my Gran Turismo Depression Arc

[Il_Conte_Sky]

Hello guys, I'm Stefano
Long time GT player since ~2008
Gran Turismo has been part of my life since then, in various extents troughout the years but it's been always a constant in my life.
First as a more casual gamer, falling in love discovering Motorsports culture thanks to GT4, than as a dedicated player on GT5 and 6, where I managed to reach results I'm still today proud of. Then as an ESports Player/Manager on GTSport and 7, reaching the apex of my potential as a GT player and then "retiring" and becoming manager of a well established team on the Italian GT scene. We are now partnered with a big Italian Multigaming and I mainly help to create races and championships for them. I'm happy with what I'm personally doing with my "GT Life" to be honest, considering it's still a side-hustle to my IRL job and career.
What I'm not happy of...well...it's the game and the direction it's going.
The very reason why I went full ESports mode in the first place is because of GTSport, basically. Especially in 2018-2019, the potential for growth was huge and it seemed like only the start of something historical. We felt like real pioneers of an ESport, and I know I'm not the only one who has these feelings
Long story short: now in 2024 I feel forsaken by GT7, Kaz and Poliphony Digital
Watching Gran Turismo 7 unfold, month after month, patch by patch, while nothing was being accomplished to made an upgrade to the Online experience over GTSport, nothing was made to improve the Quality of life of Sport Mode and Lobbies (except literal breadcrumbs like Start Timer and Weather preview), while having to watch the singleplayer side of the community getting all the few content almost every single patch, has been one of the most coping, tiring, psychologically abusive experiences I had to endure in my gaming life.
I find myself today here, basically venting, because My First GT (while being a product I don't really mind existing) has been ultimate proof to me of what Modern GT really boils down for Kaz and PD: an Encyclopedic, Museum-like, mostly singleplayer experience, aimed at catching as many casual players as possible whilst not aiming to retain them in the long run. Which is indeed underlined by Kaz confirming that PD is going to dedicate a slice of the development time to update this Free To Play title, made specifically to reinforce this concept and teach it to new players... well if this is not a sign of the future direction GT is gonna take, I don't know what is. And this final piece, completing the U-Turn GT7 started after GTSport, feels like a slap in the face for me.
I hope I'm wrong... but the "Onlinecommunity" era of GT (from GT5P to GTSport) could be over with GT7.
It's been an era that created a generation of dedicated players, who learnt to have fun in both creation and competition, of players who still had to compensate for the game's shortcomings, but had the tools and the right additions to do so (like GT6 Clubs), and thanks to this, the possibility of cultivating healthy and non-stagnant communities. And finally a generation that, for those who wanted to believe in it, was promised a bright future through the Sport mode.
Instead, in my view, Sport mode was managed with laziness and made stagnant.
GTWS turned out to be a mere showcase for GT and its partners, and nothing else.
GT6 Clubs have been a collective dream, apparently.
Lobbies have almost regressed compared to 14 (fourteen) years ago.
Almost all communities I knew from back then have closed. Only the last bastions remain, consisting of groups of friends, like my original team from which I started all the way back.
The most popular GT-themed content is on how to farm as quickly as possible. Or the best Gr.3 cars and such.
Almost all the passionate and dedicated players I know have long since run out of things to do on GT7.
Those who have not already changed their main game and want to continue playing GT daily, unavoidably flock online to discuss with other bored players what they want to see in the future, ultimately disagreeing and arguing (and I admit I'm a major offender on this, expecially on Twitter) in an infinite loop where the only common denominator is one: none of this will ever be taken into consideration by Poliphony.
Many of the things that would at least alleviate this tiring and abusive relationship between this OG playerbase and GT are already available to the devs, or implementable in a relatively short time, but the focus seems no longer on any of this. I feel like the dedicated player is no longer welcome, the important thing is that he bought the game, not if he continues to play it.
I feel like the brand's direction has been always poorly balanced in the last 7 to 8 years: GTSport has been a drastic U-Turn from traditional GT, and now GT7 is yet another U-Turn from the direction GTSport was taking. And instead on working hard on trying their best to give an enjoyable experience to everyone, Kaz&PD are just enjoying their "2022 new lifestyle" while neglecting all their core playerbases, both the OG Online Community born on GT5-6, and the ESports community born in GTSport. And in my opinion this has gravely fed into the huge divide that there is nowadays between singleplayer and online/sport players of this game.
Finally, if the game's not for me anymore, why I don't just call quits and, like kind people suggested me online, "fornicate" myself away on IRacing/ACC/Insert your PC simulator here"?
Well, that's complicated.
At this moment I have a moral commitment to my ESports Team project. That I want to carry forward until it is sustainable to do so. Probably, if everything goes ahead, I will be forced to buy the next GT title to do it, even if on a personal level I would not be very inclined... because unfortunately I see very little sustainability for ESports in the direction that Gran Turismo has now taken. At least for online players.
This is my conundrum, the Depression Arc I'm now in. A guy admittedly still in love with a game while being neglected by its devs, committed to a project involving said game, not able to distance himself from the source of his frustrations.
For anyone of you who disagrees with my view of GT7, I accept it, but I would like to ask you: what did you do today on Gran Turismo? How many hours a week can you play GT7 without getting bored?
If the answer is positive, congratulations: you have Found Your Line.
I didn't make it though, and under these conditions, I don't know if I will ever make it. Thanks for your attention, and take care ❤️

