Is GT Sport a True Gran Turismo Game?
Throughout the years, Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo series has had a clear-cut identity: a visually stunning PlayStation exclusive series with an authentic racing simulator experience. In addition to the eventual inclusion of dynamic weather, car damage, online support, and premium vehicles, each entry generally received improvements with more cars and tracks as well as improved visuals—from the photo-realistic recreation of the cars to the accurate depiction of real-life race tracks.
Gran Turismo is beloved by many due to various factors such as having hundreds of cars to collect, offline championship races, authentic racing simulator experience, cutting-edge graphics, and competitive multiplayer races. However, Gran Turismo Sport trudges to a multiplayer-centric direction, scaling back on content and changing some aspects. This has sparked concerns whether it’s still a worthwhile purchase and retains the heart of the series. Due to this, it’s best to analyze some of the biggest elements that have been changed or tweaked, starting with the game progression and single-player content.
Change in Progression and Single-Player Content
Gran Turismo Sport’s single-player aspect is one of the biggest concerns of fans. Unlike previous entries, it does not have a traditional career mode where progression is felt by advancing through the various offline championship races. In place are tutorial-like missions aimed to teach players the basics of car handling, challenge missions where you get specific requirements to win each race, and a Circuit Experience mode aimed to familiarize players with the sectors of each track.
Despite the lack of offline championship cups, players can engage in single-player matches through the Arcade mode, which has single races, drifting, split-screen multiplayer, and even custom races. Completing any race—regardless if done online or single-player—rewards players with enough money and points to unlock new vehicles.
In essence, Gran Turismo Sport adopted a freeform approach to game progression and is now vastly non-linear than before. In a way, instead of advancing through the championship cups to gauge one’s progress, Gran Turismo Sport dauntingly tasks players to become better drivers. Ultimately, the career modes aim to groom players for the game’s multiplayer modes, including FIA approved championships.
One way of looking at the single-player and multiplayer modes of Gran Turismo Sport is that the competitive aspects are end-game content. While inexperienced drivers can jump straight in the multiplayer aspect, those who have honed their driving skills through the campaign have a competitive advantage. In addition, the campaign is the best place to unlock new vehicles fast, thus highlighting its importance in the game.
In a way, Gran Turismo Sport addresses the repetitiveness of championship cups. Before, each match formulaically starts you near the last place, racing past each opponent one by one until you win. The AI also leaves much to be desired as they mostly stick to a set driving lane, but is understandable considering you have to run past several other drivers to win the match. We can only speculate that Polyphony Digital has scrapped championship cups in favor of a more robust multiplayer aspect.
Content-Light
Gran Turismo Sport only has a total of 162 cars, paling in comparison to Gran Turismo 5 and 6’s over 1,000 cars. It also lacks vintage vehicles, but series producer Kazunori Yamauchi promised that these vehicles alongside more tracks will be made available post-release. This has dismayed fans who primarily enjoyed the series’ car collecting aspect. However, it’s worth noting that Gran Turismo Sport has made significant improvements in bringing each vehicle to life in terms of visual fidelity and superb audio quality.
Polyphony Digital touts that the level of detail in each car is so meticulously recreated that they are all futureproofed for succeeding titles. Also worth noting that only a few vehicles in the later entries had true attention to detail. Not all cars were created equally in the last two entries on the PS3, with the majority of the vehicles having PS2-like assets. For instance, only 200 out of the 1,000 cars in Gran Turismo 5 are considered “premium” or richly detailed in appearance. Premium vehicles are also the only ones with an interior cockpit. This isn’t the case with Gran Turismo Sport as all vehicles were astonishingly recreated.
Gran Turismo Sport is not the first game in the series to add new content via post-release updates or DLC, with Gran Turismo 5 having several paid car packs. However, it remains unclear whether new content will be downloadable freely or for a price.
Regardless, the Gran Turismo series has been regarded for its fantastic visuals and presentation, not sheer quantity. Nonetheless, seeing the first Gran Turismo game on the PS4 omit hundreds of cars is disappointing.
The track count is also small, only having 40 layouts across 17 courses. While disappointing, familiarizing oneself with each track and replaying them over and over again to get the best lap time has always been the core of Gran Turismo’s racing experience.
Verdict
In a nutshell, the single-player portion of Gran Turismo Sport remains important to the core experience. Aside from the lack of championship cups, the single-player gameplay experience remains similar, carrying the same enjoyable and authentic simulator experience. The biggest change in single-player content is the freeform sense of progression, letting players do whatever they please to become better drivers.
While lacking in content compared to past entries, Gran Turismo Sport makes up for it in quality. Each vehicle received equal attention to detail, and the realistic lighting makes everything look photorealistic. Since the first game released on the original PlayStation, impressive graphical fidelity has been one of the defining aspects of Gran Turismo, and this latest entry matches those high expectations for today’s standards.
Simply put, Gran Turismo Sport is a true Gran Turismo game that focuses more on quality than quantity. It remains to be seen whether Gran Turismo Sport’s change in direction is enough to appease series fans and newcomers in a time where other racing simulator games have risen in popularity. Unlike the PSOne and PS2 eras where Gran Turismo was largely uncontested, it’s debut on the PS4 will largely compete against Turn 10’s Xbox One Exclusive Forza Motorsport 7 and Slight Mad Studios’ Project Cars 2, which both have some of the hallmark features of the series such as stunning graphics, authentic racing simulator experience, and a robust career mode. While possibly just a coincidence, Polyphony Digital’s shift in focus for Gran Turismo Sport allows the series to feel fresh from its competitors while breaking new grounds in the sim racing genre.
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