How They Broke Car Collecting in 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 certain the best in the series The changeable weather and track conditions simulation is incredible in its 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 on 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 Outreach 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 master 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 and just letting you lose 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 it 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 so subtly 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 starter 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 odd 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 event in 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 message is 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 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 groupview 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 a 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 4 group 3 group 2 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 all 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 dry up the desirability of them they would do almost the exact opposite of 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 exceptions to this being the odd one or two cars like the Nike one or the Ben's 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 but 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 I 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 event 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 I haven't even mentioned 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 grunters by five 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 Motorsports 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 FF challenge the FR challenge four-wheel drive Challenge and Mr Challenge and through playing these the different cars you would 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 aerator was produced in and the country it came from you see how this is far more appealing than what gt7 does by just forcing these ideas down people's throats leaving newer players boarding reviews 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 it's an 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 release 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 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 check out 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 thank you so much if you've gotten to the end of this video it really does mean a lot to me uh you can probably tell that I've had you know these thoughts on my mind for quite a while now so it does feel good to uh get them all out in one place I've been working on this video for about the past month and uh it's been quite a challenge with the script writing you know getting all the footage and and of course editing um these are all things that were completely new to me and I just had to learn on the job really so that said I'd really appreciate if you uh drop a like if you enjoyed subscribe if you want to see more because I do have a lot more to say about this game so that there will be more videos coming soon and just any feedback please let me know in the comments whether that be about what I discussed in the video or just the I guess the production of the video itself versus anything really yeah let me know um and before I go I just want to say that I do really love this series uh gt7 despite its issues is still a very special game to me all Gran turismas are really I wouldn't have gone to this much effort to make this if I truly didn't care about the game and and everything I've said in this video is 100 genuine to uh to how I feel so yeah that's all for me and uh yeah hope you guys have a good one see ya

Channel: Roflwaffle

Views: 217,571

Keywords: GT7, Gran Turismo 7, Car collecting, collection, menu books, used cars, legend cars, credits, grind, racecars, classic cars, money, single player, microtransactions, Gran Turismo, dealership

Id: ZhskxtwBPpM

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023