It's really quite evident that the more I play this game, the more the phrase 'wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle' does a good job in describing GT7.
There's aspects which, on the surface at least, are great sounding, and hell even work in execution, but are invariably brought down either by Polyphony's patented baffling design choices or, more then likely, by Polyphony's desire to bring the game more in a freemium direction. A return to a classic career mode! Too bad you're mostly stuck doing one off races and championships are few and far between, and the Menu system basically serves as the game's main campaign mode, which still hand holds you for most of it anyway. Customization has finally been overhauled and revamped! Hell, I'd probably rate it as better then Forza by this point, but still nowhere close to the personalization that Ghost's NFS games provide, and as someone upthread said, the fact of the matter is that outside of a few specific cars (and really, the Wide Body conversions) most of it is shared between the car list. People give guff to Forza Aero, but at least a good amount of popular vehicles in FH4/5 have unique and licensed bodykits where GT7 has jack. And of course, the fact that engine swaps are locked behind roulette spins.
More of a focus on road cars! Except most of them are lifted from GT Sport wholesale, and PD's reticence on adding modern road cars of the past half decade is becoming more evident and frustrating. And of course, the elephant in the room being that it's getting clear, a week on, that the in game economy was designed around artificial scarcity, and also designed out of giving cash rewards equivalent of peanuts, forcing people to grind to an untenable degree compared to older GT titles, while also providing a clear lane towards micro-transactions as an 'easy' way out (but still needing to give massive amounts of money towards PD if you have any desire of going that route in order to buy any of the 20 million credit cars)
Like, it's very clear what Polyphony is doing and to be honest, people should be ruthlessly critical towards it all. It's clear that Polyphony are making clear mistakes, and it's also incredibly clear that they are going down some very dark places that very few devs, especially in the racing game space but also in general are not going to anymore. I'd hope that would at least garner some honest criticism, but it's getting increasingly clear that this sub forum is operating under increasingly cult like mindsets where apparently everything is fine. It isn't, not by a long shot.
