It's been a week since Update 1.07 rocked Gran Turismo 7, its in-game economy, and the community.
Following days of review-bombing, bad press, and even outspoken words from leading content creators (along with justified rage from players on social media) Kazunori Yamauchi and Polyphony have finally responded.
The statement, released today on the PlayStation Blog comes directly from Yamauchi and is one of apology and regret.
Downtime make-right
The first thing Kazu addresses is the downtime that occurred last week. With GT7 offline for over 30 hours, players were rightly angry.
To make that right those affected by the outage will be gifted 1 million credits into their account. The caveat here is that the player must have owned GT7 prior to today, and must log into the game before 25 April to claim the free credit pack.
This is a nice gesture, and one that players will welcome.
But what about the rest of the complaints? What about the enormous grind that Update 1.07 created?
Upcoming economy changes
While Polyphony isn't immediately rolling back GT7 or making changes now, they are promised for future updates.
"To improve the player experience, we will be rolling out a considerable patch in the beginning of April" says Yamauchi in his statement.
Promises include:
- Increase rewards in the events in the latter half of the World Circuits by approximately 100% on average
- Addition of high rewards for clearing the Circuit Experience in all Gold/all Bronze results.
- Increase of rewards in Online Races.
- Include a total of eight new one-hour Endurance Race events to Missions. These will also have higher reward settings.
- Increase the upper limit of non-paid credits in player wallets from 20M Cr. to 100M Cr.
- Increase the quantity of Used and Legend cars on offer at any given time.
These changes are very welcome. While GT7's AI may make single-player endurance races a bit of a dull affair, their inclusion is something players have been crying out for.
Meanwhile, raising the credit cap should make saving for those ultra-expensive cars all the easier.
Selling cars
Perhaps the biggest economy change is hidden toward the end of the blog post however.
Mentioned in the PS Store description for Gran Turismo 7 is the ability to sell cars. But this is not in the game as it stands right now. This has greatly restricted players ability to craft the garage that they want to have.
Well it looks like the sale of cars will be introduced in the future.
In what are called "near-term updates" by Yamauchi, the addition of selling cars is included next to more Endurance Races (including 24h) and more rewards for Online Time Trials.
New cars & tracks promised
We always knew GT7 would get more cars & tracks added during its lifespan, but the timetable for these has now been laid out.
"There will be a few additional patches deployed between now and the end of April which will add new cars and tracks" says Yamauchi.
This is very welcome, and hopefully will also bring some new Cafe Menu Books for players to enjoy.
Will this calm the community?
We certainly hope so.
While players are unlikely to remove their negative reviews from Metacritic after this announcement, it is a good place to start mending the wounds that Update 1.07 created.
It also comes a little late. Yamauchi and Polyphony clearly underestimated the reaction to their nerfing of rewards and creation of a huge grind for cars.
While people have a problem with cars being handed out for free early and often (see Forza Horizon 5), they also need to feel like achieveable targets.
After all, GT7 is a game, and games are escapism from our real-world inability to afford McLaren F1s and Ferrari F40s.
Hopefully this is the first step toward GT7 becoming the game we had all hoped it would be. Frustratingly though, there is no talk of making the game more playable when offline.