100%! My final review

  • Thread starter nuxetcrux
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United States
Los Angeles
nuxetcrux
I was once a late stage alcoholic, living on the streets. I had my license taken away a long time ago for racing and got jail for continuing anyway, and honestly I should've been off the streets sooner. I spent years on skid row in LA, in and out of jails.

Prior to that, my first book I wrote for 1st grade was just the specs I copied from the back of the Car and Driver with drawings of the cars, including a Vector M12. I got GT1 on launch as boy and, if you caught me gazing at an upscaled replay, you'd see the face of wonder, those pixels--those cars--dancing in my eyes.

Now it is 2023. I've been out of jail and off the booze for almost a decade. I reconnected with gaming in a sober living using an old phone and a DS2. I became a chef in Michelin starred restaurants, built a bit of a life. Got in on the gamestop squeeze and got myself a 120fps TV, a PS5, and GT7.

Never have I wasted my time so profoundly as I have on this. I had a thought the other day when I was clearing the last ******** events, buying the last ******** VGT cars that the best form of encryption would perhaps be a cipher that always misleads you into thinking you're on the way to the truth, but those paths just branch ad infinitum, creating new, infinitely almost satisfied breakthroughs, and that the user would participate in the obfuscation. I honestly wish I just relapsed over covid instead of this.

This probably seems like an overreaction, but I feel I'm only able to see the writing on the wall because I've been attending the church of Kaz and Akihiko Tan for 25 years. Their achievements are deserved and staggering. But I'm afraid something here is....decoupling in a concerning way. Aside from the launch, which was the most disrespected I've ever felt by a game company, the game itself is a marvel. And, credit where it's due, they did eventually create something resembling a respectable product. But for the first year, even if you had the pace and drove the wet line--definitely NOT racing--you would still be pitted and randomly slammed, especially on tracks where the pathfinding was far worse even then Motor Toon GP. The pit lane bug, where a car would unrealistically pull 12gs and teleport to the pit entrance and if you were between the two you were banished, wasn't patched for months, among others. And to be sure, while Akihiko Tan was banging out Motor Toon GP in the mid-90s, Papyrus had three-band tire sim in NASCAR Racing ps1. Now, GT is received as a gentle-sim a la Codies' games with a lion's share of labor being poured into modelling and presentation but absolutely NOT into gameplay/realism, since it seems they feel they have achieved perfection. Almost nothing in GT7 is a straightforward input/output with it's physics engine. Because of them shoehorning in other motorsports and car classes, unless the car is operating in its wheelhouse of tarmac tires and the "tuning" engine (read: normalization/constraint engine) three others developed for the user to place the car in a spectrum of performance it can brute force emulate astonishingly well but fails when the seams are allowed to be iterated (i.e. parameters outside of the constraint). Tan himself has often said it was the 'feel' of understeer in early sims that captured his imagination as a youngster working on his own early work, citing Hard Drivin' among a few others, and I would point to the console versions of Nigel Mansell's and Super Monaco GP on genesis as also having a very strong representation of understeer in the 16-bit era.

Take every version of Mustang that can be normalized through tuning and normalize them. Then put them on a track. It's not just that they all behave and perform differently, but WILDLY different. Like, the deltas for every category of performance are completely blown out. And I understand they are making a consumer product, and that many are currently happy--I don't mean to discourage. But I would be shocked if they didn't **** the franchise straight into the ground with GT8, given the widening cracks and the advanced age and dying passion of Polyphony's leadership, and the fact they behaved like Greed incarnate for a year and play dumb about it. The tires are like keys to different, non-working sims. And a Gran Turismo car has never been able to jump or navigate elevation without videogamey rotational slippage and center of mass cartwheeling.

We've accepted these airborne miscues and no damage and, for a while, anemic engine sounds and loud tires, etc over the years because we love the games and when you love something you learn to love even its faults. Somehow, this is the first in the series, for me (I missed 3,4,5,6) where it feels like the opposite is true, that the game is very cold and hard to love and WONT make me a better driver but harm my times in AC and IRL.

It would only take ONE HIRE to fix this, though I would suggest a few more: please bring in new blood and then please reward their passion for actual driving. Then it might be the "Real Driving Simulator".
 
The review is fine, but I don't feel like you're giving the reader any indication which part of the game you are critiquing. I'm getting the impression it's mainly the physics, but you touch upon other things too.
 
The review is fine, but I don't feel like you're giving the reader any indication which part of the game you are critiquing. I'm getting the impression it's mainly the physics, but you touch upon other things too.
Yeah, I got a bit lost reading this, as you like to hop into other things and it feels like a rollecoaster is running in my brain.
 
The way I understand GT7 is a bit different. PD have the task of making a game within the limited budget, and they can no longer compete with real sims whilst being restricted to a console. so they diversify early on in the project. THey put all their money into the car models, people say wow, those are works of art, look at those taillights, so realistic. Best car models in the world. Better than any other game on the market. True. result achieved. Then they put money into Scapes, wow this game is not just a racing game like any other, look at this scape! Then they put money into optimising the framrate, wow look how smooth it runs. All the reviewers are happy in a smooth gaming experience that looks stunning. That leaves us at the last two categories: physics, and solo campaign.

