Gran Turismo series producer Kazunori Yamauchi has revealed something of a surprise Gran Turismo 7 update with his usual pre-update “silhouette” post on social media.
There’s been relative silence for the last couple of months regarding content updates, since the last one which arrived on July 25. That was, of course, the relatively infamous 1.49 update, which necessitated a quick follow-up patch to address a little physics issue.
Since then though we’ve heard nothing as the whole month of August and now a significant chunk of September have passed without any fresh content arriving for the game. While monthly updates were never specifically promised, they have become an expectation from fans and to date only five months have passed without an update — and never back-to-back.
Thankfully that lull seems to have passed, with Yamauchi announcing the update shortly ahead of the Gran Turismo World Series Round 3 event in Tokyo coming in the next few hours.
While previous “skipped” months have seen a bit of a bumper haul in the following month, this update looks to be a regular three-car affair. As usual, the cars are heavily disguised in the traditional “silhouette” style, but we’re not getting the fancy animations and sounds of the last couple of teasers.
The three cars are, accordingly, pretty difficult to identify. On the left we can see what looks quite like the hood vent of a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, from the VII to IX generation. As we recently got the Evo IX, we’d guess that this is a VII or VIII model — and an odd choice, considering that the Evo cars are the ones still most affected by the 1.49 bounce glitch.
On the lower right there’s very little to go on, but we think we can make out the hood vents of an R35-generation Nissan GT-R. Furthermore it looks like the redesigned nose of the MY17 car (which was in the game at launch in regular and NISMO variants) and the lower splitter treatment appears to be that of the most recent iteration. That being the case, it’s likely to be the runout 2024 car — hopefully in some of the neat paint finishes Nissan chose for that model (and added to the livery editor, please!).
That leaves us with a bit of a headscratcher at the top. While clearly van-like in form, there’s virtually an endless list of vehicles it could be. Given the arrival of the Toyota HiMedic in 1.36, a Toyota HiAce stablemate wouldn’t be a terrible shout and its roof lines and rear door cutout do fit those shown in the image. Let’s hope it’s the axed 3.5-liter V6 model, with 280hp.
Of course these teasers only serve to hint at the cars coming in the update, and any other contents are usually kept under wraps until shortly before the update is pushed out to the world. We don’t yet have a date for that either, but PD tends to favor Thursdays for updates so we’d expect it to be October 3.
Update (30/09): This has subsequently been all-but confirmed with a server maintenance notice for that exact date.
Chances are we’ll hear more about the update — and how close we are with our guesses — during the GT World Series Tokyo live stream in a couple of hours time. We’re also expecting to learn more about the “My First Gran Turismo” demo title and the PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced version of GT7 too.
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