My two cents:
I really like the price systems in Gran Turismo games, because they reflect real life prices in USD, without adjusting for inflation. It gives an added depth and realism to the cars, and it makes you appreciate the bang for your buck, or grossly overcharged nature of different cars. A McLaren F1 is worth almost 20 mil in today's market as well, and I'm glad the game isn't making me pay THAT for an F1.
No they don't, the prices don't reflect anything like the real world prices for many cars. You can buy a Lamborghini Muira for less than $1m USD at an auction now. If the prices reflected the USD cost of the car new without accounting for inflation then the ingame cost should be around $20,000 USD.
Of course the Muira in GT Sport is a prototype, but these are rarely worth more than an original model in anew condition, so this prototype in GT Sport shouldn't cost anywhere near what it does.
The Shelby Copbra Daytona Coupe is about twice as much as it should be if we're looking at recent real world auction prices.
The prices are all over the place, they are not based on real world prices, they are based on PD's idea for the in game economy.
The problem of course is race cars that were never meant to be sold. It then falls onto what people think they're worth nowadays. To reduce the price of these classic race cars would cause an inconsistency with how the pricing system in the entire game works, and I'm not super keen on that, since Sport took such a HUGE and much needed step towards consistency and quality.
They simply need to find an in game economy that works, the Cr cost of the cars doesn't have to reflect a real world price, the real world prices vary massively from country to country anyway.
GT is a franchise that really is lacking in making cars feel special to me, and these unicorn cars are the very rare exceptions that really stand out to me.
You can make a car special or harder to acquire without forcing people to grind, this is my problem with the in game economy. THe other issue is that if you increase earning potential, you run into the problem that at some point affording these 20m cars becomes okay but everything else you can buy in a second. That breaks the economy.
The other problem is the one we already have where too much grinding is required to afford these 20m cars.
The solution is simple IMO, you reduce the cost of the 20m cars and you increase the number of places and ways you can earn Cr (not the payouts themselves). This way you can save more without grinding beucase there is more to do to earn the Cr's but the econom isn't so broken that these cars become unaffordable for all. THey should be late game content that you neatuarally can afford when you reach the point in the game that they become useful. I.e. in GT7 if there is a historic race car event and it's say an IA license event, by the time you reach that event you should have, or have had the opportunity to buy a car that can compete. You may have spent too much on other cars, that's choice, but if you spend on what you need to keep progressing, you should always earn enough as you progress to not have to grind to progress further.
I just bought the 20 mil Ford for a private lobby, so I can definitely empathise with the grind. The problem with these 20 mil unicorns is partly that the economy in the game is awful, as has already been pointed out earlier in this thread. There are a few ways to address this, of course, most of which have been suggested earlier as well, but to add my suggestions on a few other ways to alleviate the issue:
- Even something as simple as making the Daily Workout Gift cars worth a quarter of their dealership price when sold; the usual depreciation for selling dealer bought cars, would make the grind SO much easier.
- Since we can buy cars with real money in the PS store, why can't we buy these 20 mil cars with real money? I get that there will inevitably be people who will claim this is predatory business practice, but I think GT Sport has provn adequately that PD isn't that sort of company. I'd love to have the option to buy these 20 mil cars with real money, as I recall the justification for microtransactions in GTS being that people can be competitive without spending the time to buy all the cars.
- Make these cars a one time gift for achieving all Gold in a license test/ the hardest event in the game. If GT7 really does offer a more traditional gameplay with a fully fleshed out campaign mode, this should be very easy to implement.
Using real world money to buy these cars is not a solution, you've paid for the game, high end content should not be locked behind a paywall for players who don't have hours each day to grind for it. However I totally agree, prize cars should be sellable, and some of these cars could be rewards for completing tough objectives as well.
Ultimately though, the biggest problem I have with these 20 mil cars is that the grind itself is brain dead, which robs the cars of the special feeling that they SHOULD have, along with the sense of achievement. The quickest way to earn money is driving in an oval for 15 laps at a time with a X-Bow...
I personally drive Group C cars around Monza in the 7 lap Gr. 1 event. 220k x1.5 in roughly 10 mins, and clean race is brain dead easy to get with a Group C car since you're passing in the straight. For some context, you'll take the lead by the end of lap 3 on Racing Hards, and then doing 4 laps with no tyre and fuel to worry about... yeah, you'll fall asleep at the wheel even with a deafening 4 rotor screaming at 10k rpm. I do about three of these races a day for almost a mil a day, which means I'll get enough money for a 20 mil car in about three weeks.
And there is the problem, doing the same race/s over and over just to earn Cr rather than becuase you enjoy that race so much is not good game design. They need more events in GT7, a more balanced economy and to minimise the grind people have to go through currently.
]If the events were actually challenging, if we had more viable options with close Credit to Time Spent ratio, the grind would be less mundane, and less problematic. If you were to look at any RPG game, a grind for something special can be very satisfying if done right. The problem here isn't that we have to grind for the cars in my opinion, it's that the RPG element of the game is done just about as poorly as you could imagine
Earning a unicorn car doesn't feel special because it's not a measure of skill or dedication, but rather, tolerance to monotony and boredom. And who plays a game to be bored?
Any grind is bad game design, where you have to grind to progress no matter how well you lpanned your play through, that's terrible game design. You are artificially making the game longer, but you are not making the game harder.
If they make the races more challenging, yes that's fine, but then if you still have to grind you have the exact same problem whereby you will be replaying the highest paying out races over and over again to save up for that car you want rather than replaying the race events you enjoy the most. You will still have that issue that saving for these cars is a test of tolerance rather than skill if you still need to grind for them.
As long as the cost of the more expensive cars increases so steeply against everything else, the economy will continue to be broken, because you cannot scale the earnings up that much without breaking it in one way but leaving it as it is is already broken. So I don't see a solution other than reducing the cost of these cars. They don't have to drop to 1m or 2m, but I have said befoore, GT4 had the best economy in any GT game IMO. It wasn't perfect, there were still the high payout events you could repeat over and over if you wanted to save as much Cr as you could, but it wasn't as forced on you to do that to save up because the sheer volume of events and payouts in general were much better balanced.
The most expensive cars to buy in GT4 were 4.5m and they took effort to buy, at the start of the game they looked totally out of reach, but nce you hit the latter stages of the game you could get them after a few events. That's how it should be, IMO of course.
You made some good points in there, I agree with some of it, but I don't see how the problem can be alleviated without reducing the cost of the cars or breaking the economy in another way.
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