Reviewers don't need to play more than 30 hours of a game before they give it the final verdict. There goes the solo campaign length.

PD doesn't have any money left to make physics much better than their prototype. They're too busy being comfy. They just slap together whatever average code they have lying around the shop and every 6 months update it by tweaking 5 values in a notepad. You can see PD love to recycle concepts, ideas, models, code. In all of their games, everything is recycled. Every game is the same in many ways. Like Call of Duty.

They don't need to care what the players think about the physics now, they already made it great for reviewers by day one. That was the ideal physics prototype. By the end of the game's life the physics will be good again, but it doesn't matter that it's terrible in the interim. PD can get away with "realistic physics" each update by simply making the cars harder to drive. Players are foolish enough to believe that a car must be hard to drive for it to be realistic. You can see the same thing with iracing. For years the tyre model was complained about, nothing was done, and when, after decades, they got an update, there was backlash because now it was "too easy" to drive, and therefore "unrealistic". It doesn't matter what the physics are like. Physics doesn't change. People change. Yet Nobody can tell the difference, nor does the difference matter for the money spent, and all will fight regardless. Good publicity. Physics in a console game? Waste of money is what that is.

They don't associate with the players because the japanese are very exclusive in business. This keeps them from making GT 'realistic'. They make what they feel like making, GT is just their sounding board, but now Kaz is older, more mature, and less passionate about replicating realism in a console game, and he no longer cares about dumping extra money into physics when he can get more money dumping it into other investments, and just living his life. GT was his thing in the 90s, now it's just another investment on his portfolio. Some would say the passion is there, but he's not the young adult he once was. He's old and withering, much like the soul in his franchise. But at the same time he's now worth more money than he knows what to do with, it's certainly not going to be invested back into GT for it's own sake. He's a proper fulltime business man now. Nobody asked for a Gran Turismo movie. They (the fans) asked for a better game.
 
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Your last GT7 review, or your last review altogether?
My guess is the latter, considering how the review exploded into:
  • Book authoring
  • Dancing pixels
  • Alcoholism
  • Jailsitting
  • Fine cooking
  • 120Hz TV
  • "*****"
  • Religious beliefs on PD
  • Motor Toon GP
  • NASCAR
  • Moustache
    And last, but not least...
  • Missing on almost the entire GT series.
 
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please bring in new blood
I have no real knowledge or proof of how PD works internally, just anecdotal knowledge on the development industry in general.

The problem most likely is the new blood. The industry is brutal and mistreats employees habitually, across the globe, across all companies. Add in Japan's infamous work culture and you get a recipe for relatively high turnover and a relatively young workforce in game development.

I'm 35 currently and started playing GT2 as an 11 year old kid. That means the OG developers of GT1 and 2 are likely at least 10 years older than me currently and its very doubtful they're willing to deal with such brutal development cycles as 45 year old adults. They've moved on to better QOL jobs in related industries. That means nobody who actually worked on those original games - besides Kaz who is more of a marketer than a hands-on developer these days - is developing the current games. Nobody remembers what they wished they could create back then when technology was limited. Further, because the industry is only really tolerable for new developers in their 20s, most of the people working on the game today probably never even played GT2, and possibly not even GT4, at least not during the relevant era. They don't have the deeply seeded sense of nostalgia for what those games were and what a modern version should be.

GT7 has all sorts of cool stuff that they couldn't pull off with the technology available back in the day. But it also has a few weird quirks that are results of the modern era we live in and not all of them for the better - the game economy for example. While GT4 was the first time GT really celebrated the breadth of automotive history and culture, it did so without any exclusivity. At its core, Hagerty is actually a great company in line with the love and celebration of car culture, and frankly could've been an interesting partnership. Unfortunately I believe Hagerty is actually giving itself a bad name by accidentally associating itself with exclusivity. The company isn't exclusive at all - anybody can be a member of Hagerty, can enjoy their content, and you can get Hagerty insurance on basically any classic car, even something like an NA Miata. The company does specialize in collector cars and the detailed history of rare vehicles but I'm not sure why they chose to present that in a very exclusive way within the game, rather than allowing these cars to be much more accessible and enjoyable like GT4 did. It simultaneously adds credibility to the game while also making many players feel left out, which is a real-world problem most of us are all too familiar with. That defeats the purpose of playing a game, and prevents the true celebration and enjoyment of both the cars and the Hagerty brand itself.

I think some of the development choices in this game are a sign of the times, side effects of modern mindsets. There was not enough consideration for the older games and the older way of doing things. What once was the ultimate **** box simulator is now the ultimate poverty simulator. That's ironic because now that I'm a grown adult I could easily pay hundreds of dollars for whatever sort of paid content they could throw at me, but I refuse to, because I remember what the essence of gaming was back in the day. A way to escape reality and enjoy unattainable things. If the company employed developers who actually remember how it used to be, we'd all be ripping around in hopped-up EG Civics and Nissan Sentras and various other cars from our childhoods that we've actually owned and experienced. There are a few highlights in the game, sure, but not enough. Not like GT2 or GT4. Give me an update full of 10 economy buckets from 1995 and I'll be a lot more satisfied than buying a single ridiculous Ferrari. Most of PD's developers probably weren't even alive in 1995.
 
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