It's better that GTS, GT6 and GT5. It falls far below GT2, GT3 and GT4. The genius of those games was the freedom they gave you. You unlocked all the events by passing the licence tests. They were open world games before that even became a type of game. You won your car as a prize for winning the event.
GT7 couldn't be more different from what made those games great. Kaz just can't do this anymore.
GT5, aside from it's PS2 model cars to make the car count higher, as a game was the biggest in terms of content. You could sell cars, you had a tooooon of stuff to do, and there were multiple ways to earn credits to buy the high-end cars.
It literally takes, bare minimum, over 600 hours to finish GT5. Yet, it took just barely over 30 hours for me to finish everything in GT7, with the only thing to complete in the game being the Platinum trophy which is only a question of asking a few of you guys in the forum to hang around with me with a Tomahawk X in Special Stage Route X to get the 13.000km trophy online and just do 50 sport races (not win them, just finish, which again, is easy).
What is saving Gran Turismo 7 from being an absolute flop, is the fact that it's a car game. It doesn't have a storyline or something of the sort.
Imagine a game like Horizon: Forbbiden West having only part of the story available at launch and you would have to wait for updates to get the rest?
That's what's saving GT7, because we all know that with future updates, the game can become infinitely better. But so far, it's way too lackluster in terms of offline content.
But yes, GT2 GT3 AND GT4 are still the goats of the series.
GT7 had the potential to, on this very day, have everything good that GT4 had and improve it even further with a few more additions.
Instead... we got... Music Rally... Really!?????
What we had in GT4 (only 2 and a 1/2 years after GT3 was released):
-High number of cars, all of which weren't "fake" VGTs (even with duplicates that was still nearly 600 unique cars) and 51 tracks, real life and fictional.
-5 Licenses with 16 tests that would reward you with cars for your efforts if you achieved Bronze, Silver and Gold and would also allow you to participate in races/championships that actually require you to have them. That's the whole point of license tests.
-34 fun and challenging driving missions.
-4 whole campaigns from Beginner, Professional, Extreme and Endurance Races, of which it featured races and championships (most of which had 5 or 10 races, with the FGT championship being 15 races) of all types of cars, from FF, FR, 4WD, Turbo, NA, MR, Supercars, Kei Cars, Hot Hatches, Classics, Group C/Le Mans and even Formula cars, this later one being an exact replica to the F1 championship with 15 races, giving you a pretty decent amount of money and one of the most sought after cars in the game (Sauber C9 Mercedes).
-3 other campaigns of the areas in Japan, Europe and America where it featured races and championships for cars from a certain nationality, age and again, type of car.
-Multiple One-Make Races and Championships, from almost every brand in the game.
-1 whole campaign of Rally/Snow/Wet races.
-In the championships, you had the option to QUALIFY yourself and dictate where you would start on the grid, instead of the new stupid chase the rabbit formula and majority of the time you had grid starts in the races (depending on which track, but it was on most of them) instead of rolling starts.
-You could sell any car in the game. You could even reset the championships you've won so that you could start them again to win a prize car and sell it again. The only cars you couldn't sell were the concept cars. Anything else you could sell for roughly 1/5 of their retail price. And the cars that you would win throughout the massive number of events in the game you could not buy them from dealerships, meaning that you would now from the start that those cars are prize cars awaiting for you to get them after winning their respective events. Also, the most expensive cars in the game (that you can buy) were 4.5 million credits and you had a championship that you could do that would give you about 5 to 6 million credits per hour via winning all 5 races and selling the prize car.
-You had the option, especially during the endurance races but you could do ANY race with your B-Spec driver. If you were too tired to do the 24hour races or any long endurance race, you could just pit and make your B-Spec driver do the rest of the race or part of the race until you were good to go at it again, with you setting at which pace he should drive.
-Physics that at the time even real life racing drivers were surprised at how close to reality the game was. This in 2004/2005 (GT7 has done good on this aspect at least).
Now compare all of this^ to what we have in GT7 at launch, a game that has been in development just shortly after GT6 was released in the end of 2013.
The disappointment and criticism is not only understandable, but it's necessary.
