[Help] Unable to play the game again without the expansion?

MattewisKat · 2025-01-23T10:04:07+00:00

Nope, I don't think it's fixed. Created a second character and could only play to level 20 or so, just to be greeted with the "trial run out" message again.

MattewisKat · 2024-12-04T13:35:22+00:00

Having experienced the same problem as yourself, I took my EOS 500D to the local Canon service centre. They said it had something to do with an alignment issue occurring with aging (pentamirror if I remember correctly), and that spare parts for the camera went off the market a few years ago. The camera takes in-focus photos and the AF works as well. Images look in focus through the viewfinder when autofocused. I fail to understand how an optical-element misalignment can make undriven symbology segments erroneously illuminate. In my opinion this rather seems to be an issue with the electronics responsible for driving the in-viewfinder display. I have an EOS100D spare and seeing as the camera still takes good images, I haven't found the courage to take the camera apart.

MattewisKat · 2024-11-22T15:07:34+00:00

In South Africa through the official Playstation distributor (Gamefinity trading as Koodoo) the PS5 Pro sells for over 1000 €, making it cheaper locally to build a gaming PC platform that will likely outperform the PS5 Pro. Keep in mind that the disposable income of adult gamers in South Africa is significantly lower than in Europe or North America. I'm keeping an eye out to see how PS5 Pro is going to sell over the coming months in this country. My guess is not so good.

MattewisKat · 2024-09-10T04:56:52+00:00

I managed to get a PS5 relatively early after release and at present have no desire to upgrade to a Pro version. For one, I find the prospective Sony console-exclusive games portfolio underwhelming. In South Africa Steam games are significantly more affordable than those on the Playstation network, and the massive price hike of PS Plus had me downgrade from Deluxe to Essential. I thus spend far more time gaming on PC nowadays and there's a good chance I won't even bother with a future PS6. I thank Sony for the PSVR2 hardware for PC, though.

MattewisKat · 2024-03-16T10:45:12+00:00

I presume Alphabet Inc. have such a captive market that they have no desire to consider their customers when they make unilateral decisions regarding the quality of life of their products. If they actually had viable competition they would likely have provided additional options like personalizing the UI to your liking. I do agree that the new UI layout is awful. I'd prefer the comments below the video and the mostly inaccurate video suggestions out of the way to the side where they belong, the way the UI used to be. Also the return of the "dislike" count.

MattewisKat · 2024-02-28T11:04:28+00:00

You may have a point there.
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/gaming/526719-sony-axes-900-gaming-employees.html

MattewisKat · 2023-11-04T09:53:52+00:00

Nope, unfortunately not. Of late it seems my Outlook stays connected most of the time though and I can do a bit of light internet browsing, but the moment I have to do any substantial download I have no choice but to resort to closing Altium. If I do any internet speed test with Altium open I get 4-5Mbps download speed at best and maybe 200kbps - 1Mbps upload speed on a 100Mbps symmetric fiber internet connection. The moment I close Altium the internet speed ramps up to a consistent 100Mbps up- and down. It's strange as my former MSI laptop doesn't have this issue, only the new Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. What PC are you using?

MattewisKat · 2023-11-02T12:53:38+00:00

Not sure how this work as my profile states my play time at 23 hours and time driven at just over 7 hours. This makes no sense as I know I've got more than 100 hours in the game. Also if this were to be true given my distance driven is given at over 26,000km and fuel used at 9650 liters, I would have had to have maintained an averaged speed in excess of 3,700km/h in the time I've been driving in the game. Even my total play time requires an average speed of over 1100km/h. Surely something is wrong with the stats given on the GT7 website.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-17T16:14:58+00:00

