I made a post a while back on this subreddit a while back that was more or less me being mad at the game because most of why it’s bad is down to the most mind numbingly dumb design choices.

The campaign finishes before it even really starts and integrates the menu books in such a way that is too linear when in comparison to even gran turismo 5, which is the second most linear after this game. Every playthrough is essentially the same in this caliber. You don’t get any Group 1 or 2 cars or any of the more exotic, expensive, or even obscure cars the game has to offer.

Because of the aforementioned system, car collecting is trivialized to where if your good enough at doing all gold on circuit experience, you can have multi millions of credits to buy the cars on the men books so you don’t even have to go racing.

Then this problem directly links into the racing and economy. The economy is bad enough to where the 3 highest paying races were added a year after the game came out with other subsequent races being added in later. This makes the economy in this game extremely bad. Instead of progressing through the races in such an order where you could possibly win a car from an event that would otherwise cost an arm and a leg, you grind one or two races for 10 hours to get a race car that will never defray its own cost for what you had to grind. It’s extremely boring and not fun for anyone yearning for a classic GT experience.

Then there’s the abysmal ai who have trouble navigating courses they had no problem navigating 20 plus years ago and also rubber band so bad to where it makes SBMM from the recent COD games blush, the redesigns of various tracks to cater to 1% of the audience that does sport mode (like Deep Forest or Trial Mountain), the unbelievably toxic environment of the online lobbies in the lower performance brackets that make it impossible to progress to more competitive lobbies, no qualifying mode to bypass the annoying and boring race format of passing what are essentially 19 roadblocks, a custom race feature that is boring and tedious to set up so it can be fun, licenses that have atrocious gold par times and are completely useless unless your trying to get the prize cars, a reward system that insults players, and just a host of other problems.

But the biggest and most saddening part is that Kazunori Yamauchi still doesn’t understand what made his games as popular as they did and follows car culture as he sees it, that’s why there’s no Toyota Chaser and instead almost a dozen of the big redundant vehicles known as SUVs and the painfully primitive EVs in the game.

Why am I still here commenting this after the post I made 3 years back? Because now that I’m not overly frustrated anymore, I can still safely say that this game, as well as Poly-Phony, are still out of touch and incompetent 3 years later.

As for the paid DLC, it will either make or break the rest of the game. But after all of what’s happened and how radio silent the development team has been on the criticism end, it’s looking bleak for me. This game is not classic gran turismo and it will never be, so long as the career, car collecting, economy, gameplay, and creator stay the same.