Kazunori Yamauchi on Gran Turismo Fan Expectations, SUVs, Expensive Wheels, Tourist Trophy, and More

[Everpure]

We ran a C-segment estate and a C-segment CUV simultaneously for a while. There was only one thing the estate was better at: fuel economy, because it was a modern hybrid and not a 15-year old petrol-only. Everything else the CUV blasted the estate away. Guess which one we still have, as an only car?

Two particularly important parts for us are the considerably higher H5, which allows much easier ingress and egress without having to drop or climb, and the fact that the boot is both larger and higher, which allows use of all five seats and the wheelchair and luggage/shopping in the boot at the same time - or three in the cabin plus dogs, and chair and luggage in the boot. The estate needed either the chair at home or the shopping/luggage on the rear seat; not much good for a supermarket run or a family holiday.

Still, I guess people with disabilities just don't deserve the independence that cars offer, right? I mean, they certainly shouldn't enjoy it...


Our youngest daughter walks to school and always has.

It’s fine when your use cases are different. But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a higher risk of accidents with SUVs, because they’re larger, higher and many real world SUV drivers are not up to the challenge. Traffic accidents statistics in Germany prove that point. And because they’re basically a wall driving forward, compared to lower estates, they are significantly less efficient on fuel consumption.
Again, your mileage may vary, but for most people, I’d still argue that estates have more than enough seating and luggage space.
And yes, elderly or disabled people might prefer a higher entrance into a car. But that doesn’t take away from my above points either. It’s not all either/or.

 

[ShiftingGears]

Honestly, I feel more convinced that the Microtransactions implemented for GT7 were more so Sony-influenced rather than Kaz's choice due to the fact they feel like there isn't much effort into them. Yeah, there's cars that are absurdly expensive and appear for a limited time. But those are primarily cars you don't need to beat the GT Cafe mode with and aren't present much. The only incentive for me to get a Ferrari 250 GTO is just because I want one. For Sport Mode, players most of the time are seemingly using Gr.1-4 cars with a heavy emphasis on Gr.3 from what I heard.

Gr.3 cars aren't that expensive in the grand scheme of things with most costing 450,000cr and Gr.4 costing 350,000 cr on average. Most Gr.2 & 1 cars could be had with 1-2 races on the LeMans WTC race that paysout 850,000 cr after 30 mins of gameplay.

--------
Compared to GTA Online with its shark cards and other nonsense or the loot boxes I've heard about in some FPS games from Activision or EA for instance, GT7's use of MTs is very light. They're there, but they're not pushed anywhere near the extent of the previous 2 companies I mentioned.

PD put a lot of effort into designing the economy and particular the scarcity of cars around microtransactions. They put more thought and effort into it than the event design in GT7

I also dont think GTs microtransactions are any better than GTA shark cards. The most expensive vehicle in GTA costs you $120 US to buy with microtransactions.

The most expensive vehicle in GT7 costs you $200 US in microtransactions.

 

[MatskiMonk]

PD put a lot of effort into designing the economy and particular the scarcity of cars around microtransactions.

Interesting supposition, but I'm still not really seeing any evidence for this.

 

[Famine]

It’s not all either/or.

Which is somewhat the point I was making, as your previous post was more unequivocal about SUVs and their owners.

 

[RandomCarGuy17]

PD put a lot of effort into designing the economy and particular the scarcity of cars around microtransactions. They put more thought and effort into it than the event design in GT7

They pushed for the scarcity of cars you don't need to beat any race with. They literally serve no purpose other than just wanting them, but there's no consequence to not getting them right away. The scarcity was done as nothing more, than a haphazard idea to bring "realism" into the game. That and for player retention, Kaz wants players to take their time saving up and buying cars instead of having them all in a couple of months. His mindset for doing this granted is still very, VERY flawed and stupid. But that's definitely the mindset he has.

I also dont think GTs microtransactions are any better than GTA shark cards. The most expensive vehicle in GTA costs you $120 US to buy with microtransactions.

The most expensive vehicle in GT7 costs you $200 US in microtransactions.

