Well if I'm playing devil's advocate here I'd say that even though GT Sport was online-focused and the AI wasn't the main part of the experience, that game has the most advanced AI we've seen in the series so far (custom-race professional AI) so that shows that at least they've been working on it to some degree even when it arguably wasn't a priority.
Yet in the part of the single player suite that actually matters (and the one part of the game that they added after backlash when it absolutely could have been present at launch) the AI is still as moronic as it has ever been, except now it bins it in corners with somewhat noticeable regularity.
So yeah, if they've been working on it, I'm seeing absolutely no changes, in the one place that actually matters, considering they're making a big to-do about bringing back classic GT gameplay loops and basically pandering to nostalgia in order to instill back trust into the fanbase after giving them the middle finger.
I know Gran Turismo cribs a lot from RPG design, but ultimately it isn't one. It doesn't have the story, characters and worldbuilding that can carry an RPG through boring or grindy periods. Gran Turismo is nearly pure gameplay, and so making the gameplay engaging and enjoyable as much of the time as possible makes for a better game. Polyphony can still exert massive amounts of control over how the player plays the game in the sense of structure and progress, but the challenge needs to be properly matched to the player.
This. This is the crux of the argument and what makes me want to tear my hair out with regards to the CarPG structure that GT has slavishly shackled itself to. The only reason why the CarPG structure worked as well as it did was because games at the time of the original GT's were a lot smaller in scale. You certainly weren't going to sell to the general public with a game that was, for all intents and purposes, a sim as the time saw it. The CarPG aspects worked in that regard.
The problem is that the formula grew old, stale. It certainly wasn't helped that every Japanese publisher under the sun tried their hand at the same structure and almost all of them failed, with the only real competitor coming years after the fact and succeeding because it actually built upon the CarPG system and fleshed it out, alongside offering everything that GT didn't have (and wouldn't have for years after the fact) Yet PD, and Kaz specifically, have never had any pushback in trying to reinvent the wheel or present anything new. They just continue trotting it out, with no changes, and it gets lapped up by GT fans who should know better. The structure is rotten, it is boring, and basically is a relic of gameplay design that the racing game genre, with the exception of GT, have all but abandoned because it is an active detriment to the one thing that is important to a racing game: the actual racing.
Considering the fact that the entire genre has shifted towards realism overall, it boggles the mind that alongside the continued insistence on trotting out the CarPG formula as a founding pillar, that the AI makes this even worse for the reasons you outlined. By this point, a fair few games in the genre have good AI that at the very least put up a decent fight and don't make dirty driving and a devil may care attitude rewarding - Codemasters games, with a few exceptions, are great examples of this, alongside Scaff's video evidence up thread. And those examples are from small teams, not a development studio that is more or less the Japanese jewel in Sony's development studio crown, a studio that is absolutely getting special treatment and coddling since Playstation's development teams have almost all but gone towards Western studios exclusively with a few second party exceptions.
Yet this really doesn't matter because I've become more or less cognizant of the fact that Kaz won't be pushed on this topic, like many things, and that considering that PD is doing all hands on deck to try and appeal to nostalgia (quite cynically, I might add) that the AI will still be, at it's core, the same AI that's been present since GT4, and probably earlier, just with the GT Sport coat of paint that is the magical ability to bin it in corners noticeably.
Play ACC and you realizes, you aren’t so good as you think, or F1
