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SvennoJ said:

Generous score. I can't give it more than 6/10 myself in its current state, despite the fact that I can't stop playing.

A lot of that can't stop playing comes from having to grind all my spare time to be able to afford the cars I like to use, the older ones which go for up to 20 million a piece in the Legendary Car Dealership. The last patch has done a lot to improve payouts, yet not for the races I like to do. Custom endurance races with grids line-ups you create yourself still sit at 60K for a 12 hour endurance race. So instead of doing what I want to do most, I'm using a PP glitched Tomahawk to farm for credits to be able to build the line-up I want to race against.

It's a 6 at most due to:

- Lack of content. There are no races (yet) for the faster cars, not for the slower cars the game keeps throwing at you. All there is in PP 400 to PP 800 races against moving pylon AI. GT Sport has at least double the amount of content, however that was after years of support. Launch content of GT7 is more than what GT Sport launched with.
- The online is a big step back from GT Sport. Missing features, worse stability, new bugs on top of the not fixed old bugs, daily races split between ps4 and ps5, and no way to track your progress. PD has it all blocked now, no more stat tracking like what was possible with GT Sport on Kudos Prime and other sites.
- MTX, PD threw us a big bone with the last update but it's mostly one and done payouts. Grinding Tokyo with a glitched Tomahawk can get you a bit above 2 million credits an hour, almost on par with GT Sport. Yet there are more very expensive cars in GT7 and you can add another 500K to 700K per car for tires and tuning. And they only appear for 4 or 5 days, then who knows when they show up again. I missed out of the XJ13 and the 917K, 2 cars I really wanted to race but couldn't grind fast enough.

Dynamic time and weather are the star of GT7. Watching the track dry up, puddles slowly disappearing in the sunrise, absolutely stunning and challenging to race in these conditions. However a lot of tracks don't have night and/or rain implemented. It can't rain on Mount Panorama and the sun can't set at Spa. Brand's hatch has neither.

GT7 is a live service game through and through, meaning it's basically early access. It's not finished and it shows.

Then there are the technical issues. I was not expecting to see so many frame rate drops on PS5. The PS5 should be capable of showing better spray effects, yet the current ones already cause frame rate issues in traffic with the light changing. The server connection is bad as well, I get at most 3 bars and have received numerous penalties due to cars stalling with lag. On PS4 Pro you're better off setting the output resolution to 1080p. Doing this weeks Spa race with dynamic time has very unstable fps on ps4 pro in 4K HDR. While the game hasn't crashed on me, the races have. An unexpected error has occurred, thrown out of the online race, ratings tanked.

But it undeniable looks amazing when it all works


GT7 has a lot of potential, but also has a long way to go to get there. The UI is slow and cumbersome, so many missing QoL features, plenty bugs and generally very unbalanced. Back to lapping the entire field 3 times in the Tomahawk, still have 38 million to go for the current line up in the LCD.

Naturally, we may never come to an agreement, but as you know I'm not against us having some discourse about our disagreements lol... That, and at least you detailed out your thoughts unlike most people, so I respect that right off the bat!

Since I review in a bubble, it wasn't until after I had written my review that I started to get all the wind on "omg MTX this game sucks" rhetoric that was going around.  Granted, I said what I meant in the review: I never had at any point felt pressured to "buy" money.  I played through the game just fine, ended with several million and had 90+ cars (I think the footage shows 90, but I actually have 93 cars as I bought some right at the end, one of which I believe was the Tomahawk you mention!).  There is a car that was 18 million, and I knew that was meant to be grinded and saved up for.  BUT, I also then looked into some of the responses from the developers and they touched upon exactly what I had figured based on me knowing some real life prices of cars and seeing that they were very CLOSELY matched in the game: they're trying to mimic real life pricing rarity and difficulty to acquire.  Sure, I know, it's just a videogame, but what most people are complaining about is actually rather by design, even if it's harder to grind for the 18mil car than it would be in previous games.  And to add something: I've never even had anything CLOSE to as much money in Forza games as I did in GT7, and while GT7 contains far more expensive "legendary" cars, if the developers wanted to make the game's rarest cars hard to get, then that's what they did.  It didn't in any way hamper my experience, it's just there for people who want them.

