Gran Turismo 7 developers Polyphony Digital has responded to the massive fan backlash after last week’s botched update.
Update 1.07 (which later became Update 1.08) saw the game becoming unplayable for more than a day due to an unforeseen issue, and the update itself includes adjustments to the reward payout for completing races that ultimately see the payout rates getting decreased overall.
As revealed on the PlayStation Blog, all players who were affected (owns the game before the announcement post went live on March 25) will be gifted a 1 million credit pack as a mea culpa. The credit pack must be redeemed before it expires on April 25.
Polyphony has also shared details on what’s to come in an upcoming update scheduled to appear in early April (next week the earliest). This upcoming update will include the following:
- 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
Polyphony has also outlined other changes coming to the racing game that will be implemented in the near future:
- Increase the payout value of limited time rewards as we develop as a live service
- Further World Circuit event additions
- Addition of Endurance Races to Missions including 24-hour races
- Ranking battles in Online Time Trials will be made more advantageous with rewards. earned based on achieving a time that is within +1%, +2%, +3%, and +5% of top time
- Make it so cars can be sold
New cars and tracks, a staple of the GT content updates since GT Sport, will also be added from now until the end of April.
The response to the nerf in payouts and the server outage double-whammy was disastrous. The user review on aggregate review sites like Metacritic for GT7 is the lowest of any PlayStation Studio title, sitting at 1.5 at the time of writing. Various content creators have also called out on the egregious push for microtransactions, as well as the need to have a constant online connection to access almost all the features of this mainly single-player title.
This is also the first instance of Gran Turismo 7 being referred directly as a live service, something we called out in our review. Sony has mostly been known for its excellent roster of single-player titles, but when it comes to live service games, let’s just say they really need to catch up quick.
Gran Turismo 7 is a stellar return to form, as we dubbed in our review. However, it still has many areas needed to be improved on if it wants to offer a good live service title.
Today sees the release of Update 1.09, introducing minor fixes. Servers are back up and running, and you can find the patch notes here.
Source: PlayStation Blog