- 9,925
- Denmark
GT7 is a weird racing game (compared to others)
- Thread starter Djuvinile
- 144 comments
- 18,308 views
Are we really doing this "Gran Turismo is a driving game so any critique towards it's racing quality is invalid" again? Really?
Yes, it offers other activities that aren't racing. It's still primarily a racing game though.
Vs
Not to mention that racing still = driving anyway. They're called racing drivers. Not racing racers.
Yes, it offers other activities that aren't racing. It's still primarily a racing game though.
- 59
- Belgium
Or as professor Denis McManus of the University of Southampton put it: it is "The Enchantment of Words".
- 813
- United Kingdom
- 3,816
- London, Ontario
- voodoovaj
The operative word is test.
This is easier to test for bugs, and focus test. The focus test group, where they bring in random people to get their opinions, will find the GT approach more palatable than a traditional racer.
And most of the community needs to stop with the "AI is crap" mantra. The AI is doing what it is told to do, and it does it perfectly well. That is a far cry from bein a bad AI. PD keeps getting the signal that it's AI is bad, when the reality is that the implementation is bad. Well, it isn't even bad, so to speak, it's uninteresting because it's designed to let you win, and that is never fun.
Look no further than the rubber banding as proof.
I witness a great example in a race where I set up a custom race. I had my 429 Boss (tuned to 600PP) and I set a 2 lap race with "professional" level at the Red Bull Ring. The lead car was a ZR1.
It's a 2 lap race, so the bulk of the field let me by before the second corner. I was in 2nd place by turn 3. The ZR1 was already 6 seconds ahead.
The AI was ripping away doing a really good job, but again, this was set to be only 2 laps. I will repeat, the over riding philosophy is that the player should win. This is not a RACE. The player must WIN. So, the ZR1 immediately goes into slow mode so I could catch it. It paced itself perfectly so that I could catch it at the second to last corner, and it let me pass at the last corner, then, although it could have easily passed me, it sat behind me.
The fact that the AI is working so hard to allow me to win is the proof that it isn't "dumb procession AI" in that it cannot do better. It is actually very good AI, doing it's best to mask the fact that it's allowing me to win, right at the last corner!! (how exciting
).If you are ever ahead, and the AI catches you, then it is outdriving you. I've seen the AI set the fastest lap in many instances, and I don't suck!! Even in these races, where the AI is clearly better than I am, I win. Why? Because the AI is set up to let the player win. It is not a race.
That 2 lap short race that I described also, CLEARLY, shows how the AI CAN adjust for difficulty on the fly. It COULD be better simply because you are better. It could, for instance, run at the "pro" level if you are a DR B or higher, run normal if you are a DR C, and run on easy if you have just started the game.
Again, philosophically different from other racers. Other games approach it with the concept that the player should be skilled enough to win and the AI provides a challenge to overcome. In GT, the philosophy is that the player should win, regardless of how good he/she is, and the AI should do it's best to hide the fact that it is letting the player win.
All they did with Sophy is remove the directive to let the player win.
Last edited:
- 100
- United Kingdom
The problem with a "skip qualifying" option is that you increase the complexity of the game. PD would have to fine tune each race twice to make sure that there was a reasonable progression from easy races through to hard ones. And they would need to write two different AI scripts one for quali starts and one for rolling starts.
We may yet see a quali option for single player at some point in the future. I don't expect this to be a high priority for PD. They've got the rolling starts for the newbies and the endurance races, online mode and harder races for the more experienced. That won't please everyone all the time, but it covers most of the bases
- 13,879
- Adelaide
- Neomone
It was possibly the closest that Gran Turismo has gotten as an event. Although the track still had race track curbs and barriers, so was akin to many of the street course race tracks that we've had in the series already. And the event was still encouraging the player to go as fast as possible, ie. racing.