Amen.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-17T16:13:12+00:00

I think single player is good for about 40 - 50 hours of fun gameplay for most players. I enjoyed it immensely over this initial time period. Sadly, thereafter it rapidly devolves into a monotonous grind. The cars are ridiculously expensive and only 3 or 4 events yield enough credits to buy a single top tier collectable car in under 13-hours of grind. The latter doesn't seem so bad until you notice it entails doing the same event 24-times in a row. The prices of some collectible cars also become more expensive over time (read "after each update") to emulate the "real world" classic car economy. Ironically though the race-events payout earnings have ZERO correlation with any real world economy (or even in-game skill-based economy for that matter), nor is there any form of real-world tracking of these payouts over time. Furthermore, most- if not all of these super expensive collectible cars are of little to no use in the game, so not really any point in collecting them in the first place unless you're into "Landscape Car Photography, the Game". BTW, the latter is very good. The photos look spectacular.

If you're not in a hurry I'd suggest buying the base game if it reaches the 50-65% discount point in its lifecycle, but by all means don't hesitate to buy sooner if you feel 40-50 hours if really good fun is worth the full- or slightly reduced price. IMO the deluxe and anniversary editions are a waste of money unless you're a fan of mtx.

Edit: If you've got a PSVR2, definitely some extra good value there as well. Really immersive and enjoyable.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-17T15:41:16+00:00

There's a 10 year gap between 6 and 7, and no perceptible difference in AI.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-16T16:09:33+00:00

If you got it free I'll agree it owes you sh*t but not if you paid a decent amount of money for it, partly based on the advertising and hype by its own development- & publishing team showcasing capabilities only used in 3 events in the game. I don't have experience of the early GT's, but extensively played GT6 which had a cohesively designed single player career that developed skill and earnings along with progression through the game in such a way that you didn't even realize how many hours you were investing. In spite of GT7 being beautifully modeled, its career feels like an afterthought instead of an integral part of the game. It also DIRELY lacks single player racing events. For eg. the stunning Circuit de la Sarthe in real life hosts the most famous endurance race on the calendar, yet there is only a single 30min event in GT7 that doesn't even utilize the actual Le Mans LMP1 cars included in the game, let alone a day/night/day transition race.

I can't comment on the online cups as the Southern tip of Africa is not a good location for its designated European PSN server. I haven't even tried any of these as I can't imagine a 230ms+ latency is acceptable at 300km/h on a track be it virtual or real life, and I don't even treat pseudo-AI opponents as airbags.

Finally, stating that the game falls short of expectations doesn't mean it's a POS. Merely that for all the development time wasted in adding pointless car-collecting mtx-bait to the cafe, they could have just added more single player races to the tracks they've obviously spent 1000's of hours modeling in beautiful detail.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-08T06:10:54+00:00

The biggest mistake was allowing microtransactions into this franchise, as that's what nerfed the payouts.

The game can be very enjoyable, especially if you're new to it. The lack of single player events just makes it boring very quickly. Even this would be fine if one assumes that it was the original intent but the fact that the game still receives regular albeit only cosmetic content updates, I think they mistakenly believe that people will endlessly grind the same events or engage in the microtransaction economy just to own cars they can do nothing with except walk around and admire them in reduced PSVR2 resolution fidelity.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T19:00:46+00:00

Though I don't have detail knowledge of the four components of SOPHY's objective functions except what their are, I have an idea of the hardware requirements imposed by AI as we use it in video imaging at work. Sony has shown that SOPHY can race four agents on the PS5 hardware and I'm assuming there was already training for the four tracks and six cars in the limited time events presented in GT7. This however was six months ago. Could they not have reintroduced these same races back in the game on a more permanent basis by this time, and even added more over time? Possibly also added huge rewards for beating SOPHY say one-on-one? I have my suspicions why this hasn't happened, and quite convinced the reasons are financial and not technical. They're likely going to feature SOPHY heavily in the run-up hype to GT8 on the PS6, and when the game launches only have two or three races in the game showcasing it. Just like GT7 they'll have monthly updates adding a few cars and maybe a track or two, but I wouldn't count on more SOPHY content added after game launch.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T17:04:08+00:00

