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The announcement that the track was returning given by GT's twitter was "Deep Forest Raceway returns to Gran Turismo 7 on March 4.". I mean, if clear and concise is what you want, i don't see how it could be clearer or more concise lol.
Gran Turismo 7's New Deep Forest Layout Revealed in 4K Cockpit Video
- Thread starter Famine
- 407 comments
- 45,564 views
Indeed. Would it really have been hard to write a short article detailing the changes?
It's just not what they do. How many times have they tweaked the physics and the penalty system during Sport? Not once have they gone into detail why they changed what they did, what it affected, why they believe it's better, what feedback they listened to etc etc. They just give out a single sentence, generic text in the patch notes.
Do better please, PD.
As we all know, that didn't happen. Yes millions of people bought it at launch but they did not flock to Sport Mode. They either put the game down entirely very quickly or they complained it wasn't like old GT games, where was their career mode? Yes we die hards knew what the game contained but casual players don't. It's Gran Turismo, they didn't know or care why it's called Sport and not 7. They expected more of what they were used to, and didn't find it. What they did find was clearly not appealing.
Even at launch the weekly numbers for Sport Mode barely went above 250,000. Other than a small peak in 2020 the numbers have been a pretty consistent 80-100,000 since early 2018. Nearly four years and there was no growth to speak of in Sport Mode, despite the number of overall players constantly increasing. That isn't a good success story for Sport Mode, even if the raw numbers are good compared to other games.
There might be ~750k weekly active users but as we've established, only ~80-90k are playing Sport Mode. After four years the majority of playing GT Sport are not playing Sport Mode.
A "huge failure" might be a bit extreme but there is no doubt in my mind that their experiment did not work in the grand scheme of things. They've had ~5 years, pre and post launch, to draw people to Sport Mode and e-Sports and there is no sign at all that uptake has scaled with increase of players. Nothing. No sign of growth at all.
It's just not what they do. How many times have they tweaked the physics and the penalty system during Sport? Not once have they gone into detail why they changed what they did, what it affected, why they believe it's better, what feedback they listened to etc etc. They just give out a single sentence, generic text in the patch notes.
Do better please, PD.
Depends what you define as success. They called the game GT Sport. They put all their chips initially on Sport Mode, that's why they called it GT Sport. It was supposed to be the core of the game that they hoped everyone would be playing. "Everyone can compete" they said, everyone can learn. That's why there was no traditional single player career mode at launch, they though what they had to start with would be enough to launch people into Sport Mode.
As we all know, that didn't happen. Yes millions of people bought it at launch but they did not flock to Sport Mode. They either put the game down entirely very quickly or they complained it wasn't like old GT games, where was their career mode? Yes we die hards knew what the game contained but casual players don't. It's Gran Turismo, they didn't know or care why it's called Sport and not 7. They expected more of what they were used to, and didn't find it. What they did find was clearly not appealing.
Even at launch the weekly numbers for Sport Mode barely went above 250,000. Other than a small peak in 2020 the numbers have been a pretty consistent 80-100,000 since early 2018. Nearly four years and there was no growth to speak of in Sport Mode, despite the number of overall players constantly increasing. That isn't a good success story for Sport Mode, even if the raw numbers are good compared to other games.
There might be ~750k weekly active users but as we've established, only ~80-90k are playing Sport Mode. After four years the majority of playing GT Sport are not playing Sport Mode.
A "huge failure" might be a bit extreme but there is no doubt in my mind that their experiment did not work in the grand scheme of things. They've had ~5 years, pre and post launch, to draw people to Sport Mode and e-Sports and there is no sign at all that uptake has scaled with increase of players. Nothing. No sign of growth at all.
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- 63
- Brasil
- yt_st3vao
I've had to reset my password and all. Just to post this. it's from the trailer where they show a Lamborghini Huracán in the livery editor, and I happend to see this decal from another real world track, and have not seen anyone comment about it. If I'm not mistaken, this track is located in Italy
Adria International Raceway
Adria International Raceway
- 1,925
- United States
It would be amazing if they did that for the old Swiss F1 track Bremgarten which has been abandoned since the 50's due to the Swiss ban on motorsports.
Circuit Bremgarten - Wikipedia
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- 4,453
- Vancouver, BC
- GTP_Grand_Prix
Oh yes.It would be amazing if they did that for the old Swiss F1 track Bremgarten which has been abandoned since the 50's due to the Swiss ban on motorsports.
Circuit Bremgarten - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Look at all of those high speed curves,
It even had more trees than GT3's Deep Forest did!I always thought Grindelwald was kind of channeling the spirit of Bremagrten, albeit on a smaller scale. It's a very old-school looking track.
- 15,119
- Melbourne
- ScottPuss20
- CheetahsMeow
- 352
- Philippines
- mgc-gamerz
yes bring back Grindelwald, I like that track better than EigerSince PD hasn't shown much interest in recreating dead real life circuits from scratch in their games, fantasy tracks like TM and DF (and Grindelwald, bring it back, please) are likely the closest we are going to get to a vintage road circuit from PD.
- 1,556
- Willow Springs
- schlafhund
What’s your PSN? Couldn’t get any hits on ScottPye20.
- 1,211
- Melbourne
- Nicky-Boy_7
ScottPye20
It's under his avatar, as is always the case if you submit it in your account.
EDIT:
Oops! I see you got it right after all. Perhaps he's changed it and not updated his account.
It's under his avatar, as is always the case if you submit it in your account.
EDIT:
Oops! I see you got it right after all. Perhaps he's changed it and not updated his account.
