Gran Turismo 7 launched two weeks ago to high praise from fans and critics alike, with fans praising the game for its franchise return-to-form and currently sitting at an impressive 87/100 review aggregate score on Metacritic.

There’s a lot to love about Polyphony Digital’s latest entry in the 25 year old franchise (something we’ll discuss further in our upcoming review), but the check engine light is already starting to blink with a few of the studios’ live service decisions - decisions that need to be urgently addressed, or run the risk of this triumphant start breaking down before it makes it around the first corner.

Earlier this week, patch 1.07 rolled out for players followed by an immediate maintenance period that originally planned for an hour downtime turned into a staggering 32 hours instead. In this time, players felt the full effect of studios’ decision to make Gran Turismo 7 an always-online title, with EVERYTHING in the game inaccessible outside a few race options in Arcade mode.

Keep in mind too that Gran Turismo 7 - while it does have multiplayer options with Sport Mode and Online Multiplayer - the rest of the content is single-player. Missions, License Center, GT Cafe, Scapes, dealerships, tuning shop, hell even your own garage is ALL inaccessible when played offline without an internet connection, and this outage has only proved how catastrophic this decision is.

Not only that, but players also learnt with the new 1.07 patch that several of the key events for making credits in the game have been significantly nerfed, making it extremely harder for players grinding for some of the games more illustrious legend cars that can cost in the tens of millions just to purchase.

This looks even worse on Polyphony and Sony after enabling microtransaction purchases for several currency amounts after the review embargo, in addition to not being able to sell the cars you collect in game and the new ‘Roulette Ticket’ system seemingly skewed towards players earning the very low credit options.

To add insult to injury, both the McLaren F1 and Porsche 917K, which cost 18 million credits each, have appeared in the shop rotation this week of all weeks. To purchase them, you’d either have to grind for 21 hours or play normally for 93 hours EACH, or purchase 18 of the 2m credit packs (which in New Zealand cost $31.95).

Absolute insanity…

For comparison, GT Sport added microtransactions nearly a year after launch, however they were for purchasing the cars themselves and cost very little as to what it would cost to buy them with credit packs in GT7. Sport also had the Daily Workout system where you’d earn a random car from driving 26.2 miles each day, whereas in 7 you now earn a Roulette ticket instead (which strangely fluctuates on what type of rarity it is) with the CHANCE to win a car, but most likely earning somewhere between the range of 2-10k credits.

While you will earn roughly 15% of Gran Turismo 7’s car list for free during the GT Cafe campaign, alongside a healthy amount of credits along your journey, post-campaign completion is absolutely dire and offers no way for players who are committed to playing and filling out their garage to earn credits. Most events offer pitiful amounts starting at 5k-30k, with some of the more time consuming offering up to 50-70k, which quite frankly, is not good enough.

Bare in mind that unlike GT Sport, currency has a lot more value to it in GT7 than just buying cars, its the tool for upgrading, customizing and maintaining them too - which from my experience, most of my credits have gone into the actual tuning upgrades than the cars themselves. When you have a car list of 420+ cars (which will get expanded greatly over time with free updates), each with their own expensive tuning upgrade options and high costs from dealerships, it all adds up and players will find it near impossible to feasibly play enough to earn the cars they want.

Yamauchi-san responded to the fan outrage over the downtime and currency adjustments, saying they “discovered an issue where the game would not start properly …that was not seen during tests on the development hardware or the QA sessions prior to the release” as reasoning for the day and a half long outage.

He also stated that he would like to avoid a situation where players are “replaying certain events over and over again” and would like players to enjoy the game “even without microtransactions”, with mentions that future content, race events and features will ‘constructively resolve this’.

While we have no idea when or what will be introduced in first Gran Turismo 7’s post-launch content update, the community have made it very clear that a lot of games current live-service woes need to be addressed and as soon as possible.

Things such as enabling crucial single-player features to still be accessible offline, currency earn rates, roulette tickets and daily login bonuses ALL need to be addressed if Polyphony doesn’t want to run the risk of even further fallout among the community, and an even bigger PR nightmare for Sony to handle.

Polyphony have crafted what many fans would consider one of the best Gran Turismo experiences since the PS2-era with GT7, and within barely a month since release, have washed away all that with the sour experience of almost predatory microtransactions, unfair currency earn mechanics and a terrible always-online implementation.

Please Polyphony, fix this game.

Gran Turismo 7's Problematic Liveservice Model Needs a Drastic Overhaul