Seeing all those greyed out icons is just heartbreaking man. It's like seeing a mansion that has been gutted and only the fixtures remain.
I know they communicated that we wouldn't be able to see other people's liveries anymore, but I was still holding out hope that at least we can save our own liveries locally. We can still save scapes so it should be the same system. It really doesn't make sense why the Livery Editor becomes unusable (especially as other people pointed out - AI cars in GT League still has their custom liveries). Also cars in garage revert back to normal livery EXCEPT those with race numbers and custom rims do not get those reverted. And since you can't enter livery editor there is NO WAY to reset them to default except buy a new car. Dumb oversight by PD.
For GT7, does this mean we will also lose all customizations when they pull the plug? Because currently you can't save a style unless you're connected to the internet. Livery is one thing but the customization in GT7 is more extensive. Will all widebody or engine swap cars be rendered undriveable? Will they be reverted to stock? Scary to think the hundreds of hours I spend tuning will be wasted just like that.
Also silly to wipe out our stats page. They could've removed all that community page stuff but left out our own offline stats intact.
Same deal with mileage exchange. Is it really that hard to code an offline patch that makes all items available permanently? We still get mileage XP for driving (even if we don't get the daily marathon bonus). Now it's all useless.
If they really want to go the extra mile they could code in a "LAN mode" to replace online. I know all the backend stuff is already there as that's what they use for the in-person finals. Maybe Nenkaai could reverse engineer this stuff in the future but it would be nice to have an official patch.
So kudos to PD for making the game workable offline (unlike Ubisoft with The Crew), but there's more that they could've done to preserve certain features of the game I feel. They had 2 years to prepare and it's well within their capabilities to sort this out. Video game preservation is a real thing, especially with Gran Turismo games as we can see people even today enjoying the PS1 era games. From GT Sport onwards, once PD decides to pull the plug that's it. These games will never be the same anymore.
so far no publisher dared to take a game offline without keeping the single player part. Ubisoft plans to do that with The Crew, but there are already people preparing a class action suit to set a precedent (
https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-crew/servers-shutdown-lawsuit)
gt sport still has drm (physical disk required for the retail blu-ray version, license for digital version)
I hope he's successful with the lawsuit and can prevent game companies completely rendering always online games useless, but I'm not holding out much hope. A lot of mobile freemium games allow you to buy stuff with real money, but once the servers shutdown that's it. It's like nothing you ever owned or paid for matters.
At least if you bought the game on PC there may be an unofficial patch to make it work offline in the future. People managed to patch NFS World and keep playing it offline after the servers go down.
In any case, the push for always online and DRM is definitely a worrying trend. Anti cheat is good but it's also anti preservation. Most people just doesn't care about the past and move on to the next shiny thing, but I always liked the idea that you could replay any older game as long as you have a working copy and hardware to run it with. Going forward there's going to be less and less games where this is true.