What really annoys me about this game, or at least, whoever is the one making the decisions for what the updates include - is that you really don't have to include any cars or tracks in an update in order to elevate the game from where it is now into one of the best GTs.
Content means nothing if you have nothing to do with it, and that's where GT7 struggles the most. From this, I wrote a short "dream" patch note list, without including anything that I think would actually take more than a weeks dev time to do (cars, tracks, functionality overhauls, big features, and so on).
Events (assuming a GT League is not possible)
- Added "Manufacturer" and "One-Make" Events to various brands in Brand Central - Golding all of the events of a manufacturer offering "invitation" cars provides the player with a permanent invitation to these cars.
- Added "WTC600" "WTC700" "WTC800" "Hypercar Parade" and "Gr.1" events to the majority of circuits in "World Circuits"
- Added 3 one hour long "2008 Super GT" events to the following circuits: Fuji International, Suzuka, Autopolis
- Added 3 one hour long "2016 Super GT" events to the following circuits: Fuji International, Suzuka, Autopolis. All these events all pay 1 million (1.5m with CRB)
- Added the "Suzuka 1000km" event to World Circuits. This event pays 5 million per completion. (7.5m with CRB)
- Added 24h events to Nurburgring, Le Mans and Spa, each paying 40 million per completion (60m with CRB)
- Added the "Laguna Seca 200 miles" event to World Circuits. This event pays 3 million per completion (4.5m with CRB)
- Added 6 lap Clubman+ events to High Speed Ring, Trial Mountain, and Deep Forest Raceway, with cars limited to Japanese vehicles from 1990-1999 - Events including these, WTC600 and beyond have had their payouts rebalanced to match the rates of the existing higher Spa, Sardegna, Tokyo and Le Mans races (750k/hr).
- Sport Mode
- Crossgen play is now enabled on daily races. The warmup timer has increased by 30 seconds to accommodate load times.
- Decreased the penalty threshold, making it easier to accrue penalties for contact with other drivers (debatable, now damage is properly enabled)
- Re-enabled SR/DR for Daily Race A
- Daily Race D and E introduced. Daily Race D is a new race that provides users with a random combination on every race, with no SR/DR impacts. Daily Race D can also be queued for in the World Map by entering the new "Quick Race" section.
- Daily Race E is a 60 minute long endurance race with dynamic weather enabled. Qualifying for this race is done within the event, the same as GTWS events. Events are run every 90 minutes.
- Custom Races
- Payouts have been increased by roughly 10x when racing an "Endurance" Event lasting longer than 10 minutes (as to avoid exploits, though I haven't actually tried to calculate if this is a good multiplier or not. It sounds nice at least!)
- A new difficulty has been added, "Ace" - a difficulty harder than the existing "Professional"
- Fixed a bug where the AI could not go above 95% throttle input on all difficulties
Again, what annoys me is the fact I genuinely believe that you could get this done within a month of dev-time with absolutely no problems whatsoever. Using "Professional" in Custom Races already isn't the highest internal difficulty so it's not like it would take them a thousand years to even make the AI gain pace, they just need to let us use the difficulty we can't. Crossgen play in dailies is also surely possible, as it already exists in lobbies and in GTWS Sport events.
I digress.
It depresses me the fact that this game has direction that is taking it in a way that is appeasing absolutely nobody. 99% of the things here boil down to something that just
lets us race our cars which is an absolutely asinine thing for a driving game to be missing out on.
I'm sure there's things I missed. But I don't think many would complain if we got that in an update, nothing more - even though it functionally includes no new content, it just expands on what is already there and gives us what should be there anyway.