True, but the MTs were never pushed by PD nor marketed. Rockstar on the other hand markets the hell out of their shark cards and promotes them all of the time. Plus added a subscription service to their online model, GTA+ makes GTA online in my mind already worse than anything done with GT7.

 

[sonnyboychris]

Honestly, I feel more convinced that the Microtransactions implemented for GT7 were more so Sony-influenced rather than Kaz's choice due to the fact they feel like there isn't much effort into them.

To your credit, PSVR2 feels the same way and for similar reasons.

 

[MatskiMonk]

They pushed for the scarcity of cars you don't need to beat any race with. They literally serve no purpose other than just wanting them, but there's no consequence to not getting them right away. The scarcity was done as nothing more, than a haphazard idea to bring "realism" into the game.

Plus the most scarce cars are blocked by RNG, doesn't matter how many extra credits you buy if you don't get the invites.

 

[hawkeyez]

I think one of GT7’s biggest downfalls of single player is the fact that it doesn’t have races for all vehicles. I don’t know how many times I go to do a race and it says “road car” yet my race car is right in that PP range and tires. So what do we do instead? Custom race which is only good if you can manage to get the right cars and settings.

If not that then Quick Race against regular AI or Sophy. Except if you do that sometimes it litters the field with those safety cars which takes you right out of the game. Here I am in an old Porsche Spyder battling it out with a dodge charger safety car or whatever it is.

GT7 could benefit from having proper classes instead of just throwing a bunch of cars in. Even cars that should/could be in the same class… aren’t. Because they gave us the “crappy” GT40, not the one that ran against the P4. So we are left to tuning trying to fit different cars into groups for online races.

It all feels Willy Nilly to me in that regard. Unless you want to race GR.4, GR.3, GR.2 and GR.1.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

“Here’s one Can Am car (2J), here’s one Group 5 car (Skyline Silhouette), here’s the Porsche 917K but not the Ferrari 512… etc”. - yours truly, Polyphony Digital

 

[05XR8]

It all feels Willy Nilly to me in that regard. Unless you want to race GR.4, GR.3, GR.2 and GR.1.

…and ironically it’s funny not funny that a few people complain to shew players to go play Assetto Corsa Competizione if “they” want to drive GT3 and GT4 cars. Pretty much the bread and butter of Gran Turismo 7 events that offer the most Credits.

 

[hawkeyez]

…and ironically it’s funny not funny that a few people complain to shew players to go play Assetto Corsa Competizione if “they” want to drive GT3 and GT4 cars. Pretty much the bread and butter of Gran Turismo 7 events that offer the most Credits.

I would say perhaps ACC has better physics and force feedback and maybe is all around more realistic. I personally can’t get into it. The one thing that GT7 had over that game is being able to customize your car with a livery. ACC you just pick a preset livery/car and you’re on your way.

ACC wins for having a better radar. I would think if all you ever want to drive is GR.3 then ACC might be your ticket to a proper race sim for console. I stick with GT7 because it’s got the older cars and race cars. PC2 and AC are fairly dated now on console other wise I might have stuck with them. It’s tough to jump from sim to sim and be competitive in my opinion.

GT7, you’re right, the bread and butter of events are those classes. I really miss GT Legends so maybe that’s where my wanting more vintage race events comes from. I’ve probably raced the historic events more than any other events besides Sardegna grind. So the game feels like we have about idk five historic? And they’re all limited to that 580pp. I wish we had more historic events and a few different pp suggestions.

 

[05XR8]

I would say perhaps ACC has better physics and force feedback and maybe is all around more realistic. I personally can’t get into it. The one thing that GT7 had over that game is being able to customize your car with a livery. ACC you just pick a preset livery/car and you’re on your way.

ACC wins for having a better radar. I would think if all you ever want to drive is GR.3 then ACC might be your ticket to a proper race sim for console. I stick with GT7 because it’s got the older cars and race cars. PC2 and AC are fairly dated now on console other wise I might have stuck with them. It’s tough to jump from sim to sim and be competitive in my opinion.