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- 15,119
- Melbourne
- ScottPuss20
- CheetahsMeow
- 1,556
- Willow Springs
- schlafhund
Cool, thanks. Since you said diehard I just wanted to have a look. :-) 745 races and 222 Sport Mode days logged is by no means low but I don’t know if I’d call it diehard.
- 69
- Florida
Old Deep Forest was a real drivers' track, you had to hook up every corner without error. The challenge during the 2nd half of the lap is now gone.
- 54
- United States
That's not how this works. The supposed dropoff you describe happens to at least the vast majority of games, if not every single game, with an online component. Video games are treated as disposable by both the majority and by developers, and each group does so because they believe the other group does. So, nearly every online game has a "come, eat, leave" sort of lifespan, and streaming/YouTube has exacerbated this because there is now a "need" to chase trends. The fact that Sport retained real numbers at all is far more interesting than this very typical industry-wide dropoff. In order to actually increase numbers, you have to play with loaded dice.
Sport wasn't even an "experiment". It was the latest part in their longterm commitment to bridge the gap between real racing and video games. Polyphony has been doing this for over a decade now, if not the entire last 25 years, and they should continue to do so.
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- 1,925
- United States
Way too early to say that without even playing it ourselves. The first section was always the most fun anyway.
I didn't talk about a drop off, I said the numbers were almost flat throughout. The game went from ~4 million players to ~14 million and there was ZERO growth in that period except one small spike. 10 million players, and no obvious growth. That isn't good.
Likewise for the viewership side of things. Plenty of eSports games started out with small audiences which then grew massively over time. GTS, not at all. The 2021 videos have the same 5-25K views as the 2017 videos did. No growth.
We can all have our own opinions on these things but hard numbers and stats don't lie.
- 54
- United States
I think you need to go back over your hard numbers. They clearly show not only the same sad fate that happens to nearly every other game ever released, but actually the more favorable version of that outcome, one that so many games have begged for and never received. Seriously, go look at other online games, where the results are either similar or worse. The kind of growth you're looking for is artificial, created by things like paying people to play the game (Valorant) or winning the algorithm (basically any MMO or mobile game that survives a few years). "Natural" growth is actually fake, for the reasons I described. Maybe it was a thing in the past, but it just isn't anymore.
It is so often believed that increasing sales automatically increases what the marketer types call "engagement". This is not the case, and it is not worthwhile to chase, because that's how a developer gets trapped into making the worst breeds of GAAS forever. You want that "flat" curve. What you don't want is the downward spiral, which is the usual outcome. You're free to believe that Sport is something it isn't, and that's why we have 7.
14 million players is not niche, and even if it was, that's irrelevant. The numbers could be 100 to 1400, you could still chart the same growth, or lack of it.
The simple point is, what were those 14 million people doing with the game? Because clearly it wasn't playing Sport Mode, the name of the game. Far more people played the single player part of the game, so "engagement" there went up. It didn't in Sport Mode, the mode they put all their chips on.
It's not exactly a coincidence that the next game is barely mentioning Sport Mode and competitive eSports, and is instead focusing on the return of all the old stuff they "burnt to the ground", is it? They tried something, and It didn't work.
To be clear I'm absolutely not criticising them for that, I welcome that they tried something different even if it wasn't for me. I wish they did that more often the last 25 years.
- 54
- United States
Don't ask me that, ask yourself that. The answer isn't what you think: that lots of people do not really care for online play. One of the oldest chestnuts with the entire GT series has been that a gigantic portion of buyers never even think to play it with other human beings. There is nothing PD could, can now, or can ever do about this group of people, to get them to suddenly like playing online. You know what PD can do, though? Make GT7!
It's not that PD tried something that "didn't work". It's that PD were targeting a completely different group of people than the majority who were buying their games, and that this is something they've been working towards for a long time, likely because they really did not want to keep making this series bigger and bigger and bigger into infinity; there's an upper limit here too. GT7's lower car count is likely evidence of a compromise relating to this. At some point you have to put the brakes on endless expansion. If only business owners could realize that too...
It's not that PD tried something that "didn't work". It's that PD were targeting a completely different group of people than the majority who were buying their games, and that this is something they've been working towards for a long time, likely because they really did not want to keep making this series bigger and bigger and bigger into infinity; there's an upper limit here too. GT7's lower car count is likely evidence of a compromise relating to this. At some point you have to put the brakes on endless expansion. If only business owners could realize that too...
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Of course it is. They tried to convert that gigantic portion of players towards competitive online play and didn't manage it. What else can you take away from it?
The lower car count in GT7 has absolutely nothing to do with "not wanting to make the game bigger and hitting the brakes", it's a pretty simple issue of cars taking an insane amount of time to create and time not being infinite. It's every car they had for GTS + every car they had time to create since then.
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- 54
- United States
That they didn't really try to do any such thing, because that isn't actually possible, and has never been. That is not even "my" take either, but the take. Halo, funny enough, is a great example of this as well.
Your description matches exactly with what you quoted. We are in complete agreement there. You probably don't agree with the reasoning behind it though, but let me try all the same: gamers do not simply claim to expect PD to perfectly recreate every single car that has ever appeared in the series, but also claim that this is incredibly easy to do and that any derivation is a "clear" sign of laziness. The last, what, 12 years of screaming about PD being scammers or whatever is clear proof of this.
Your description matches exactly with what you quoted. We are in complete agreement there. You probably don't agree with the reasoning behind it though, but let me try all the same: gamers do not simply claim to expect PD to perfectly recreate every single car that has ever appeared in the series, but also claim that this is incredibly easy to do and that any derivation is a "clear" sign of laziness. The last, what, 12 years of screaming about PD being scammers or whatever is clear proof of this.
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