As expected, following Kazunori Yamauchi’s teaser at the weekend, the next update for Gran Turismo 7 is due to land on Thursday October 20.
The date and contents have been confirmed by official postings on PlayStation Blog and the game’s own website, with the usual content teaser video to whet the appetite for the new cars coming our way.
A server maintenance notification has also been posted on the official site and in-game, confirming that the game’s servers will go offline for around two hours starting at 0600 UTC on October 20. The update will become available during that time, but players won’t be able to access the game until the update is installed and the servers come back online.
It’s actually a little tricky to say which of the four cars is the headliner for the update, but we’ll start off with the one that was easiest to identify in the first place: the 1973 Nissan Skyline GT-R.
One of the rarest GT-Rs ever made, and certainly the rarest single body style, the “Kenmeri” Skyline was only made for one year and in a run of 197 cars. Nick-named for a promotional campaign featuring a young couple called Ken and Mary, the Skyline could have been a great homologation model.
Emissions regulations effectively killed the car though, as it was more-or-less using a straight-six race engine. Nissan shelved the car and with it the GT-R badge, for another 16 years. It will most likely pop up in the Legends Cars dealer as a result.
Another classic in the list is the 1980 Maserati Merak SS. Maserati conceived the Merak as a low-cost, high-volume V6 sports car, based on the V8 Bora. Indeed from the A-pillar forward, it’s identical to the Bora, with the open rear and famous flying buttresses the obvious visual difference.
The Merak SS was the sportier version, with another 20hp from its Citroen-sourced, three-liter V6 compared to the base car. It was practically a mass-production car by comparison to the GT-R too, with around 1000 SS models from a total production run of around 2000 Meraks.
Although there’s a Top Gear connection — with Jeremy Clarkson famously buying a base Merak badged as an SS for a £10,000 car challenge — we expect it to show up in the Used Car dealer.
Two newer cars are also in the update, although both are essentially updates of cars already present in the game.
The first of these is the 2018 Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3, which joins its existing 2013 sibling and expands the Nissan brand offering for the GT World Series. It’s actually a significant upgrade to the 2013 car, using the new “MY17” body introduced in 2017, among other details.
That includes a new dry sump version of the engine, allowing for it to be mounted lower and further back to lower the center of gravity and bring the center of mass closer to the vehicle’s footprint, improving stability.
Another racier car is the Mazda Roadster NR-A. This is effectively a track-focused version of the Mazda Roadster, based on the 1.5-liter, fourth-generation convertible. It’s a stripped-back model, with upgraded mechanicals to withstand track, and even race, use — and appears to be presented in GT7 as a club racer with bucket seats and a roll cage.
At present it doesn’t look like there’s a new circuit coming in this update, as it would ordinarily appear within the update teaser video alongside the cars. Fans may have been expecting one, as GT7 has thus far seen a new circuit or new layouts every other update, but for now it looks as if 1.25 will buck that trend.
Aside from the additional note of two new Scapes collections — Autumn Leaves and a set around Whitby in North Yorkshire, UK — we don’t know what else the update will bring just yet. That includes any new GT Cafe Menu Books, races, or the long-awaited car-selling feature.
It’s likely that there’ll be fixes for issues and changes to some game functionality, but we’ll have to wait for the patch notes to discover what they are. In addition there’ll probably be some unannounced changes, such as a new selection of engine swaps which the GTPlanet community will dig out.
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