So, as many of you know, GT7 has not been well received by quite a large part of the community, with the game initially getting review bombed to be among the worst PS5 games of all time, and was at one point in the bottom 5 games of all time.
And, for all of us who play the game, it's not really hard to understand why. However, I initially thought that GT7 had only a few "big" problems to fix, and nothing more than that.
But, after looking at the features offered in past games, of the same franchise and developer, and also, looking at the times we live in (we are in 2022), the game has actually a rather gigantic list of problems, some of which I haven't seen being mentioned in this whole forum (maybe I missed it).
All of these problems range from the actual game structure and design, how unpolished it is to even basic quality of life features. The game also has a lot of good things, some of them even enough to make some types of players stick around, but those don't need to be talked about, as they are fine the way they are. This is just about focusing on the negatives.
I decided to make this thread for us all to not just list the problems, but also discuss them, and if they are easily fixable/added/removed or, in the case of some of you, if any listed problem, is not a problem at all, and if so, I would like a really good justification for that.
Without further delay, I'll list all the problems I've found with this game (and oh boy are there a lot of them, even after 6 months of updates) and I'll list them in no particular order, I'll just number them.
PROBLEMS:
1. Massive lack of single player campaign content compared to past main titles. For reference, even after 6 months of updates, it has about 1/10th of the content of GT4, a game from almost 20 years ago. Even GT Sport, an online game focused game and the game used as a Prologue for this, manages to have over twice the single-player content. The café should be a single mode of the game, to collect cars, and not the real campaign mode. It's atrocious in design for it to be, no championships for each car type, no notable endurance races, nothing and some prizes instead of being big monetary rewards or cars, are roulettes that can give you potentially 2.000 credits, ridiculous. Past GTs, GT4 in particular, had the almost perfect formula for this, why change something that doesn't need to fixed?
2. License tests, aside from a very small amount of events, which is only up until National A License, are worthless.
3. In certain game events, like the License tests and Missions for example, you get rewarded a Bronze prize and a Gold prize, yet you don't get rewarded for a Silver prize. In past games of the franchise, we had these prizes. We might as well not even have the Silver time requirement at all really since they are pointless, no incentive for them at all.
4. The implemented Collector Level can go up to a maximum of 50, yet it's absolutely useless after level 20.
5. Worst economy/grind out of all Gran Turismo titles and it probably ranks very high even amongst other games as well. It takes almost 300 hours of just grinding the single best event in the game to collect all cars in the game, which is the "objective" the game provides you, and there are only 4 events, which are single races, that give the "best amount of credits" in a "reasonable time period", as otherwise, all other forms of grinding make this a thousands of hours long grind.
6. Why can't we change cars in the Tuning shop/GT Auto? Why do we have to get out of these places, go to the Garage, select another car, and then go back to the same place for us to do what we need with the car?
7. In the 1 Lap Magic missions, why do we have to wait for the timer to go down every single time? How hard can it be to just make a smaller countdown of 3-2-1 with the other cars already en route in the track with the time adjustments for the event? Have they not learned from GT4 Mission 34?
8. Music Rally serves absolutely no purpose.
9. In GT Sport, we had an incentive to go to a race and win it with an underperforming car to receive a higher payout for our efforts in doing so. No such thing exists in GT7.
10. Almost all races in this game have you starting last and in a single row with the leader usually between 10 to sometimes even 40 seconds ahead of you. Making this more of a Mission than an actual race.
11. No qualifying in any single player race. It doesn't exist at all when we had past games of the franchise with this, a rather famous and very important part of racing. Calling it a disappointment for not being in the game is putting it quite lightly.
12. The game provides you with 3 difficulty settings for the single player campaign. Yet it doesn't provide you with any benefits for choosing the harder difficulty settings, basically not giving you any insentive at all to choose the harder setting.
13. The widebody kits from GT Auto are permanent and can't be removed, ever. You are stuck with it and basically have to buy another car if you want one of the same model with and another without it.
14. GT-Auto offers you the option to wash your car, yet your car is always clean after a race. Basically, why do we even have this in the game if we can't get the car dirty?
15. No USB custom import music like we had in the PS3 era with GT5 and instead we have to rely on another application like Spotify.
16. Overcomplicated UI. Why in the bloody hell do we have to move from track menu to track menu to find a racing event? Why can't we have 2 menus, one with the racing events laid out like the past Gran Turismos (eg. Clubman Cup, Sunday Cup, etc) and another menu for the World Circuit tracks for us to do time trialing and custom races?
17. All past Gran Turismo games, even GT Sport which was purely online focused, allowed you to sell cars. I could understand not being able to sell cars if we were not allowed to have duplicates and we have to collect them all, but we can have them in the form of the event prizes and the daily workout ticket. Plus, most people don't even care about half the cars or even more than that, and yet have to be stuck with said car, not even being capable of discarding it at all unless it has duplicates.