GT7, you’re right, the bread and butter of events are those classes. I really miss GT Legends so maybe that’s where my wanting more vintage race events comes from. I’ve probably raced the historic events more than any other events besides Sardegna grind. So the game feels like we have about idk five historic? And they’re all limited to that 580pp. I wish we had more historic events and a few different pp suggestions.

GT Sport have all those. Cant see why Kaz/PD haven’t rehashed those as it can be done properly in this game.
As an example, the Superbird Daytona weekly used the five-speed transmissions. Same could be done to the Vintage Le Mans race AI cars(Mach 1, 250 GTO Berlinetta, etc.) from GT Sport.

I’m suprised, but not, PD haven’t made a classic Fuji race with the Skylines, Z cars, 2000GT, CSLs, 911s and Alfa. It’s all right there.

 

[hawkeyez]

GT Sport have all those. Cant see why Kaz/PD haven’t rehashed those as it can be done properly in this game.
As an example, the Superbird Daytona weekly used the five-speed transmissions. Same could be done to the Vintage Le Mans race AI cars(Mach 1, 250 GTO Berlinetta, etc.) from GT Sport.

I’m suprised, but not, PD haven’t made a classic Fuji race with the Skylines, Z cars, 2000GT, CSLs, 911s and Alfa. It’s all right there.

Yeah I’d actually like a Cobra/Daytona Coupe race at Spa. I think some of the downfall to the historic races is anything with a muscle car, they just top out. Max speed of like 120mph. So we’re stuck trying to make a custom race of faster muscle car tunes but it’s very tricky.

Just give me Sophy running the cars I tell it to run, if Sophy is as ground breaking as they make it out to be I should be able to populate the track with my tunes, have Sophy drive them and have some killer races.

Lately I’ve raced more regular AI vs Sophy and I do notice Sophy is much better to race against. But again, it’s limited to 2 or 3 laps. Does Sophy have a bedtime or something? Haha

 

[05XR8]

Wonder if we"ll see a group like this in GT7.

 

[Ande3200]

Wonder if we"ll see a group like this in GT7.

I think its possible. Kaz said all this way back he wanted to added suvs witch he have now With Lamborghini urus.

 

[05XR8]

It’ll be interesting if one of the collab Ioniq N are coming in this next update. All those different performance modes might not be available, but a nice shake up to compare it with the Taycan turbo and Tesla.

 

[MIE1992]

It’ll be interesting if one of the collab Ioniq N are coming in this next update. All those different performance modes might not be available, but a nice shake up to compare it with the Taycan turbo and Tesla.

Fully agreed, and I'd love to see the Purosangue as well. And speaking of cross-overs/SUVs, I think it'd be genuinely neat to see that Toyota C-HR that raced at the Nurburgring, perhaps as an additional Gr.4 entry, as well as the N24-spec Lexus LFA.

 

[ShiftingGears]

Interesting supposition, but I'm still not really seeing any evidence for this.

They pushed for the scarcity of cars you don't need to beat any race with. They literally serve no purpose other than just wanting them, but there's no consequence to not getting them right away. The scarcity was done as nothing more, than a haphazard idea to bring "realism" into the game. That and for player retention, Kaz wants players to take their time saving up and buying cars instead of having them all in a couple of months. His mindset for doing this granted is still very, VERY flawed and stupid. But that's definitely the mindset he has.

True, but the MTs were never pushed by PD nor marketed. Rockstar on the other hand markets the hell out of their shark cards and promotes them all of the time. Plus added a subscription service to their online model, GTA+ makes GTA online in my mind already worse than anything done with GT7.

They reframed the entire purpose of the game to be explicitly around car collection and becoming a car collector, the credit grind is harder than ever than any previous game (was certainly true in the first 18 months), cars do not appear for months at a time and reappear for two weeks to create FOMO, features to track used car prices are put in the game so you fixate on the price of the cars for realism and yet you can't sell cars for a similar price, and any exploit that results in credits gets an immediate hotfix while other issues stay in the game.

Notice how any "realism" in this game only applies to when you sink credits into it, and not you gaining credits like selling cars you own. Not unique to GT, but the realism excuse is a cop out.



