Gran Turismo 7 is an amazing return to form for the long-running racing game series by Polyphony Digital. The series is 25 years, as a matter of fact. The game continues to receive post-launch free updates adding more content. Unfortunately, many of the core issues players have had with GT7, particularly everything you do once the credits rolled, have continued to linger.
In our review of GT7, we pointed out some of the oddities that systemically limit you from experiencing all the content the game has to offer- especially the cars. As of the February 2023 update, there are 495 cars available in the game. I managed to only own 190 of them, spending more than 100 hours already only playing single-player.
Even with the updates, GT7 remains too grindy with its most sought-after cars remaining unreachable unless you spend 9 hours or so doing the same 1-hour endurance race.
There are many layers to this, so let’s take a step-by-step approach to address all the flaws of the game’s progression post-game.
Credits Remain Stingy
The payouts for winning races remain a core issue in GT7. Over the year, more race events have been added. But if you want to consistently earn money there are three, count them, three, good races with a decent payout for the time it required to clear them. The 30-minute endurance race at Circuit de la Sarthe (Le Mans), the night wet race in Tokyo Expressway and the 1-hour endurance race at Spa-Franchorchamps. These pay out at 500,000 credits- with the Spa race being the only race awarding 1 million credits for finishing 1st.
There are several other endurance races available… but they are in the Mission Challenges. These sorts of events aren’t repeatable. As in, the reward you get is one-and-done. The reward is finite. If you repeat the same race again you get absolutely nothing if you already claim the reward. That’s one hour wasted for nothing but bragging rights on the friends leaderboard.
GT7 had a few limited-time events that frequently award a million credits. But again, it’s not grindable. You get the one million and that’s it.
One of the updates improves the payouts for custom races, but it’s still not worth doing custom endurance races. The game needs more races with better rewards for the players to feel like they’re grinding. Put 10 different alternatives to Spa in the Circuit Experience, all with the same 1 million credits reward. Just that alone would dramatically improve the post-game.
The cars that are in the Legend Cars rotation can be priced around 200,000 credits to 20,000,000 credits. And the more sought-after ones cost multiple millions. Hence, there’s a need for more races with better payouts. The idea that the only way reasonable way to earn a Shelby Daytona, A Mercedes 300SL or a Ferrari 250 GTO is by doing the same Spa 1-hour endurance race 20 times is astoundingly baffling.
The not-reasonable way to do so- via buying microtransactions- is even worse. It will cost you RM790- a 2 million credits pack costs RM79. RM790, for one car.
Terrible Daily Rewards
At least there’s a very clear path to get those cars. Some modern cars, to emulate the exclusivity of some brands, require you to earn an invitation for the privilege to purchase them. Want to get a Ferrari LaFerrari? You need an invite, that only lasts for a month.
How do you get an invite? As of now, the only way I could get them is from the daily rewards- the gacha system. By driving for the same length of a marathon, you’ll be rewarded with a free random ticket to draw a random prize.
The gacha system is horrid. It works well in the context of GT Sport since all the rewards are just cars. But the pool of prizes in GT7 that can come from the daily ticket can range from 5,000 credits (which is basically pennies worth in the post-game) and upgrade parts for cars you may or may not own to rare items like engines for engine swaps, expensive cars and invitations. It’s awfully diluted. And the fact that you can only get one of these rolls per day is also bad.
If there are races or challenges that you can do to guarantee to earn some of these rewards, it would be better. Have a Ferrari-themed championship that earns you an invite to buy the exclusive Ferraris, for example. But no, you must engage in this gacha system. And I’ve enough terrible pulls that earn me 5,000 credits instead of any other more meaningful rewards to burn my will to play the game every day.
Engine swaps could be a cool thing that you regularly do to the many road cars in the game, but due to its scarce nature, I just feel no need to even engage with the system.
Closing Thoughts
The main problem with GT7’s single-player experience is there’s barely anything worthwhile to do post-game that doesn’t require extraneous, repetitive grinding. Thankfully, the new cars added post-launch seems to be priced more affordably- nothing more than 10 million credits if I recall correctly. But trying to earn the already existing cars in the base game remains an issue that should be addressed.
For a car-collecting game, Gran Turismo 7 makes it really hard to collect cars, and do so in an unfun way. Polyphony continues to maintain and update the game monthly (more or less), and hopefully, more care on this aspect is being considered and improved on. This remains a sore spot for what is one of the better racing games to be released in recent years.