Polyphony Digital has announced a new Gran Turismo 7 Save Data Recovery service via a post on the game’s official site.
The service is intended to help players who are experiencing game progress issues to restore their save data to an earlier, known-good state in order to allow them to resume their GT7 career.
It’s an issue that has arisen from the fact that GT7 requires a constant internet connection in order to function. As players rapidly discovered during the disastrous v1.07 update, without access to the game’s servers there’s almost no functionality.
The new Music Rally mode still works, and players can access their own garage to drive in Arcade Mode races at tracks they have previously unlocked, but no progress in these modes will save and the game is otherwise inaccessible.
This “always-online” requirement has been implemented by Polyphony Digital in order to prevent save data modification. While it’s clear some data is stored locally — the ability to use your cars at your unlocked tracks while offline reveals that — it appears that a major part of it is stored on PD’s servers.
Some players have found that, in certain circumstances when online access is intermittent, they can be blocked from progressing any further in the game. That’s likely caused by a bad file overwriting the server-side save, and as the player cannot access their own save they cannot restore it with their own backups.
Resolving the issue then requires Polyphony Digital to replace the corrupted save with a previous good save, rolling back progress accordingly. Until recently this seems to have been conducted by an otherwise unheralded Twitter account, but there’s now an official tool for it too.
If you’ve been affected by issues that block game progress, you can fill out the form on the official Save Data Recovery Request site. Hopefully this will result in your data being restored so you can get back into GT7.