There's also tracks like Eiger, El Capitan, Seattle, Citta di Aria or Costa di Amalfi that really emphasised the sense of place and environment. Imaginary tracks in real locations is a great idea with a lot of room for leaning into Gran Turismo's documentary style of teaching the player about stuff, and it's a bit of a shame they turned away from it.
- 287
- New Zealand
- Novice_Senior
Whether its some sort of philosophical choice or not, the end result is the most people think you have bad AI.The operative word is test.
This is easier to test for bugs, and focus test. The focus test group, where they bring in random people to get their opinions, will find the GT approach more palatable than a traditional racer.
And most of the community needs to stop with the "AI is crap" mantra. The AI is doing what it is told to do, and it does it perfectly well. That is a far cry from bein a bad AI. PD keeps getting the signal that it's AI is bad, when the reality is that the implementation is bad. Well, it isn't even bad, so to speak, it's uninteresting because it's designed to let you win, and that is never fun.
Look no further than the rubber banding as proof.
I witness a great example in a race where I set up a custom race. I had my 429 Boss (tuned to 600PP) and I set a 2 lap race with "professional" level at the Red Bull Ring. The lead car was a ZR1.
It's a 2 lap race, so the bulk of the field let me by before the second corner. I was in 2nd place by turn 3. The ZR1 was already 6 seconds ahead.
The AI was ripping away doing a really good job, but again, this was set to be only 2 laps. I will repeat, the over riding philosophy is that the player should win. This is not a RACE. The player must WIN. So, the ZR1 immediately goes into slow mode so I could catch it. It paced itself perfectly so that I could catch it at the second to last corner, and it let me pass at the last corner, then, although it could have easily passed me, it sat behind me.
The fact that the AI is working so hard to allow me to win is the proof that it isn't "dumb procession AI" in that it cannot do better. It is actually very good AI, doing it's best to mask the fact that it's allowing me to win, right at the last corner!! (how exciting
If you are ever ahead, and the AI catches you, then it is outdriving you. I've seen the AI set the fastest lap in many instances, and I don't suck!! Even in these races, where the AI is clearly better than I am, I win. Why? Because the AI is set up to let the player win. It is not a race.
That 2 lap short race that I described also, CLEARLY, shows how the AI CAN adjust for difficulty on the fly. It COULD be better simply because you are better. It could, for instance, run at the "pro" level if you are a DR B or higher, run normal if you are a DR C, and run on easy if you have just started the game.
Again, philosophically different from other racers. Other games approach it with the concept that the player should be skilled enough to win and the AI provides a challenge to overcome. In GT, the philosophy is that the player should win, regardless of how good he/she is, and the AI should do it's best to hide the fact that it is letting the player win.
All they did with Sophy is remove the directive to let the player win.
- 287
- New Zealand
- Novice_Senior
I don't think they'd need to overcomplicate it with different AI. Get creative. If you skip quali the starting grid position could be the same as your last race finishing position, could be random, could let them choose a position. Difficulty would come from setting the AI difficulty like in most games.
Last edited:
MonoTonouS
(Banned)
- 656
- United States
Do people not realize there are grid start races in the game that work just fine, and that you can use grid start in both offline arcade and custom race, and they work just fine.. It's not a AI limitation, PD just loves the conga line.
- 7,224
- beyond down under
- Skython11
They're better in custom races yeah, but that only makes the point of the game's career progression being conga line even more ridiculous. Like, they could make the career mode have good races, but just choose not to. And the car randomization for custom races is mental, I drove a D-Type and the game's throwing VGT cars at me that way out perform everything else. And it's not really fair that if you want to race a full field of appropriate opponents you have to own them all, which in some categories can get very very expensive.
GT4 had qualifying, but only for championship events.
- 3,816
- London, Ontario
- voodoovaj
And this is why being clear about the issue is important. They are wasting resources on AI when the problem is game design.
Developed by 'Sony AI" (which is Sony) in association with "PDI" (which is also Sony). The question is whether the system exists in the game now, or not. I'm saying it is. Why? Because efficiency. New techniques will save computational overhead.