 

[Met Entso]

I feel you, as a plain online player of the game, it's hard to believe how careless they are about easy to implement (maybe apparently) improvements on the online game. They just don't care I guess? Honestly i have no idea.

And not to talk about online VR...

My impression is that they do the hard work, the core of the game, really solid, and for some unknown reason they don't code the fine tuning of what surrounds that GT7 game core. They don't exploit it to it's full potential. Why PD?

 

[Hdbd04]

Sometimes I feel the growing negligence starts with the lack of any modern replacements for any irl Gr.3 car that is already more than a decade old.

Although seeing how much of the same Sport Mode is with it's plus and flaws, with a few additions or even improvements makes me sad

 

[MatskiMonk]

It's unfortunate if the game hasn't developed in the way you hoped, but I don't think anybody feels that any aspect of the game is as good as it could be, neither single player types or online types. Sure, there's obvious features missing from online, but that's true of lots of aspects of the game.

Currently the trophy for finishing a single sport mode race is at 12.1%, for finishing 50 it's at 2.5%. Whichever way you look at it, there's a lot of GT players that don't care about online play or eSports (I'm one of them), so I'd simply suggest that if you're looking to continue developing an eSports community GT just isn't the best game to base it around.

 

[Clinton Ducks]

It’s not just online/sport mode that’s somewhat lacklustre though. Even though they keep throwing content at the single player side of things, there’s still some fundamental issues that have been there since even (much) earlier games in the series.

Mainly that the AI behaviour has arguably never been great in any GT game all the way back to the very beginning, and it seems like it’s something they don’t have all that much interest in improving.

It’s like you (OP) say, the game is more of a car museum type thing than anything to do with the actual sporting side of motorsport. It can be both though, which is what I don’t get.

 

[Il_Conte_Sky]

Sure, there's obvious features missing from online, but that's true of lots of aspects of the game.

Sorry, didn't want to sound like I'm envying the singleplayer side of the game...Last month I had to create 4 new accounts we use for Hosting the Lobbies of our championships, and since you unlock the racetracks via the Menus and Collectors points I had to pretty much complete 4 Career modes back to back...and well, damn...that was a boring experience.

And instead on working hard on trying their best to give an enjoyable experience to everyone, Kaz&PD are just enjoying their "2022 new lifestyle" while neglecting all their core playerbases

It seems like this notion could be applied to any dedicated GT player, online or singleplayer

 

[SPDN Stefano]

I have also read a lot of posts from people who feel the single player experience is being neglected. So I guess the whole game is being neglected?

All in all I feel like GT7 is a pretty amazing package. In 240 hours I have only done 23 GT Sport time trials, 9 daily races, 55% of circuit experience, 80% of the missions, 8 licences and collected 33% of the cars. So I don't think anyone will "run out of things to do" on this game very fast, especially when involved in the eSport side. I have barely touched multiplayer, livery editor, photo mode etc. I haven't even found where the "GT Sophy" feature is. Some tracks in the game I only drove once or twice during 240 hours of playing. There is a huge amount of content here and the quality is very high.

So the word "neglected" doesn't really come to my mind when I play this game. Which game does a better job? Also lets not forget we paid € 70 or less for a game with hundreds of hours of high quality content with free updates. We don't pay for a membership like iRacing. How high must ones expectations be to be disappointed with GT7?

 

[Scaff]

I have also read a lot of posts from people who feel the single player experience is being neglected. So I guess the whole game is being neglected?

All in all I feel like GT7 is a pretty amazing package. In 240 hours I have only done 23 GT Sport time trials, 9 daily races, 55% of circuit experience, 80% of the missions, 8 licences and collected 33% of the cars. So I don't think anyone will "run out of things to do" on this game very fast, especially when involved in the eSport side. I have barely touched multiplayer, livery editor, photo mode etc. Some tracks in the game I only drove once or twice during 240 hours of playing. There is a huge amount of content here and the quality is very high.

