Gran Turismo 7 - Welcome back to the race

I haven’t had time to pick it back up again, but I may well do when I drop MLB The Show, which will probably be soon. New cafe menus would definitely draw me back in.

I was doing other things and was hoping it upgrade to a PS5 as the load times kind of suck and my PS4 sounds like a jet engine. So now that I have a PS5 I likely will start playing it a lot now. It loads sooooo much faster it’s not even funny the difference.

I really want to use that game to learn some real tracks and get practice racing other people online. The rotating races each week keeps things fresh and gives me a track to learn. Sometimes it’s not a real one, but usually there’s at least one.

There’s only a handful of tracks that I feel like I’ve really mastered…
Spa
Laguna Seca
Red Bull Ring

I can jump into those tracks on any game and at least hold my own. It’s my goal to actually build up my track knowledge and get quicker at learning tracks. The nice thing about GT7 is there are TONS of youtube guides that tell you exactly where to brake and how to take turns. And you have the track missions in the actual game.

You’ve mastered Spa? Wow, hats off. I’ve only played that in two or three games so far, and I still look forward to every time precisely because I’ve still not been able to master it. I miss the days of Gran Turismo 2 and 3 when I hadn’t mastered Laguna Seca yet.

Well mastered might be a bit much, but I can certainly run pretty well on it. I have an obsession with that track so I just kept running it over and over and over in any sim. Same with Laguna. I could never understand how to do the damn corkscrew of death and now it’s pretty easy. That’s a much easier track than Spa though IMHO. Red Bull ring isn’t really that difficult of a track so eh. My biggest weakness is slow chicanes, but I’m getting better. Oh I also have Monza down pat, but again that’s not exactly a hard track to learn. Hard to race online without dying, but not hard to learn.

Right? I love it when a game is written this close to the metal. Exclusives have their perks.

It sounds like you’re using my definition of “mastered”, which means I know exactly which turns I’ll fail before I fail them. I consider that mastering a track! :)

But I know what you’re saying. I have tracks I’ve learned and tracks I haven’t learned. The ones I’ve learned, like Willow Springs, Mount Panorama, or Laguna Seca, I’ve internalized regardless of the game. It feels very different to race on a track I “know” vs a track I don’t know, and that difference is what I find most rewarding in racing games, and especially good ones like Gran Turismo 7.

-Tom

Yup if you learn a track in GT7 it totally translates over to the PC sims. The PC sims might be a bit more unforgiving, but the braking points, lines etc are pretty much the same. GT7 online is a good place to practice online racing as there isn’t really a damage model. There is a rating system and penalties and all that, but it’s a lot more forgiving than say iracing where people think you have killed their 1st born child. ;)

Vice versa in my case!

-Tom

I’m still working on that track. I mean I can get around it well enough, but the downhill section is more me dodging walls and praying than following a proper line. It’s annoying as I know the proper line, but I get it wrong every time. Bah

Time to load up ACC and do a 24 hour race!

Wife…Why is there a bedpan next to the desk?

ACC let’s you save as you go, so you can do a 24 hour race over a couple weeks!

I’ve done three now: Spa, Nurbrugring GP and Suzuka. The weather/lighting/time transitions aren’t quite at AMS2 levels, but they’re still very pretty.

In the last week, something odd happened with the roulette spins: I received two 5-star spins that gave me a pretty decent car, $100,000 credits, and a 4-star spin that also gave me a car.

What makes this particularly interesting is that it’s the same week I started to partake in races that use the top-of-the-line cars, with higher payouts and a significant jump in the need for pit stops.

Anyone have a clue on whether the races you run have an impact on the roulette ‘star’ level for hitting the marathon for the day? This could be just a weird coincidence that I complained (again) about the reward system, jumped to a different level of racing, and got a subsequent bump in rewards. In the past month leading up to this week, I was very much focused on re-running super license races and circuit experiences to try to get golds so hadn’t been running many actual races.

If I actually cared about the progression in Gran Turismo 7, I would be absolutely dying to know the mechanics underneath those stupid roulette spins. But it would be hilarious if you’re right!

-Tom

I think they tweaked the odds without telling anyone. I’ve been getting much better luck on the spins than I did at launch. It largely doesn’t matter to me so eh… Right now I’m stuck on the Porsche Cup. Nurburgring in the rain with a Porsche? Kill me.

I’m convinced that video games have got Porsches all wrong. It has to be! If they were so hard to control in real life, no one would buy one!

I feel the same about American muscle cars but only when they try to turn.

I agree. It’s a fn death trap. I have to put a big wing on it and try again. The back end just wants to do it’s own thing. I could barely get it around the bus stop at spa. So frustrating. I grabbed a gt3 car and I could fly around the track easy peasy.

Given the boners previously introduced into Gran Turismo 7, I wouldn’t be surprised if they accidentally turned off traction on all Porsches’ rear wheels. Oops! Stand by for a fix in a future update. Eventually.

-Tom

I love that there’s news of a Gran Turismo movie in development, and the tidbit that every gaming news site has glommed onto is that the movie has a plot. Pretty funny when I see it in so many places.

I kinda breezed over that news when I heard it. Gran Turismo as a movie? Is it just Fast without the Furious, with the hopes of creating a franchise out of it by signing on some interesting actors? Days of Thunder? There’s only so much you can do with a racing movie on the track so it’ll have to have some pretty interesting plotlines outside of racing to be a draw.

I don’t know, it seems strange as a concept if it’s not based on a true story. Like Ford vs. Ferrari was a great film because it had a plot going for it with real names behind the people. I don’t see it.

In other news, GT7 is slowing down considerably for me. After completing the Nuremberg circuit experience and getting a nice boost in credits, having around 210 cars in my garage, and struggling with these ultra-fast Vision GT races for the cafe menus, I’m just enjoying trying some different vehicles in random races to see how I do. It’s very quiet on the single player front.