18. Past Gran Turismos allowed the player to be able to redo certain events and they could win the prize car every time said championship/race event was completed and won by the player, making the grind much less boring. In Gran Turismo 4, the cars that we could win in Events from the game were non-purchasable, and thus we knew we could gain them instead of wasting credits purchasing them without the knowledge that we could win them for "free".
19. Liveries and styles have to be saved before they can be applied, even a goddamn simple paint job. ... Really?
20. The car paint job preview has 4 demo cars instead of your actual car in use. Again... Really?
21. The game has implemented an "Invitation" feature to buy certain valuable post-2001 cars in the game but you can only win it via RNG through the daily workout ticket which has very low odds of giving one to you. So, it's not enough that the cars themselves are already expensive, but we also have to rely on RNG to get an invitation to buy them, and we have a time limit to buy them after getting said invitation. Extremely bad implementation of such a feature.
22. The game has implemented "Engine Swaps", where you can engine swap engines from one car to another. However, you can only get them via RNG through the daily workout ticket and it has extremely low odds of awarding you one. Even if you play every single day, it can take you a decade to be lucky enough to get the 40+ or so engine swaps available in the game, and it gets worse because PD keeps on adding more of them each update but the odds remain the same.
23. The game has implemented "Special Car Parts", parts that give an extra boost over the already normal car tuning parts. However you can only get them via RNG through the daily workout ticket and it has extremely low odds of awarding you one. To get all 200+ unique parts, it can take over a century. No, this is not an exageration, it really is how long it would take with the odds given.
24. The normal tuning parts awarded in the daily workout ticket are specific to a single car.
25. The daily workout ticket has a set prize as soon as you are rewarded the ticket, it can't even be changed by exiting the game and re-opening, thus predetermined. Yet it is presented to you as a roulette with a 5 prizes. Basically making you waste time and I would go as far as trying to deceive you by making you think you can win 1 of those 5 prizes when in reality the 4 other prizes are there just for the roullete animation. PD somehow found it necessary to animate some of the roulletes lighting effects and animation via updates... Baffling...
26. We don't have a data logger (telemtry data basically) like we had in GT5.
27. We don't have a menu for test driving our cars acceleration, drag racing times, top speed, like we had in almost all GT titles prior.
28. The game has Drag Racing implemented in some of the Mission menus, yet we can't create these races ourselves in single player, and even worse, we can't make them Online.
29. Lobbies are worse than they were in GT Sport. It took them 6 months to add the quick chat (lol) and there's still no ability to change settings mid-lobby, you have to create a new lobby to change the track and the lag in these make it almost impossible to race/drive with other people.
30. Very few daily DR/SR rated races in Sport Mode and almost all of the time it's always the same category of cars (Gr.4/Gr.3). There's only 3 of them and you have to wait almost every time several minutes to do another one. And all of them are BoP because Tuning (Performance Points) is broken.
31. Performance Points/Tuning are/is glitchable, in the way that a car can have very low PP but perform as if it was much better (example of the Tomahawk X glicth).
32. Massive lack of brand new tracks or even existing tracks from past GTs.
33. You can't save your own ghost and reload it later. ... lol
34. LCD cars can take 1 month or more to reappear again (it used to be over 2 months). Creating an unnecessary FOMO feeling for the players, even more so with how expensive some of these cars can be.
35. Unpolished search function in your garage options. Doesn't even provide you with a way to search a car by just typing part of its name. Again, more unnecessary clicking.
36. The game requires to be always-online even to play the single-player content. Without an internet connection, the game is basically unplayable garbage.
37. Microtransactions exist on a game we paid 80€ (70$ for our american friends) for. And to make them worse, their value is borderline criminal.
38. The Gran Turismo 7 AI is... see it for yourself: PS: The Lamborghini Veneno is the player, other cars are AI.
EDIT: Added listed problems:
39. We can't pause or see race information during a pit stop in custom races.
40. We can't save during a race to play it later. A feature that was present in GT5.
41. In previous Gran Turismos, we could jump races during championships, effectively making the championship last less time while also winning it and get the final prize money. In GT7 we have to finish all of the races, even after you have secured the championship by the 3rd or 4th race, it doesn't allow you to jump races at all.
42. No information of the weather before the race.
43. Weather is still only available in some tracks.
44. The Nordschleife tourist layout, One of the most crowded track in GT Sport lobbies is only available in Time trial in single player mode. I again, can't understand the reason for this.
45. In the Lobbies, you can't sort them by how full they are. This is important because most of the time people want to go into the lobbies that already have a good amount of people in them.
46. Collections (photos, replays, liveries, etc) have a smaller limit than in GT Sport. In GT7 you have a limit of 2000 for all of them combined, where in GT Sport you had 1000 for every distinct thing. Again, why go backwards on this?
