were with GT Sport if they had been clear that they wanted the game to be this tutorialized tour through Automotive History where you also sometimes race then fine we could then judge the game based purely on those merits personally I don't think it does a great job of teaching people about cars and getting them invested either and there are certainly more compelling ways to do that but at least there wouldn't be this sense of betrayal from gt7 you almost get this feeling that it's saying this is what Gran Turismo is and always was almost like they're gaslighting us because it obviously isn't the worst thing I can say about gt7 is that if you're looking for a more complete classic Gran Turismo experience even GT Sport is better yes seriously GT Sports the game that's trying to be something completely different and had its GT mode tacked on the side in an update which still lacks many of the Staples of Gran Turismo like tuning Parts prize cars and championships but what it does have is an incredible selection of events catering to almost every type of car in there including many of the Classic Events we've lost with gt7 with the release of gt7 I was so ready to just forget GT Sport even existed but I'm glad I went back to it because it's actually a lot better than I remembered albeit not a patch on the first four games and on top of that you don't have to deal with nonsense like engine swap roulettes and brand invitations if you want that McLaren F1 but saving up 20 million seems so Out Of Reach just go to sport it's only one million same deal with many other cars which are far more reasonably priced something that gt7 carries over from sport is the always online aspect of the game even for the single player which completely bit them in the ass last year the explanation has been to avoid people modifying save data that could impact sport mode ratings which may have some truth but I don't think is the full story it just comes across as unnecessary since many other online games don't need to do that and it seems very anti-consumer but more importantly means that when they inevitably turn the servers off gt7 and GT Sport as we know them are basically gone people have said to me that hopefully they can learn from GT 87 to make Gran Turismo 8 a true return to form but at this point how many more opportunities do they need if they couldn't get it right with seven when they had everything in their favor will they ever I hate to be so pessimistic but I just can't see it I don't have that Faith anymore something has to change drastically for that to be the case because if we have the same group of people working under the same conditions with the same ideology why would we expect the results to be different unless polyphony except gt7 as the embarrassing failure that it is which despite being one of the most anticipated games of 2022 most people have almost entirely forgotten even exists then I don't believe Gran Turismo can ever truly be good again if there's any positive it's that live service games are dying this is something which again has started happening during the course of me making these videos and I'm very happy to see live services are notorious for stretching out content over a longer period of time to try and keep players invested and gt7 suffers from a lot of decisions which seem to be based around that so maybe things can be better but that doesn't answer if polyphony still want to make a proper Gran Turismo game if by some miracle somebody with creative control at polyphony is watching this video then this part is directed straight at you I mean and I am just pretending at this point kind of like how polyphony pretends gt7 is a proper Gran Turismo game but it's worth a shot ask yourself what type of racing game do you actually want to make because to me it seems pretty obvious that you don't want to make a game like like the older Gran turismos and you know that's fine if that's really true but just be honest with yourself and your players so here's the ultimatum do you want to try and do those older games Justice really knuckle down and understand what the whole appeal to them was and translate that to the current day with all of the advantages and improvements that come with that or do you want to do something else entirely whether that be a complete reboot of the series taking it in a different direction or people are going to hate me for saying this but GT Sport 2 whatever it is that you actually want to make and have interesting ideas for and are committed to following through to completion that is what you need to do the worst thing you can possibly do is not commit fully to one idea because then no one will be entirely happy even worse is pulling a veil over everything and just pretending that it's something else and that all is completely fine and to be clear none of this is aimed towards the people on the ground floor at polyphony who don't have any say in these decisions they're just doing their jobs and doing them very well it's simply a failure of the management that gt7 can end up as broken and disjointed as it is despite having a clearly very talented team at their disposal I think by now I've made my points hopefully you can understand why it annoyed me so much how people would act like micro transactions and the economy were the only issues and if they fixed those