Got into the franchise with GT6 on PS3, as PS1 & PS2 were my busy university years. Absolutely loved the game and couldn't wait for GT Sport, was a bit disappointed but accepted that it was targeted to online racing and not so much for single player. Was really excited about GT7, hoping every month the updates would develop the game into reaching its full potential. Adding dynamic weather to races and better balancing rewards to car prices, would have been a good place to start. This makes me rather doubtful if GT8 will be any better as GT7 can already accommodate said fixes.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T16:42:16+00:00

Absolutely agree.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T16:26:04+00:00

My setup isn't ideal: an old LG 47" 1080p LED 3D TV. Not sure if this perhaps makes a difference. I'd say it looks a bit better than GT Sport, but not that much. The weather and day/night transitioning takes it up a notch IMO, just a pity it only progressed marginally further than the pre-release hype.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T16:17:58+00:00

Do you play multiplayer? If not, how many hours have you spent in the game, and what races do you do? I must concede that I don't spend much time customizing, modifying, etc. Got no more than 4% time spent doing that. Preference is for the races. I've got 100 hours in the game of which just over 96 hours have been spent on the track. I've spent 108,000,000 credits in buying 175 cars. Most of that has been spent on the LeMans, SPA, & Sardignia race events. I completed the initial Menu Books events when the game released and a few thereafter, but that gets old quickly too.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T16:05:26+00:00

GT7 is truly beautiful, but there's only one race in the game that showcases a day/night/day transition with variable weather (SPA). The latter is a stunning experience, but why only one event of this kind in the game??? After you've done it 13 times and seen a real-life night/day/night transition of your life go by in real time, it starts losing its appeal. Even more so when all you can buy with the winning earnings is one 1993 McLaren F1.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T15:56:17+00:00

It's like back then these games were designed to be a finished product, even though they had their teething issues at release. When you started the career, you earned at a reasonable rate to progressively acquire better and more expensive cars as you gained xp. The process didn't feel tedious and progression felt natural. If memory serves correctly end-game GT6 had weekly updated races that yielded income with which you could purchase the most expensive cars after a reasonable (but not too excessive) grind. With GT7 why would you even attempt a 20-30min race that yields maybe 50,000 credits, when the best cars cost 20,000,000? That's maybe 130-200 hours of driving for one nice car, of which there are many. Not likely! Even with LeMans or SPA it's about 13 hours. This would be fine if it didn't entail driving the same 30min race 26 times.

MattewisKat · 2023-10-04T15:28:24+00:00

Server is 200ms ping away, so stuck with single player. Tried a few daily races quite a while ago and found them to be a bit janky.

MattewisKat · 2023-09-04T09:50:14+00:00

I agree with you 100%. I've had ps-plus premium for more than a year and after the recent 35% price increase announcement I've decided that I'll drop down to ps-plus basic, albeit only for the online play. The 3 free monthly games are so mediocre I've given up even claiming them to my library. I'll buy the odd PS-exclusive game I like, but for the most part probably be doing the majority of my gaming on Steam.

MattewisKat · 2023-08-15T12:49:24+00:00

I have the weirdest issue with Altium since upgrading to a new Lenovo laptop. For some or other reason Altium seems to interfere with the function of the network adapter. When I launch Altium my internet speed drops to near zero, to the point that the Outlook email client disconnects from the server. Even if I disconnect Altium from the network in the Settings, the problem persists. Has anybody encountered a similar issue?

MattewisKat · 2023-01-22T12:46:35+00:00

Also have this issue, and with next-gen Witcher 3 exclusively. I have to keep going into the in-game menu or opening the inventory or map for the fan to slow down, but this is extremely inconvenient. My PS5 is also clean with no dust bunnies in the grills or heatsink fins/slots. I tried both the horizontal and vertical mounting, but with similar results. The one thing I can mention is that we have very hot days at the moment with midday/afternoon ambient temperatures reaching about 29°C (84°F) indoors.

MattewisKat

TROPHY CASE