General:
- As usual, Gran Turismo looks pretty damn good. While I don't think it shines in daytime conditions (well, not many racers do, really), racing in the morning, evening, and especially night is a pure eye-candy. And it looks twice as good in replays, with the help of Polyphony Digital magic the series has been known for since pretty much its inception.
- The menus and presentation are also out of this world. Although GTS kept the "mouse cursor" navigation, I think the menus are just organized better this time around. The home screen was designed specifically to show the cars and various historical facts, while the actual menu items are placed at the edges of the screen. You can also use the left stick to move the cursor around like a real mouse (although the sensitivity/speed is a little slow), and the right stick is used to quickly scroll through menus and lists, which also helps navigating around the game
- While I'm on topic of menus I would also like to mention that the loading screen is now much more useful in GTS compared to any previous game. Not only can you immediatley see the track map, the prizes (if there are any), and mission goals/failure conditions - there's now also a cool feature of PD offering the Videos for the single-player content. Those videos are basically short tutorials with minimal explanation and serve as the Demonstration on how you're supposed to tackle a specific Lesson or a Mission. Right now there are only "Official" videos made by PD themselves, but I assume in the future you'll also be able to check out community made videos designed for the same purpose, and all of this is possible while the system is loading up the actual race/assets. Pretty neat
- All the information that you might need at a first glance is presented to you as soon as you boot up the game (and by the way it boots up really fast, much faster than GT5 and GT6 did for their respective GT/Career modes) - you see your car, credits, XP, current local time, and whatever else you might need is easily and quickly accessed through the aforementioned menus, like the sidebar on the left from which you can go to the Garage, Livery Editor, and so on
- Ah, notice something new? Yes, the Livery Editor has finally arrived to the Gran Turismo series, and I have to say it's pretty packing. You can put lots of various decals on a car of your choice and make it truly unique and stand out among competition. Much like many other games where this feature is present, the decals vary from basic shapes, numbers and letters, to more complex things like company logos. I haven't yet delved much into this mode, so I'm not sure if there's a hard cap on the amount of "layers" you can put on the car
- The music in the menus is also pretty nice. While I can't say that so far I prefer it to the Jazz and House tracks GT5 had, for example, I can't say that I dislike Sport's soundtrack either
- Speaking of music, I think GTS has a pretty nice selection of on-track songs as well - a combination of EDM and rock, and it was real cool of PD to bring back all the Daiki Kasho songs from Gran Turismo 4
Content:
- As you all already know, GT Sport isn't quite a conventional Gran Turismo game, in a sense of this entry being more "esports" and online oriented than any previous game in the series. As such, the focus of the content that's provided in GTS has also shifted away from a mostly single-player experience, and here it serves more as a preparation stage before players set out on a track to race against the world, namely the Driving School, the Mission Challenges, and the Circuit Experience
- The Driving School is exactly that - a collection of lessons with progressing difficulty that are designed to teach players to drive and overcome various situations. As per usual for a Gran Turismo game, the lessons start on basic tasks such as braking within a specified zone, or going through a turn, or finishing a lap within a certain amount of time. There is a total of 48 lessons, broken into two categories - Beginner and Intermediate - and each category has a total of 3 rows with 8 lessons in each. Complete one full row of lessons and you'll receive a free car. It's a nice way to get you started in the world of GT Sport while also slowly becoming a better driver.
- The Mission Challenges are very reminiscent of the Missions and Coffee Breaks from Gran Turismo 4, and the Special Events from Gran Turismo 5. These missions usually consist of overtaking the opponents and finishing as high as you can, or doing a hotlap, and so on. Much like the Driving School - the Missions are broken into categories (or rather Stages), with a total of 8 stages and 8 missions in each (Stages 1 and 6 are available in the Demo). Completing a full stage also rewards you with a free car.
- Finally, there's Circuit Experience, which is designed to help players learn the tracks that are present in the game turn-by-turn, with the final trial being a full lap , where your'e required to apply everything you've learned within the trials that are set before. Of course you can tackle these in any order you want, but it's best to take it slow rather than jumping straight into an unknown territory. Unlike the other two modes - Circuit Experience does not reward you with free cars upon completion each track, but it does give you a decent sum of Credits for each trial, and the rewards increase based on the Bronze, Silver, or a Golden trophy that you've earned.
