I’m genuinely concerned that GT7 could have one of the worst campaigns in the series to date. I saw no indication of any structure or progression, it almost seemed like another redo of GTS’s GT League, where every event is available from the start (or rather 3 easy level thresholds to make them available) and no specific direction. Maybe the collector level/Cafe stuff will somewhat aid this, but what I saw doesn’t convince me it’ll be enough.
To get this out of the way, GT needs (and has needed) difficulty settings in all levels of it’s campaign, or at minimum an “expert” mode to unlock after completing the original event.
GT5 was fairly unbalanced mid-late game, but the early-middle point of the game was pretty good. You had options of doing licenses, entering the first one or two A Spec events, and/or doing special events to build XP and unlock stuff. Golding every single license test would get you to (I believe) level 4 or 5, unlocking every beginner event and I think some of the amateur series, all without needing to even buy a car. Plus it’d gift you around 15 cars for doing so IIRC. So you could buy something from the UCD and climb the A-Spec ladder normally, but alternatively you could also do some license tests, get a couple free cars and levels, immediately hop in the special events and get enough credits and XP to get a mid-tier sports car, or mod one of your gift cars, and go into the amateur series. The first events of the first 3 special events were unlocked by A spec level 4 (Kart @1, NASCAR @2, TG @4), so it was very possible to amass a close-to-6 figure credit balance before even needing to buy your first car. You had the option to skip events you weren’t very interested in or didn’t want to buy a new car for specific entry requirements, and you could climb through A-Spec this way until around maybe late in the professional series. At that point you had to start clearing the incomplete events, and that could get you a fair way into the Expert series. It was around level 20 where the balance got off and you had to start repeating/grinding events or squeeze out golds in the harder special events to get to the upper extreme and later-unlocked endurance series events.
In that early-mid game there was excellent player agency allowing you to prioritize content that interested you or catered to the car or cars you liked. Even where GT5 did good though it was too small for the amount of content it had, and there should’ve been even more events in the upper series utilizing more of the car list. There were hardly any (if any) events with harder difficulty that utilized slower cars, and a lot of missed opportunities with brand or model-specific events.
GT6 severely regressed with its structure structure to the point that the campaign was essentially a glorified mobile game - quite literally angry birds but extrapolated onto a GT context. This time you were not only forced to start the game by buying a car, but buying specifically the Honda Fit. You were forced to complete the licenses to unlock every stage of the career, and to unlock the licenses you had to earn enough “stars” from each stage. You were forced to spend time in each stage of the career rather than progressing how you wanted, and special events had little to no impact on anything else. There were more events but less agency, and it felt like you were grinding just to get through it all because you didn’t have much choice of what you
could do. GT5 made the licenses and specials optional, and all of them would assist you to some level to getting through more campaign if you wanted to. GT6 regularly forced you out of the path you wanted to travel, and any extra stuff (Specials and Seasonals) didn’t help you move through other parts of the game or get anywhere closer to where you wanted to go aside from giving credits or cars that might be more useful in other events. Races were often repeated but slightly longer in the higher campaign tiers, and yet endurance racing was basically gone, with nearly no events being more than 30 minutes (ironically even in the “endurance” series). On top of this PD produced the worst AI they had to date, literally programmed to slow down on the last lap and give up as you approached. It just wasn’t fun.
GTS was designed as a focus title, funneling players into it’s esports modes, so it didn’t bother me
as much that it’s campaign was slim, decentralized, and without goals or progression. It launched with licenses, missions, and circuit experience, all of which got you vaguely familiar with the core concepts to get you into Sport mode. Problem was once you completed all that there wasn’t much else to do aside from custom races. The likes of which, being fair, was a
significant step up from any previous GT game, but didn’t give you enough tools to do anything/everything you wanted, nor was there a skeleton for discovery of what could be interesting for newer/younger players. So League was kind of a necessity to give something else to do when you’d had enough of online racing. Plus, it really didn’t help that 90% of sport mode was just cars in the various racing categories or one-make road cars. PD predominantly added road cars post launch but hardly used them to any dramatic effect in the core of the game.
GT5 and 6 were essentially carried by the end-game content, which was online lobbies, offline time trials, photo mode, weekly/bi-weekly seasonals, or (if you could stomach it) arcade mode (it was better with course maker, but that was pretty limited in 5 and it didn’t live very long in 6). All of this to entertain the idea of building your personalized garage from the 1000+ list of cars. The problem is that when the campaign doesn’t do enough to get you enticed and/or get you started there’s not much desire for even pushing for the end game loop.