As for performance issues, I played on ray tracing mode, and I had almost no framerate dips, ever.  I would get occasional stutters, sometimes feeling as short as the "regular interval" frame pacing ones from Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U, but it performed solidly.  And as you can see from the footage, I raced in the rain on the Ring Nordschleife and it never skipped a beat.  BUT, based on your description, the performance issues pertain to online type modes.  If I had to guess, this is because the game likely uses a framerate-locked timer to more accurately track your time and position, so any hiccups or slowdown in the connection likely affects the framerate.  It sounds a lot like the Smash Bros online netcode in which lag actually affects the entire framerate.  Granted, I avoid online modes in racing games, even if the time trials one would be more accessible.  This is because in online racing, players are not honorable nor respectful, and I've never found once any racing game to properly penalize poor driving ethics.  The amount of "gaming" racers who would be disqualified and banned in real life racing would likely kill most racing game communities in videogames lmfao!  Every now and then, there are respectful ones (I even remember a long time ago, I had taken the FINAL CORNER ever so slightly better than the person in 1st place and came out at a slightly higher exit speed, so I literally walked by him during the final straight, and instead of pitting my car, swerving into my car to push it, or do anything heinous/illegal in racing, he simply did what any real life racer would and watched as I squeeze out a win by probably less than half a car; he could have EASILY kept 1st place by hitting my car, but he chose to respect that I took that corner more skillfully and won fair and square, and trust me people like that are VERY rare in racing games!).  But I digress, I could be wrong about the netcode, but the game performed well for me.  Though, I never had cars pile up because the AI doesn't do that (agreed on the AI being fucking pylons, though!), which I guess could be a factor in me not having framerate issues.

And of course, since I'm addressing your items in random-ass order, to talk about content is where we have SOME agreement.  I was surprised that GT racing was only towards the end, and that there weren't any official Formula 1 championships.  The core foundations of F1 are there, and the same with rally racing, but neither was really fully dived into.  I'm pretty sure there will be added content to address this, so I agree with you that there is a lack of what is really considered THE pinnacle of automotive racing: F1.  At the same time, however, I also didn't feel the game was THAT lacking in content.  Gran Turismo has always had a more "schooled" approach, and GT7 does the same.  It's about building up your skills and ability to take on said F1 eventually, and in building up, I clocked plenty of racing time in different vehicles of different PP size-errr levels.  By the end, I didn't feel as if the game skimped on me, just that they've focused the bulk of the initial game on where most people will play.  It sounds like you play on a controller, but let me tell you, F1 on a force feedback steering wheel is a whole different physical tier of response and intensity than anything below it.  I think BECAUSE I played on a steering wheel, my level of fatigue and ability is met by the core content of the game as it is, even if they have not yet added the amount of F1 the game deserves.  As a controller player, F1 is probably more "fun", and I can understand you pining for it.  But for me, F1 is maximum intensity and "hardcore", so it being missing just feels as if it'll come later like endgame/postgame content, not that the core game needed it (again, despite me agreeing that it would have been nice).

All-in-all, I'm not really feeling I was generous with the score.  If anything, I was harsh on certain things you never mentioned mostly attributed to you probably playing on a controller.  The steering wheel feel is actually something that was more heinous to me than the AI, leaning towards a more casualized experience.  I turned off ALL the assists, and suddenly it was near-impossible to modulate the necessary amounts, something that told me everything I needed to know about where their focus was.  I also did later try a race on a controller, again, after having completed the game on a steering wheel, and as awkward as it felt, it was also EASIER to control certain aspects of the car.  That, to me, is more of a ding on the score for a "racing simulator" than anything else lol



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