Great work on the interview to the staff from GTP, I'm gonna have a little rant at some of the BS Kaz says though.
Online only single player is still daft and Kaz provides no good reasons why it should be so.
Nope, it's single player. If people want to mod or cheat they're not hurting anyone but themselves. I see no reason why it's desirable to prevent people from modding or cheating an entirely single player portion of the game in the first place, and no reason why you would hamper the experience for anyone who might have a net outage for the sake of sticking it to a few people who want to mess around with the game that they paid money for and are playing all by themselves.
Right, because I'm sure that the single player is unplayable without up to date livery downloads from the server. Just have a base set of liveries that comes with the game that is the default if an online connection isn't available.
Look at Mr. Generosity here, you can play Arcade mode that doesn't save. If you wanted to play the single player, tough.
Oh good, we have premium and standard tracks again. Polyphony - if you're going to include a feature then include it properly. You have the resources and money, we know you do.
Lol that Kaz doesn't understand that what he's describing is a glorified magic formula.
This concerns me. The collection aspect of Gran Turismo has always been fun, but it's not exactly gameplay in and of itself. It's a nice little self-directed goal for those who enjoy that sort of thing. If collecting cars becomes an explicit objective, I think that actually takes away from some of the natural pleasure of collecting.
To be clear, I like the car museum and history aspects, but I'm not sure I like forcing collecting as a gameplay mode. I hope I'm wrong and they do something with it that's really engaging, but I fear that it will be something silly like locking you out of parts of the career until you've collected X amount of cars.
Has Kaz like, played his own games? This is an insane thing to say. I'm not sure if you can complete GT1 with only 10 cars. You can probably get away with only purchasing 10 cars and using those plus whatever prize cars you get, but that's a lot more than 10 cars you're experiencing then.
So he recognises that there's a potential issue for long time supporters of his games, but instead of using good design to address this in some way his solution is "hey, just put up with it and think about the people who are enjoying this piece of the game that frustrates you"? Dude, that's not how you have respect for your players.
@Imari's post pretty much sums up my major thoughts and feelings. Since GT5 I honestly felt like there was a major disconnect between Kaz/PD and what the general gaming public expects out of a major AAA racing title, and his answers further cemented that belief for me, especially given his answer when it comes to the concerns on long-time players.
As for major concerns so far, I've said this before, but GT7 being cross-gen makes complete financial sense given current events. While GT7 would probably be a "better" game if it was PS5 exclusive, it doesn't make sense to do that while there is still a major shortage of systems and materials to build those systems (especially since those supply issues look like they won't be solved for at least another 1-2 years, well after GT7's release). All Sony and PD would be doing is shooting themselves in the foot otherwise, albeit in a much more severe manner.
If the 420 car count at launch is indeed true, than that's perfectly fine imo, as long as the variety of cars is also solid. There imo needs to be a good spread of oddballs, historically and/or culturally significant cars, as well a good variety currently relevant road, concept and race cars. There also shouldn't be multiple versions of the same chassis with negligible differences (which GTS has fixed, albeit that's mostly because of the kind of game it is), nor having major categories with relatively outdated vehicles (FM7's GT categories springs to mind). Even with fewer cars, personally speaking, in GT games of old, the Forza series, and other racers with larger-ish rosters, I generally only find myself using no more than half of the cars that I end up collecting, which isn't helped when the game decides to drop a totally random car for arbitrary reasons (Forza wheelspins comes to mind). Even in GT5s heyday, after a while I started to believed that the 1000+ car count was total overkill, and also a good bit dishonest since the overwhelming majority of those cars were straight-up ports from the previous generation at the time.
Always online just to play single player is dumb no matter what. Kaz does not give any good reasons for this decision, and the reasons he did give are either inconsequential, and/or have been solved by other games.
At this point what I need to see is actual gameplay more than anything else, alongside some details/footage of the career system and its structure at work, as well as a look on how the AI performs in races. One of the reasons I still play older, "lesser" games like GRID and the DiRT series is that even though they are less impressive games overall with worse physics, their AI actually race you, they block, they make mistakes, they give you the feeling of being in a race fighting for positions and wins, and not just act as fairly lifeless moving chicanes like GT games of the past. The blurb posted earlier about AI behaving more realistically is good to hear, though.
At the moment, I am cautiously optimistic, but I'm admittedly less interested than I was before the interview. I'm seeing a lot that looks pretty good, but there's still several aspects that frankly don't make any sense, and seem to be there just for the sake of, and not for any good, tangible reason. I plan on getting a PS5 at some point, but GT7's overall performance will greatly dictate how quickly I try to get the system.
Thanks again for the GTP Staff,
@Jordan, and
@Famine for making this happen! Even though responses may not be completely positive at times, things like these interviews and close looks are incredibly valuable in their own way, and really help when it comes to keeping consumers informed with the latest happenings.
would be the biggest annoyance with GT Sport, I would rather the game want to update upon starting the game then PD globally updating the game at once.
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