From the showcase I still wasn’t able to identify what GT7s campaign even
is, it almost seems like it
starts you in this “endgame” loop with minor guidance. I can’t identify any particular progression system that relates to an actual campaign or a true goal for you to complete like there has been in any previous main-line GT game, and that kind of concerns me.
To date, PD has had the all the content already in their game available to do so even in
launch-spec GT Sport but
never implemented these basic ideas into a campaign:
- Difficulty settings/sliders for every event increasing payout/xp/progression.
- Slow/old/road cars at the highest difficulty/tier of the campaign.
- Having AI enter with tuned or modified cars - you always race against either stock road cars, or existing tuning house cars like spoon/blitz/RE amemiya or base rally/touring/drift/race cars.
On top of this there looks to be little to no change in GT’s age-old format of starting in last and blasting through a 10-24 pack of cars by the end of a few laps. The only time I’ve had to fight GT AI is when I took dramatically underpowered cars into championships (70s lotus in British lightweights, Daihatsu Midget in pickup truck challenge), the simple fact is that GT’s AI isn’t very good and the game is worse off for it. It doesn’t matter what % of the player base
does find it challenging or “good enough”, the state it’s been in isn’t good racing and doesn’t cater to the full audience it should, certainly not all of the long-time fans. It actively contributes to a worse single player experience, and this is multiplied when mixed with a weak campaign.
The good news is there appears to be plenty of player agency, but I can’t really see how far that goes with everything so open ended and (seemingly) unnecessary to complete. It seems like the direction will be as strong as what the Cafe offers, but this presentation didn’t (to me) make it seem like it
is very strong, directation wise, anyways.
What I really think GT’s campaign could use is a more “tree-like” (I know oh god oh no not the trees) structure, that gives players options for vertical or horizontal progression based on what they want to do. I’m basing this off of an extremely primitive skeletal idea NFS Hot Pursuit 2 had in it’s campaigns, where you could take the event on the main path that would immediately take you down to the next tier to the events with faster cars and more difficult AI/cops, or you could take the branched event, which wouldn’t unlock any other races, but would give dramatically higher payouts that you could use to unlock more single/custom race content.
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Extrapolating and applying this into a bigger GT-sized context, you could start with the age-old short Sunday/FF/Kei car cups, completing the likes of which would immediately unlock a bunch of other bigger/longer grassroots types events, and a new short higher-tier/higher performance event. Taking that next tier wouldn’t give that much more of a payout, but would grant significantly more XP, and would provide a path to unlock and launch you vertically up the performance/racing categories. Sticking horizontal with the grassroots tier would give you races with more higher payouts, allowing you to buy better cars and parts for that level of racing and potentially apply then in higher tiers later on. So all races give cash and XP, but you can choose which is more important based on what you like. You quickly push up to the fastest cars, or you can hang out in a preferred spot for a while and build up your garage with your favorite kinds of cars and categories and also
actually use them for the campaign. Or you can be a completionist and do everything
mostly at once.
PD would have the option (as they always have) of providing difficulty options/sliders for everything, or if they wanted to stay on this traditional pre-set difficulty route, could make the difficulty ramp up only on the horizontal paths, with harder AI and longer races, allowing the AI to mod their cars, maybe even extending as far as having several mega championships or endurance events at every campaign/performance tier. I.e, the end game for the grassroots tier could be something like lemons endurance, or some made up very-gran -turismo international 10-race championship for lightly tuned grocery getters. This is all in the first tier, all of the tiers above could have similar if not greater depth, and if balanced correctly, it’d only take one or two events of 1-3 races to move up to the next tier. No stranding or grinding in one particular spot in the game, and spending extra time in a lower tier could get you better set up for the next tier. Campaign Tiers could look something like:
- Grassroots (compact/commuter cars)
- Performance (tuned cars and low range sports cars)
- Sports (mid-high range sports cars)
- Super (super cars/exotics and heavily modified cars)
- Cup (Smaller/slower Cup cars ala Lupo/Micra cups of old, race-modified cars if the functionality is available)
- Touring (GT4 and other lower categories/one-make classes, like the Megane Trophy)
- Touring Extreme (GT3-GT2, SGT, DTM, NASCAR, depending on what content and licensing is available and in the game)
- Hyper (GT1, prototypes, hypercars, maybe race-modded supercars if that functionality is available)
- Formula (open wheelers, redbull X cars)
All of what I just listed is can be done
just by building the UI to do so. The cars, tracks, and now tuning options are there. This is one of the least difficult aspects of game design and they’re not doing anything with it. Funnily enough it’s also something they could expand in the exact same way they did with GT League as more cars and tracks showed up.
I don’t think anything was ever going to stop me from getting this game on day one, but man, this lack of evolution and near-regression really bums me out.