The above is a good summary of different ways game developer incentivises extracting money out of the player base after launch and there is a lot of methods highlighted in this video that Polyphony Digital has employed in GT7.

 

[HarVee]

It’s all right there.

That's the problem with GT7 in a nutshell. It's all right there, as said, but PD don't seem to either realize that or are so caught up in their GTWS BS that they don't care. For a game that was marketed as being a return of the single player format it's quite sad that its predecessor (GT Sport), a game which was originally marketed as an online-oriented title, ends up having the better single player campaign.

 

[Veil26]

It’s fine when your use cases are different. But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a higher risk of accidents with SUVs, because they’re larger, higher and many real world SUV drivers are not up to the challenge. Traffic accidents statistics in Germany prove that point. And because they’re basically a wall driving forward, compared to lower estates, they are significantly less efficient on fuel consumption.
Again, your mileage may vary, but for most people, I’d still argue that estates have more than enough seating and luggage space.
And yes, elderly or disabled people might prefer a higher entrance into a car. But that doesn’t take away from my above points either. It’s not all either/or.

To be honest, I wonder why you guys would want SUVs in a game that is called "Gran Turismo". Just google the word, and you'll see it is mostly about performance coupés (not even strictly sports cars). If I look at the car selection, it is mostly sports cars and coupés, plus agile or high-performance versions of normal road cars (e.g. a Golf GTI). You can see many of these cars on real life track days.

Now, would you want normal family cars in the game? In the past, we've had Mercedes S-Class racing BMW 7 and Lotus Omega, which was kind of fun, maybe just because these cars handled worse than sports cars. Later, GT4 (I believe) had Citroen Xantia and C5, Opel/Vauxhall Vectra and more. We recently got the Volvo Station Wagon, but I am not sure what we would race it against. I agree with many of the comments above that a new car class only makes sense when there is a couple of them available to compete with each other.

Now, some of you want to open a new bucket with SUVs, yet you need to consider 2 aspects:
1. SUVs are not one class of cars - essentially, you have the extremes already present in the game with the Lambo Urus and the Suzuki on the other end of the range. You would thus either have to focus on just one segment, our you'd have to flood the game with SUVs (instead of other cars) in order to satisfy the needs of some in this thread.
2. SUVs, by being as high as they are, offer a multitude of disadvantages in road keeping:

• higher weight reduces accelaration and makes braking less efficient (not even counting fading)
• higher front surface increases drag, reducing top speed (and acceleration to a degree)
• higher center of gravity reduces cornering speed

Why - if not for the fun of the bad handling - would you then want SUVs in a racing game? But you already do have that with the pickups. I'm missing the Dodge RAM there, though...

If I had to choose among all cars out there, a few SUV come into my mind that would make sense: 2 versions of the Pajero that had figured in earlier releases, plus other Paris-Dakar cars (Touareg, X3,...). I can imagine so many cars that make a petrol head's heart beat faster (e.g. where is Lotus, I'd love to see a range of their cars, for example, which we did have in earlier GT releases, or the historic DTM cars), and SUVs wouldn't be high on that list.

Lastly, as cars are likely competing for computing time to be entered in the game, I'd rather not have any VGT car at all, nor GT3 or GT4 versions of road cars that never existed. There are enough real-world sports or race cars out there that are still missing, including true classics...

 

[Sprite]

Why - if not for the fun of the bad handling - would you then want SUVs in a racing game? But you already do have that with the pickups. I'm missing the Dodge RAM there, though...

I’ll just leave you with a video of one of the latest hot SUVs doing fun stuff.



Personally I’m not a fan of SUV’s but if they’re added to and game not just GT, then how is that a bad thing?

As a developer Polyphony are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. They can’t please everyone all of the time.

Quite a lot of manufactures make an SUV in their lineup. If not multiple variations of and SUV for some of the larger companies.

Not to mention we’ve historically had SUV’s prior to GT7 with the Stormer Concept for example.

 

[Tornado]

To be honest, I wonder why you guys would want SUVs in a game that is called "Gran Turismo".