So the word "neglected" doesn't really come to my mind when I play this game. Which game does a better job? Also lets not forget we paid € 70 or less for a game with hundreds of hours of high quality content with free updates. We don't pay for a membership like iRacing.

Quantity and quality of content doesn't equal engaging content, and that for me is the issue with GT7, particularly with regard to those of us who focus on single-player.

A few examples that highlight, for me, the lack of engagement:

Despite many attempts to fix it, GT7's progression loop is still not good (and a long way from great). Some events and races reward you so little that they become almost pointless, and then you have the missions and events that only reward you once, removing motivation to repeat them from a progression perspective. The result of this is that the high number of races and events get ignored by many, leaving a core handful of meta races that get repeated to earn enough to obtain the daftly priced unicorn-value cars. This isn't a new issue with GT7, but a problem that PD have failed to resolve over a number of titles. That's without going into detail around the utter dearth of championships in GT7.

Issues with the physics and FFB reduce engagement for me as well, with the title, as a whole, still feeling way behind the best titles on the market in these areas. When titles exist that released a decade ago have managed to keep pace with this, it's disappointing that PD are still falling short (one of which will run on potato PC's as well).

The AI, PD know how bad it is, if they didn't Sophy wouldn't exist, and while it's slowly coming it's currently very limited and unavailable to anyone on a PS4. More competent AI is more than possible without needing to go down the Sophy route, as the likes of the AI in AMS2, RRE, and others demonstrate. This is highlighted to an even bigger degree by the majority of the single player events stuck with the 'chase-the-rabbit' set-up, something that has no resemblance to real-world racing and, for me, holds almost no engagement at all.

The last example I want to talk about is the lack of a 'sandpit' feel to what could be an excellent feature if PD chose to use it. We have a massive number of cars, many of which few player will ever get to try, we don't have full day and night cycle or weather on all tracks, and we don't have time of year at all. For example, PD put resources into making sure that the stars are correct for a given track, which holds no real benefit to a player; while the likes of AMS2 lets you pick any date or time for the last 20+ years for a track and you get the exact weather for that location and the foliage, temps, etc. for the track will be correct for the season and date. I know which offers more, to me, as a player.

While PD and GT7 is unmatched in terms of visuals or lighting (but that is an ever decreasing factor), for me (and many others I suspect) it's not enough to be an engaging title in the face of what many other titles offer.

How high must ones expectations be to be disappointed with GT7?

I guess mine must be high...


...but then again, I can drop into RaceRoom (to cite just one example), which doesn't look anything like as good as GT7 and have great physics, great (physics based) FFB, great adaptive AI and get a huge amount of engagement from running just about any car on any track and just battling the AI for a mid-position finish. Add in that it will run on a stupidly low spec PC (hell a PS3 has specs that exceed it's requirements) and it highlight a lot of the shortcoming GT7 has for many of us (oh and for online players it has it's own ranked and scheduled race events as well). In one 15 min race around '90s Silverstone with the new Super Tourers DLC last night, I had more fun that I can remember having in the last year with GT7.

If you want to focus just on consoles, PC2 (despite it's flaws) manages to address many of these issues better than GTS and GT7 have.

Now the above is, of course, why I am personally disappointed by GT7, but I don't think it's a view that is mine along, and can fully understand why others are also disappointed with it.

 

[Il_Conte_Sky]

All in all I feel like GT7 is a pretty amazing package. In 240 hours I have only done 23 GT Sport time trials, 9 daily races, 55% of circuit experience, 80% of the missions, 8 licences and collected 33% of the cars. So I don't think anyone will "run out of things to do" on this game very fast, especially when involved in the eSport side. I have barely touched multiplayer, livery editor, photo mode etc. I haven't even found where the "GT Sophy" feature is. Some tracks in the game I only drove once or twice during 240 hours of playing. There is a huge amount of content here and the quality is very high.

If this is all you did in 240 hours of gameplay...damn, I envy your calm pace and ability to extract enjoyment out of (imho) fairly trivial things. I also assume you picked up GT7 not having played GTSport. You didn't simply Find your Line, you're carefully zigzagging through all of them and having a good time. I'm not sarcastic in any way, more power to you.
But you also have to consider there are quite a few people (especially in the ESport side you're referring to) that have fairly different standards. I personally have 2000+ hours on GTSport and I'm reaching 1000+ on GT7. Same is applied to GT5 and 6.
And this is the definition I'm personally applying to "dedicated players" when I'm talking about them.
On the Online side of things, Lobbies have been a straight downgrade compared to GTSport (still missing features like in-lobby Live Timing, or the ability to....create Private Lobbies...yeah not joking), and Sport mode was carried pretty much 1:1 from GTSport to GT7, same general Categories, Combos and Formats, so there are people with virtually 3000+ hours on the same gamemodes with same (or worse) features.
As already stated above, this playerbase is very far from the majority, but it's a community which fills an apparently still relevant niche for Poliphony, unless they intend to start hosting GTWS Live Events and World Finals using Sophy and not real Players anymore.
So it'd be nice if even only a proportionate amount of development time would be spent on improving the experience for who generally already maxed out the game experience since GTSport.