AI for racing games has been around since the dawn of the genre. There are many instances from decades past that have resulted in a really believable and entertaining experience. Why would new tech be needed if it has already been achieved many times over by competitors?( other than computational efficiency, or organizational efficiency),
Again, the SP is intentionally designed to let you win. Ergo, it is not a race. If Sophy is given the same directive, to let the player win, it will result in the same outcome.
All anyone needs to do is approach the race with the knowledge that the AI is going to put effort into letting you win, and then the behaviours start to make more sense. Like, on the Nurburgring, where they use their turn signals to tell you they are moving over for you.
It makes little sense to have two AI systems, or to wholesale change the system, while the game is live. It's FAR easier, and developmentally safer, to implement one system (Sophy) and tell it to sandbag until some later date.
(MY HOPES ARE THAT) When/If Sophy is officially introduced (ergo, allowed to actually show what it can do), it will come in the form of updated car balancing (both for us to use and in the car selection for races) and Co-Op racing in Single player. That's already being hinted at in the later SP races, where the front runners emulate GTWS drivers and the back markers are just no name cars. After all, they say that Sophy can emulate less skilled drivers rather than simply "go slow" (ergo it will brake too late, lose control, etc), so it should make for a very interesting event.
It definitely isn't. There is again just one person credited for AI in GT7.
If Sophy was in the game the team behind it would be credited, and it would be noticeable. The AI in GT7 is essentially the same as it's been for 12 years, because Atsushi Hayashi is the same person who has been doing it since GT5.
He had someone helping him for GT5+6, but he was the sole credit for GTS and GT7. Is it a coincidence that the AI has been this same format and skill level since GT5? I think not. It's all him.
Silver Arrows
(Banned)
- 4,715
- Brandon, MB
- Silver-Arrows21
The issue is, it's both. They work in conjunction with one another, and the AI has been a problem for as long as it has, but I definitely do agree that it ultimately comes down to game design.
But we're ultimately dealing with a company who does not believe issues are issues until the general gaming press criticizes it, which they have for years. And even then, it's unlikely that they do anything to work on it - except in this case, where they use a sledgehammer to crack open a chestnut, and likely do nothing to change the actual design of the races, so it leads to what we have in many of the chili difficulty races: AI that clocks in laps 30 seconds ahead of you, at a wicked pace, then slow down by the time of the first pit stop, and then once you pass them, begin to ramp back up in difficulty to make the race seem closer then it actually is.
Which, truth be told, is probably worse of a system then what Polyphony has done since GT5 launched and they needed something to make that game run decently in the framerate department.
- 100
- United Kingdom
GT aims for a difficulty progression - easy to start with followed by gradually more difficult races as the player gets more skilled. They don't want it to be too tough or too easy as this could turn us away.
The game has at least three tricks that I can see to set the difficulty level in any given race. First, the AI cars are generally slower than the player taking account of car PPs and the player's likely skill level when they reach that race. Second, the rolling start means that the player will be overtaking the AI cars at regular intervals. Ideally each race will end up with the player overtaking the last AI car on the last lap. Third, there's rubber-banding which is also aimed at the ideal of the player hitting P1 on the last lap or even the last bend.
It's all carefully orchestrated to produce entertainment. Lots of overtaking and a dramatic last lap finish.
Throw in grid starts and you mess with the entertainment formula. The player would have a good chance of qualifying high up the grid, then out accelerating the AI cars at the start. Most races would turn into a procession where you hardly ever see another car. It could all get too easy.
To get around this and keep it challenging, PD would need to fiddle with the AI car script to give them better acceleration at the start so that the player would find it hard to grab the lead and hold on to it throughout the race.
Not impossible, but not as easy as it might look.
Silver Arrows
(Banned)
- 4,715
- Brandon, MB
- Silver-Arrows21
Too bad that, within the main campaign of the game which they touted in promotional material, this doesn't happen except in one or two specific instances. It's all easy for anyone with even a modicum of skill in racing games - and it doesn't take away from the fact that the actual make up of the races is simply trying to chase after the rabbit, time and time again.
