As for the name, I hope they keep GT Sport - I like it. Iterative names are archaic and stuck in the past.
Release GT Sport, keep building on it, flesh it out, charge for an expansion in a few years - create the ultimate racing game gradually. Don't rush out some 'full experience GT7" that gets dumped and then sidelined for work GT8.
"GT as a service" should be the aim.
And if they are smart, which i think they are being, they realise that gaming is all about mutiplayer/social now. This game will live or die on it being a great multiplayer experience. Single player experience have been dying for a decade now, and very rarely take hold with large numbers of people.
Racing together with friends or strangers is where it's at.
Driveclub was a decent arcade racing game but it's matchmaking/multiplayer was bugged as hell, and people gave up trying to get a game going. It died because the online was simply not good enough at launch. (or well after launch).
GT5/6 had OK online given time, but still lots of problems
- bad load times
- most races were a mismatched mess of crap, usually on the nurburgring.
- relied heavily on host quality/setup.
They need to make sure that BY DEFAULT a multiplayer experience is at the very minimum a race on a circuit between cars of similar performance levels that I can quickly jump into within 1 minute. PGR on Xbox 1 managed this over a decade ago.
Have a complete/complex variety of car setups as an options is fine, but it's a massive downside if it's the default. That should be a rare/custom setup for a custom lobby.
Also I don't want to have to rely on host quality for a game. I want it to provide nice easy to manage options so most hosts 'can't get it wrong without really trying'. I remember sitting with GT5 for over an hour trying to find a good lobby to get a simple race going. This won't work in today's climate, people are impatient, and just want stuff to work.
That said, ideally, i should just hit a button to race. Maybe, at most, I can pick the performance bracket I want to race in. I should then be match-made against people of similar skill, again, within 1 minute. Lets streamline the dicking about needed to get racing. And of course this should gradually start to place people in leagues/divisions by rank/ability.
Lobbies/hosts I'm referring to above shouldn't be the default experience at all. That should be a sideshow.
So yeah, don't half-ass online, and I don't care if there are only 130 cars and literally no single player at launch it won't matter. And if you think trudging through boring offline races against AI is essential to the survival of the franchse, I couldn't disagree more. GT's 'career' was cool on the PS1/2, but not today. Even other games have long surpassed this with something that actually feels like a 'career' and not just a lifeless procession of icons to click on.
This is a fight for the survival of the franchise, and dreams of fleshed out single player are a waste of resources as far as I'm concerned.