- Of course, GT Sport still also features the Arcade mode and a local Splitscreen mode. These two are designed for players who just want to drive around for some time, with no requirements or a challenge or making any prior progress in the game. You pick a track, pick the time of day, pick the card, and race away. While you have a preset amount of cars available, you can also use the cars from your own Garage. You can do a regular race, a time attack race, or practice drifting
- And last but not least, GT Sport offers the "Museum" and "Scapes" modes. The Museum is where you can just chill listening to nice menu music and learn about various historic facts, not just for a specific manufacturer that you select prior, but also for the events that happened around the world, such as the launch of the Internet or appearance of the first Electric Guitar, or even the appearance of YouTube. The Scapes is your classic Photo mode that was present in GT since GT4, and it's bigger than ever, with over a 1000 locations available for you to pick any of the cars you own and make unbelieveable realistic photos using various filters, effects, and other options found in modern cameras. You might be required to experiment a bit, but the end result might be nigh indistinguishable from a similar photo made in real life
Progression:
- As I've mentioned above, GT Sport is catered more towards online/competitive experience with a narrower selection of cars rather than collecting every possible iconic model dating back as first half of the 20th century like previous titles. As such, you're not required to earn any licenses, or complete specific events before moving forward, or grinding races to get a high enough Driver level before you're allowed to fully experiences what Gran Turismo has to offer you in terms of available competitions, cars or classes. Instead, as soon as you boot up the game - you can jump straight into online races and start having fun either in the Lobbies or Daily Races.
- However, you still do earn experience and credits just like past GT games. Or, to be more specific, you earn Credits (the classic ingame currency used to buy new cars), Mileage Points (a new type of currency that you earn for each event completed), and Experience (which of course goes towards increasing your Driver's level). . It's worth noting, however, that I'm not quite sure if the Experience really has any value. In the Demo, you're only required to earn LV5 to be able to make custom liveries for your driver, so it seems that beyond that, unless something changes in the full version, is increasing your level will only be required for ingame achievements or Trophies
- All of those currencies are rewarded to you for doing Lessons, Missions, and other trials. Depending on how good the payouts will be in the Final version of the game, the offline modes may probably fund quite a few of the first cars you'll own in the game outside of those awarded as Prizes
- You're also able to keep track of pretty much everything you do in the game. This is done through a simple menu called "My Profile" - and it lets you know about anything you want. What's the status of your ingame achievements? How much did you drive in the last day, week or month? Who's following you? How many cars you own? And so on and so forth
- But let's talk about the new currency a bit - the Mileage points. The "MP" are a new type of currency that you earn for pretty much just playing the game. Completed a Driving School lesson? Here's some MP. Drove around a track in Arcade? Here's some more MP. This means that the longer the race itself - the more MP you earn, which gives you an incentive to enter more events, whether offline or online. Once you've earned enough MP - you can exchange them for various ingame items: Liveries, Driver Gear, Accessories (namely wheels, unsure about others like Spoilers), Colors, and even some exclusive(?) Cars.
- Lastly, while this isn't tied to progression directly, there'a a thing called "Daily Workout". This is basically your daily mission/quest found in various titles nowadays (and not just F2P ones), and completing it is very simple - just drive. Yup, that's it. Much like the Mileage points - it's very easy to fill out the requirements for completing Daily Workouts: simply by playing the game. And a reward for doing the Workouts is a free car. This also creates an incentive for people to keep playing the game if not on a daily basis then at least more often, since it helps you fill out the Car collection for free, and whatever duplicate cars you might get can be sold at a pretty high price, which also earns you additional Credits to get even more cars. Win-win all around.
Online:
- Like I've mentioned earlier, Gran Turismo Sport shifts its focus towards races in the online environment against players from around the world. This is the core concept of this game, and this is where you'll be spending most of your time actually playing GTS. Outside of the Lobbies that were first introduces in GT5 and were also present in GT6, there are two key modes - Daily Races and the Sports mode
- The Daily Races are exactly what you'd expect given the name of the mode: a set of everchanging events that are accessible only for 24 hours set in various car classes, conditions and tracks. While this mode doesn't earn you credits, XP or MP, it does help you spend some time having fun, and it also helps you level up your "Sportsmanship Rating", a new system that PD implemented to keep track of players that drive well and clean, and punishing those that like to be pure a-holes and just bumb into everybody, ruining the experience for pretty much every player involved in a race. Perhaps earning currencies will become available in the full version, but as of now this mode is designed to help you get accustomed to racing online against players that are put in the same boat as you, meaning that in certain events everybody is using the same car, or all selectable cars are from the same class/group and tuned automatically to even out the playing field, which means that rather than choosing the fastest car of the bunch - your wins will depend entirely on your skill as a player, your knowledge of the tracks, and maybe even on prior experience with the Gran Turismo series or racing games as whole
- The Daily Races themselves are scheduled in a way that they follow each other with ~20 minute time intervals which is enough for a qualifying session, the race itself, and resting a bit before the next event starts. And yes, while you wait for the actual race to begin - you can enter a solo qualifying session, based on the results of which you might get a chance to start at higher positions, which also boosts your chance at winning the race itself
- The Lobbies also offer quite a few options for customization. You can limit the entry by a specific car group, or BHP, or connectivity status, amount of laps, and so on. This is important because lobbies allow you to earn Credits, XP and MP, and all of the Lobby parameters directly affect the payout and rewards for scoring high
- Based on a few races I entered, I think the netcode has also seen some improvements. Whenever I raced online in GT5 and GT6, the players around me constantly teleported around or were very jittery, which just made some races unplayable and if collisions were on - it severely limited your ability to overtake or drive close to your opponents and control the distance between cars. I have no yet faced such issues in GTS, which means that hopefully the online experience in this game, especially in the future Championships, will be great and enjoyable
Gameplay:
- Honestly can't say anything bad about it. The car sounds have improved, the damage model has improved, the lighting model is insane, and GT is simply an enjoyable game. I think PD has always has managed to keep a balance between the simulation and arcade-ish elements of the game, and this definitely has not changed in GT Sport.