they would all be perfect not even close like I said before I personally don't agree that these choices are down to Greed but I understand why people felt that way even if after all of this you still think that way what you have to accept is that beyond that there are so many other flaws and fundamental problems within gt7 that merely shouting about Just One symptom of those problems isn't going to achieve anything but then again not a lot will that has to come internally from polyphony the case study of gt7 is to me truly unique among video games yes there are plenty of bad and poorly designed games out there but very often this is due to a few specific reasons whether it be a rush development lack of budget no creative direction or being a soulless cash grab meter capitalize on a current Trend but gt7 doesn't fit any of these archetypes completely believe me I would love more than anything for my series to be made irrelevant by them fixing the problems and restructuring the game hopefully not straight away but over time but that isn't going to happen sure a few things will change and as time goes on this series will become outdated and incorrect in a few places but the issues are so deep rooted that it can't simply be fixed just like that polyphony you need to look at gt7 with a clear lens you have a campaign which finishes before it even really starts a tutorialized snoozefest that gives the illusion of free choice but actually takes all agency away from the player more concerned with lecturing than being a fun experience you trivialize car collecting to the extent to where it becomes truly meaningless and unbalanced to the point of insanity how so many cars have no reason to exist within gt7 but easily could if you just added more events then we ultimately have to ask if you even remember that you put those cars in the game your AI is used so poorly that whether the player is crashing it every other turn or putting in the best laps of their life the result will almost always be the same they can barely be considered a racist they struggle to navigate sections of track which they had no problem dealing with 20 plus years ago and are so unaware that they can't even begin to comprehend the idea of sportsmanship which You Preach to us as players you've heavily modified some of the most iconic corners from your classic circuits for the sake of a game mode which only a fraction of your players even care about your progression can be broken so easily that I can have millions of credits within minutes of starting the game and can then spend that money to not even have to play the game skipping most of the races entirely which is incredible given just how few races you even put into the game in the first place leaving out so many events which were not only below by fans but would give the cars which you so desperately want us to collect actual meaning in the game you had reward systems which insult your players and actively waste their time a completely unbalanced economy which means that grinding the same few races like it's a full-time job is the only way to earn the most expensive cars not even mentioning the less important things which you again pretended to put much more effort into than you actually did or obviously broken features that you've yet to fix since launch that is just a selection of the things I've covered in this series how can you look at any of those and feel any sense of Pride whatsoever this is a game which was billed as a true successor to some of the best racing games of all time this is the story of how an individual considered as the grandfather of an entire sub-genre a true Visionary who arguably changed the course of video game history show that he doesn't get why people loved his games and honestly makes me question how those games even ended up as good as they did despite all of this I'm still gonna keep my eye on Gran Turismo 7 but I don't expect much and I don't think that anybody else should either but for now all I have to say is that yes Gran Turismo is still my favorite game but this to me is not Gran Turismo and it never will be [Music] [Music] Autumn Leaves [Music] on my own suddenly I never felt so alone [Music] deaf and silence all around me now since you're not here anymore a second chance in my life is all I dream about another chance to believe [Music] face to face [Music] in my life [Music] face to face [Music] thank you finding my fate lying in your arms being too late and took so very long never wished to cause you any harm and wonder how it all went wrong yeah [Music] to your spirit sings never leaves Second Chance in my life [Music] [Music] face face [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Roflwaffle

Views: 70,262

Keywords: Gran Turismo, GT7, Polyphony, PD, single-player, offline, career, campaign, car collecting, menu books, cafe, dealership, races, AI, CPU, fail, custom race, rubberband, lap times, game design, progression, structure, events, championships, ending, missions, grinding, credits, prizes, roulettes, extra menus, engine swaps, brand invitations, MTX, microtransactions, broken, glitches, missing features, nostalgia, Kaz, Kazunori Yamauchi, updates, patch, damage, graphics, visuals, VR, PSVR2, reviews, in a nutshell

Id: SzhObXng6Lo

Length: 206min 17sec (12377 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023