A surprise update for Gran Turismo 7 has been released overnight, aimed at fixing an unusual glitch which arose with the previous update.
It’s known as 1.50 and it’s a pretty compact update, coming in at 250MB on PlayStation 4 and a little under 400MB on PlayStation 5. Given the size and off-schedule timing, it’s not that much of a shock to learn that there’s no other content in the update.
Indeed the one and only item in the patch notes is a fix for “an issue where cars leap into the air” — possibly our favorite-worded line in any Gran Turismo game patch notes — which arose from applying certain settings.
In case you missed it, this issue appeared immediately after the 1.49 update at the end of July. It affected quite a few vehicles but only with extreme values set in the suspension settings.
The net outcome was some catastrophic suspension behavior which caused bouncing but not quite in the same sense as Formula 1’s “porpoising” issues from 2022. Cars could, with little provocation, jump hundreds of feet into the air at incredible speed.
This didn’t just happen on the race track either, as dynamic Scapes scenes and even GT Auto would see cars jiggle on the spot, clip through the scenery and floor, bounce and roll about, or take to the skies.
Of course the 1.49 update was notable for introducing a physics engine overhaul with a number of changes to the various parameters and calculations around how suspension and tires behave. That included new suspension and steering geometry and a change in damper calculations.
It’s very likely that the glitch simply arose from edge-cases that escaped testing for the patch, wherein certain combinations of settings resulted in the physics engine being unable to calculate what should happen and returning an extreme value.
Whatever the underlying cause, players were having a lot of fun seeing how high, fast, and far they could fling their cars, knowing that they were probably on borrowed time. Indeed early reports from the v1.50 update seem to confirm that it has successfully eliminated the issue.
As 1.50 is more of an urgent bugfix update, it’s unlikely that the (mostly) usual monthly cadence for content updates has been interrupted. We may hear more about the next such update during the World Series Round 2 event in Prague this coming weekend.
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