 

[syntex123]

(I didn’t read the comments, just the first post)

I haven’t found my line, I feel some of your frustrations. I had much more fun racing online in GT5&6, shuffle racing and my own random lobbies. Clean, fun racing. I barely touch online these days. Most lobbies that "fit my pace" are either the casual 420 lobbies(lol, I’m no stoner, they’re just casual enough for me to not lag behind because of my intense fear of hitting someone hence dropping back even though I’m not the slowest person in the world. And I’m far from the fastest, to clarify.) or other casual but clean lobbies. My own lobbies feel like a wasteland, 5 max join but leave instantly.

I spend most my days doing the grind on Le Mans 700, and almost falling asleep (I have trouble sleeping but this race is tiring…) or making decals and liveries, either for my magazine recreations or just because I have a design itch I need to scratch.

I love GT too, but I don’t have the same fun I used to pre-GT Sport. It’s a lot of fun making liveries, even if it’s just a real world replica with a few decals and a proper license plate. But the racing was definitely more fun before.

I hope we get a freeroam mode in GT8 or 9, like we were promised for GT5. If ACE has good controller support and I can play it on GeForce NOW, I’ll be a happy man. I’m not easily budged from GT, I play Forza (Motorsport and Horizon) from time to time but nothing gives me the same contentment I get from GT. I do have a GT tattoo afterall, not a Forza one.

 

[SPDN Stefano]

If this is all you did in 240 hours of gameplay...damn, I envy your calm pace and ability to extract enjoyment out of (imho) fairly trivial things. I also assume you picked up GT7 not having played GTSport. You didn't simply Find your Line, you're carefully zigzagging through all of them and having a good time. I'm not sarcastic in any way, more power to you.
But you also have to consider there are quite a few people (especially in the ESport side you're referring to) that have fairly different standards. I personally have 2000+ hours on GTSport and I'm reaching 1000+ on GT7. Same is applied to GT5 and 6.
And this is the definition I'm personally applying to "dedicated players" when I'm talking about them.
On the Online side of things, Lobbies have been a straight downgrade compared to GTSport (still missing features like in-lobby Live Timing, or the ability to....create Private Lobbies...yeah not joking), and Sport mode was carried pretty much 1:1 from GTSport to GT7, same general Categories, Combos and Formats, so there are people with virtually 3000+ hours on the same gamemodes with same (or worse) features.
As already stated above, this playerbase is very far from the majority, but it's a community which fills an apparently still relevant niche for Poliphony, unless they intend to start hosting GTWS Live Events and World Finals using Sophy and not real Players anymore.
So it'd be nice if even only a proportionate amount of development time would be spent on improving the experience for who generally already maxed out the game experience since GTSport.

I am sure you are right when you say certain details about the eSports experience could be improved but when you take a step back and look at GT7 as a whole it is a pretty amazing € 70 package no? For a console racing game like this it is probably pretty special that there are in game and real life eSports events at all? I was a top 20 player in the world on Forza Motorsport 2 back in 2007 and there was literally nothing. We had to organize things ourselves on forums.

Maybe after spending thousands of hours on Gran Turismo you are a little burned out on it and need a break? That happened to me also after playing too much World of Tanks. After a while I could only see the negative things about the game.

 

[Il_Conte_Sky]

Maybe after spending thousands of hours on Gran Turismo you are a little burned out on it and need a break? That happened to me also after playing too much World of Tanks. After a while I could only see the negative things about the game.

I honestly don't think I'm in Burnout, at least in the traditional sense
I don't really have problems booting up the game daily and finding enjoyment out of the things I'm committed to do for our Esports project
I'll show you an example, here I'm helping organize, commentate and edit these

(And yes these are the real Valerio Gallo, Gio Mangano, Busnelli and other GTWS guys there)

As you can probably imagine I can't really afford to take a break when something like this is going on, as it's all backed by a big italian multigaming company, and in its niche it's an exciting venture for the Italian competitive community.

More than Burnout I feel lost in regards of my place within GT, i distinctly feel like players like us above are never taken into account in the development stage (contrary to GTSport) or even particularly welcome to play the game anymore.
I also feel worried about the future of online GT in general because of this.

 

[imChris]

What changes would you like to see be made OP? I agree by the way that the online part of the game is neglected, lobbies was the only thing I drove in GT Sport and it's borderline unplayable on GT7, hence why I barely play this game anymore.