When you feel the haptics on the DualSense pushing back on you, when you finally run a track enough times that you have every little time-saving maneuver memorized, when you tune a car so that you not only make it faster and more reliable but also just make it feel right, when you squeak out a last second burst to nose across the line to take first...when GT7 works, it really works.
It's just everything else that makes this kind of miserable.
•Arbitrary 20 million free credit limit so you can't save for expensive cars rotating into the store. Allowing you to have as many paid (microtransaction) credits as you want but only allowing you to keep 20 million that you earned for free is the kind of rapacious nonsense I'd expect from a company like EA or Ubisoft.
•Low race payouts, and then some of the best races got nerfed because PD want you buying MTX bundles.
•Awful UI that looks sleek but is far too clunky. For example, if I go to a race, and decide I want new tires, just let me buy a new type of tires from the car settings page. Don't make me back out three menus, then go into the garage, buy them there, back out of the garage, and go back through three menus to get back into the race. That's not immersive, that's asinine. Pure style over substance.
•Basically every race in the brief "career" (the menu books) is a rolling start. Rolling starts are a snooze fest when implemented like this. No qualifying round, you're always at the back and nary a grid start in sight to switch things up.
•AI is godawful, and almost certainly the reason that everything is a rolling start race, because they're too stupid to actually compete against you even on harder difficulties. When you combine this level of bad AI with the rolling starts, this barely qualifies as racing. It's like a sprint race on an obstacle course.
•Weird gacha-esque system to win money, cars, parts and purchase invitations. The parts and invitations are the worst options. You can "win" parts for cars that you don't own, and you can't sell the parts off. And you can get invitations to buy special, limited cars for millions...and the tickets expire. Which is basically a painfully obvious attempt to get you to FOMO into buying an MTX package so you don't have to grind for 20 hours.
•Speaking of "can't sell," in keeping with the obvious "PD wants you to buy MTX bundles" theme, you can't sell cars. I don't care if it's at a decent loss, there's like 30 cars I will never drive in my garage that I would like to sell for some credits to spend on tuning and actual good cars.
•Abysmal always-online implementation. It's one thing to be like Hitman and not allow unlocks to be used, and that's already bad enough. When this game is offline (as it was a day or two ago because PD nuked it with a bad update), this game might as well be a paperweight.
Maybe this will be fixed in a year or two, but I don't expect it to be at this point. Their profit-minded focus is very evident here, and I'm not wasting disk space keeping this installed to see if they do an about face.
It's just everything else that makes this kind of miserable.
•Arbitrary 20 million free credit limit so you can't save for expensive cars rotating into the store. Allowing you to have as many paid (microtransaction) credits as you want but only allowing you to keep 20 million that you earned for free is the kind of rapacious nonsense I'd expect from a company like EA or Ubisoft.
•Low race payouts, and then some of the best races got nerfed because PD want you buying MTX bundles.
•Awful UI that looks sleek but is far too clunky. For example, if I go to a race, and decide I want new tires, just let me buy a new type of tires from the car settings page. Don't make me back out three menus, then go into the garage, buy them there, back out of the garage, and go back through three menus to get back into the race. That's not immersive, that's asinine. Pure style over substance.
•Basically every race in the brief "career" (the menu books) is a rolling start. Rolling starts are a snooze fest when implemented like this. No qualifying round, you're always at the back and nary a grid start in sight to switch things up.
•AI is godawful, and almost certainly the reason that everything is a rolling start race, because they're too stupid to actually compete against you even on harder difficulties. When you combine this level of bad AI with the rolling starts, this barely qualifies as racing. It's like a sprint race on an obstacle course.
•Weird gacha-esque system to win money, cars, parts and purchase invitations. The parts and invitations are the worst options. You can "win" parts for cars that you don't own, and you can't sell the parts off. And you can get invitations to buy special, limited cars for millions...and the tickets expire. Which is basically a painfully obvious attempt to get you to FOMO into buying an MTX package so you don't have to grind for 20 hours.
•Speaking of "can't sell," in keeping with the obvious "PD wants you to buy MTX bundles" theme, you can't sell cars. I don't care if it's at a decent loss, there's like 30 cars I will never drive in my garage that I would like to sell for some credits to spend on tuning and actual good cars.
•Abysmal always-online implementation. It's one thing to be like Hitman and not allow unlocks to be used, and that's already bad enough. When this game is offline (as it was a day or two ago because PD nuked it with a bad update), this game might as well be a paperweight.
Maybe this will be fixed in a year or two, but I don't expect it to be at this point. Their profit-minded focus is very evident here, and I'm not wasting disk space keeping this installed to see if they do an about face.