- Also I should mention that I am by no means an expert player, so I can't exactly judge just how good are the physics in this game compared to the competition or previous entires, but out of all the cars that are present in the Driving School, Missions and the Circuit Experience - I haven't really had any issues in just using them. The cars were all fairly easy to drive and responsive to controls (except Rally cars - I think those are the least enjoyable experience in all of Gran Turismo to this day). This is whilst using TCS set to 1, ABS set to Weak, and every other assist completely disabled, playing on pad
- I also like the interface. I think GTS's UI is a good evolution of the UI's in GT5 and 6 (which in turn were also sort of modified UIs from GT4), and I can't say I'm missing out on anything while driving. All the necessary information is either visible at a quick glance or is a couple of taps away on the D-pad
- Speaking of the Assists (as well as the pre-race Driving Settings) - this is one area of the game that hasn't really been changed in a long time. You have all the options that you'd usually see there, which is a choice of tyre type, transmission type, Traction Control, Active Stability Management, ABS, and Controller Sensitivity, However, what DID change is that you can now slightly alter the visual settings (such as exposure) and the camera position. The cockpit camera now lets you to adjust the seat height and how close is it to the steering wheel, which of course gives you a somewhat higher field of view. But unlike, say, Project Cars - GT Sport does not let you to change the actual FOV, which is a big shame. The External (chase) camera also now has a setting to make it lean to the side just a bit while turning (which is something you usually see in other racing games), unlike several previous titles where the camera was sort of "glued" in one place and never moved. And of course you can adjust the sensitivity for rotating the camera mid-race. The camera options are accessible during the races as well.
Some Final Notes:
- There's currently a bug where in the Dialogue of picking a profile pic for your Driver - the X and O buttons are flipped, so the interface says X is Cancel and O is Accept, which is actually opposite
- The game crashed when accessing the Profile screen after launching the demo just once before the servers actually went live. Seems like it saved my progress and when the servers went up - I guess the game couldn't sync my data properly? I had to delete the savedata from the console and "start fresh". Hopefully this isn;t an issue in the retail version
- I think the News feed needs to be made expandable or more accessible. Right now you can only see them individually if you wait until the specific link actually changes on the main menu, and there's no way to list/skip them around. The news in the My Profile screen are also non-clickable, which kinda makes their presence there useless. I guess this is getting fixed in the final build (day 1 patch?)
- Although it's pretty neat how PD included various historical facts in addition to the manufacturer history, I'm not quite sure what are they here for. They're not related to the game or the cars, so it feels more like a condensed Wikipedia timeline. Not a complaint or anything, just feels weird
- Maybe I haven't dug around enough, but it seems like the Demo has no option of accessing the Music playlist. The songs are predetermined, they always play in a specific order rather than being randomized/shuffled, and you can't exclude/include tracks in the Track music like you could in GT4, as well as being unable to create custom playlists
- It's a concern for me that PD and Kaz have decided to go more into esports/competitive/online oriented territory with Gran Turismo Sport. I'm not a fan of it because I never really cared about racing online and I loved the GT series for the amazing Career mode and the challenges it posed (like finishing 24hr endurance races for those sweet car/money prizes), but at the same time I think it's good that they have finally decided to experiment with the Gran Turismo formula since the game structure kinda remained the same ever since GT1, and hopefully this experience will benefit an eventualy Gran Turismo 7 greatly
- It's also a bit concerning that this time around the selection of tracks and cars in GT Sport is quite limited compared to previous entries. I hope that with future updates/DLC the situation will gradually improve, although it of course depends on how often will said DLCs even come out for the game. I also hope that GT Sport will serve as a buffer game/foundation to bring many modern cars to the Gran Turismo world, while the team also works on bringing the Premium models from GT5 and GT6 up to speed and ready for inclusion in GT7, especially since so many Premium cars are completely omitted from GT Sport (but the work the team has done within just 4-5 years since GT6 is incredible nonetheless)
- I'm personally still debating whether to get this game new or wait until there's a good deal/used copy for it, especially since I feel like I wouldn't be that much enticed to play GTS once I'm done with all the offline content it offers at the moment (48 driving lessons, 48 missions, and several dozen track learning trials)
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