Because each Gran Turismo game probably costs over a hundred million dollars to make now and the wide nest therefore cast for the audience of people who buy Gran Turismo games aren't buying the cars they bought twenty years ago where the rest of your post would matter. The fact that crossover SUVs are functionally the standard vehicle in 2024, and will only become moreso as electric cars proliferate throughout the market, is something that you are just going to have to accept because that fact is going to start being reflected in any game that's not only sports cars.


Gran Turismo has literally always included random pap family cars. It was in fact regularly cited as it's decisive competitive advantage in the early days of competing with Sega GT and the early Forza games that were branded with terms like "supercar heavy" in comparison. It's not suddenly a weakness that Gran Turismo has done that just because that logically must mean PD start including crossover SUVs. If you want modern cars in your game and you don't want that game to only be two door sports cars, you will have to start including SUVs because that is increasingly the only thing several car manufacturers make because it is increasingly the only thing people buy.

 

[Veil26]

Because each Gran Turismo game probably costs over a hundred million dollars to make now and the wide nest therefore cast for the audience of people who buy Gran Turismo games aren't buying the cars they bought twenty years ago where the rest of your post would matter. The fact that crossover SUVs are functionally the standard vehicle in 2024, and will only become moreso as electric cars proliferate throughout the market, is something that you are just going to have to accept because that fact is going to start being reflected in any game that's not only sports cars.


Gran Turismo has literally always included random pap family cars. It was in fact regularly cited as it's decisive competitive advantage in the early days of competing with Sega GT and the early Forza games that were branded with terms like "supercar heavy" in comparison. It's not suddenly a weakness that Gran Turismo has done that just because that logically must mean PD start including crossover SUVs. If you want modern cars in your game and you don't want that game to only be two door sports cars, you will have to start including SUVs because that is increasingly the only thing several car manufacturers make because it is increasingly the only thing people buy.

I agree with everything you say, except for one aspect: people buy SUVs because they want the space for families, want to sit high up, have a good view, and want to enter the cars with a straight back. I understand that these cars are therefore selling well, yet that doesn't make them anymore suitable for races.

 

[Famine]

that doesn't make them anymore suitable for races.

Than what?

GT's car list has always been wide and weird - in fact the SUV (although really a CUV, but few see the distinction) on my drive has actually been in GT previously in concept form - and the idea that anything you can come up with is less suitable for racing than the Subaru Pleo, Honda Odyssey, or the Toyota pod (one of the most popular cars to ever appear in just one GT game) is a bizarre one.

There were a lot of odd misconceptions in your post, including the one about "cars are likely competing for computing time to be entered in the game" (which is absolutely not true), which mainly seem to boil down to your personal disfavour of SUVs rather than anything objective.

Although that's largely because there's no objective reason to be against it. GT isn't about only having the fastest, most effective way round any track - and if it were, there'd be one car in the game.

where is Lotus

Near Norwich. However the brand's cars are not in the game following a contract dispute ahead of GT Sport's eventual launch.

Lotus, I'd love to see a range of their cars, for example

Let's start here:

 

[Veil26]

Thank you for enlightening me about Lotus - what a pity. The Esprit and Elise were just so much fun.

I would just like to clarify one misunderstanding: where I wrote computing time, I meant time for the developers to put the cars in. We are getting roughly 4 per month, right?

I guess the best cars to be put into the game would be those that get the most votes by the user community. If they value a Cayenne or an X5 higher than a Merc SL, an Aston DB10 or a DTM Calibra, so be it. It wouldn't be bad if Kaz read the car wish lists here. If I am the dinosaur out there in terms of taste, then I'll bow to the majority.

I just do not think that real life sales is what should matter for car inclusion in the game. This is about dream cars, after all, isn't it, at least to a degree? Else we'd be stuck with Golfs in Germany, Clios in France, and Fiat 500s in Italy, F-150s in the US and Yaris/Vitz in Japan. All these are there, interestingly, but whose favorite are they?

 

[Famine]

I would just like to clarify one misunderstanding: where I wrote computing time, I meant time for the developers to put the cars in

I didn't misunderstand.

The fundamental limitation on getting cars into the game is licensing. No car that appears in the game does so at the expense of any other car that could have done so.