And yet when that's been the fulcrum of the entire single experience, for the past three numbered titles (and spin off) and nearly two decades worth of games, said artificial excitement and dramatics eventually wears thin. People want excitement and entertainment, but they also want it to be earned. Not handed to them.
lmao they're already a procession to begin with, except instead of being at the front, you're stuck chasing after cars 30 seconds ahead of you, and even if you put mega lap times in a good car, you still might not be able to catch 1st because it's just out of your reach...causing people to get pissed off and drop the difficulty down because there's no point to actually trying to race and have decent competition.
Other games make it look far easier. None are perfect, far from it, but they all at least manage the bare minimum of good pace.
Also the whole point of user difficulty selection, which PD finally added, is that the user can decide how hard or easy they start out at. Sadly, as usual, PD didn't do it properly and they ended up with user selected difficulty but still a fixed scaling difficulty.
Last edited:
- 100
- United Kingdom
GT has been like this since GT1. And yet we are both here.
Yes, it feels artificial. Yes, it's frustrating when you know the AI cars start with an advantage. Yes, I've been struggling for ages to come first in a Porsche on the Nurburgring, as I can never catch up with the damned rabbit.
But somehow I find that the more I practise the better I get. I've learned to switch off all the driver aids and to drive manual gears. I've bought a couple of Ferraris that I certainly couldn't afford IRL.
I suppose I'm a glass half full kind of guy.
- 600
- DeolTheBeast
- 110
- Taiwan
I started from GT4, played GT5, GT6, GTS and GT7.
Last few days I've finished purchasing all Gr.1s in GT7, tuned them down to 800 PP, and raced them in Sardegna WTC 800 and Spa 60 minutes. And suddenly I think I got it ...
After these cars tuned to 800PP they perform almost the same on the track. Plus/minus few seconds of lap time. The difference between them suddenly reduced to cab interior, or even worse, dare I say, because I use bumpercam -- only engine sound. (Well those Le Mans after '16 having hybrid drive certainly performs different, but all cars in this category still feels extremely similar).
But this is exactly what online competition (or the so-called "e-sport") asked for. Leveled playground. Nobody want to be in a disadvantageous position, nobody want to lose. But we are not car manufacturers who produced own cars and have to use their own car to participate in a race, we can choose from all those different cars from different manufacturers, and they have to behave (almost) the same, perhaps only differ in their "skins".
And they decided to educate/train players for "sportsmanship" so they bring these rules to single player game. We no longer have choice to chicken a race like it was in GT4 as a 2 A-Spec points game with a overpowered car. (Well technically we are still overpowered but at a constant ceiling)
This is no longer the "feel the difference of cars" game like GT4, for better or for worse.
Last few days I've finished purchasing all Gr.1s in GT7, tuned them down to 800 PP, and raced them in Sardegna WTC 800 and Spa 60 minutes. And suddenly I think I got it ...
After these cars tuned to 800PP they perform almost the same on the track. Plus/minus few seconds of lap time. The difference between them suddenly reduced to cab interior, or even worse, dare I say, because I use bumpercam -- only engine sound. (Well those Le Mans after '16 having hybrid drive certainly performs different, but all cars in this category still feels extremely similar).
But this is exactly what online competition (or the so-called "e-sport") asked for. Leveled playground. Nobody want to be in a disadvantageous position, nobody want to lose. But we are not car manufacturers who produced own cars and have to use their own car to participate in a race, we can choose from all those different cars from different manufacturers, and they have to behave (almost) the same, perhaps only differ in their "skins".
And they decided to educate/train players for "sportsmanship" so they bring these rules to single player game. We no longer have choice to chicken a race like it was in GT4 as a 2 A-Spec points game with a overpowered car. (Well technically we are still overpowered but at a constant ceiling)
This is no longer the "feel the difference of cars" game like GT4, for better or for worse.
