Gran Turismo 7 patch 1.08 and servers back online – Kaz explains downtime and progression [update]

Time Stamp: March 18, 2022 10:07 AM

A new update for Gran Turismo 7 has been released, with patch 1.08 hopefully providing the fixes needed to bring the game’s servers back online and allow the game’s single player and multiplayer to start working after more than a day of server downtime. The servers have also come back online, with series creator Kazunori Yamauchi posting a message of apology and explanation.

Update: The content of this story has been modified after details of Patch 1.08 were released and the servers came back online.

Update 1.08 is a 345.5MB download on PlayStation 5, per eager Reddit users loading up their consoles to see if the game has been fixed. The following patch notes have also been released.

Other Improvements and Adjustments

　- Fixed an issue wherein the lineup of cars would not appear in the Used Cars and Legend Cars dealerships;
– Fixed an issue wherein in some cases the game would not progress to the World Map, making it impossible to play.

With the servers back online, Kaz posted a message apologising and explaining what happened:

To all our users:

I wanted to explain what happened in this update.

Immediately before the release of the 1.07 update, we discovered an issue where the game would not start properly in some cases on product versions for the PS4 and PS5.

This was a rare issue that was not seen during tests on the development hardware or the QA sessions prior to the release, but in order to prioritize the safety of the save data of the users, we decided to interrupt the release of the 1.07 update, and to make a 1.08 correctional update.

This is the reason for the delay.

My sincere apologies for the late report to everyone.

Also in this update, some event rewards have been adjusted. I wanted to also explain the reasons for it and our plans going forward.

In GT7 I would like to have users enjoy lots of cars and races even without microtransactions.
At the same time the pricing of cars is an important element that conveys their value and rarity, so I do think it’s important for it to be linked with the real world prices.
I want to make GT7 a game in which you can enjoy a variety of cars lots of different ways, and if possible would like to try to avoid a situation where a player must mechanically keep replaying certain events over and over again.

We will in time let you know the update plans for additional content, additional race events and additional features that will constructively resolve this.
It pains me that I can’t explain the details regarding this at this moment, but we plan on continuing to revise GT7 so that as many players as possible can enjoy the game.
We would really appreciate it if everyone could watch over the growth of Gran Turismo 7 from a somewhat longer term point of view.

Kazunori Yamauchi

While development issues are understandable and last moment problems with patches can obviously happen, even to the very best of developers out there, users will no doubt have some frustration at the almost complete lack of communication over the past day and a half of server downtime. This, thanks to the always online requirement for save files and progression in the single player, effectively made the entire game unplayable.

The only things available without an internet connection are the Music Rally mode and Arcade races on the World Circuit tracks that you have currently unlocked. Gran Turismo 7 locks your save file to online servers and will only allow you to play through GT Café Menu Books, License Tests, Mission Challenges, and then save any progress that you make if you have a connection to Polyphony Digital’s servers.

This is the exact kind of situation that makes this kind of online-only game controversial when such significant parts of the game are playable solo. It’s such a palaver that other developers (or more specifically their social media managers) have started to poke fun at the situation.

This isn’t the first time that a Sony first party game has run into big problems around launch. With online connectivity in mind, there’s obviously the utterly disastrous launch of DriveClub early in the PlayStation 4 generation which saw servers so overloaded that it knocked the game’s online multiplayer functionality out for several months – at least you could play the single player content, though. In more recent memory, Returnal introduced a save bug with an early update that forced developer Housemarque to quickly roll back to a previous version.

However, the frustration will go further than that, thanks to the statement made about the value of in-game cars. It’s a fair sentiment that he has in wanting the most expensive cars in the game to still hold a notional value, and it’s equally fair for him to say that he doesn’t want people to constantly grind the same race event over and over as a way to earn money rapidly, but there’s a reason why users will fixate on these kinds of cheap solutions, and part of it is down to how the game is structured. If the general sentiment is that earning in-game is too slow – and it is slower compared to GT6 and GT Sport, while the real world cost of buying cars with microtransactions is also higher – then there’s a greater imperative for users to lean on those flaws.

The way that this has been thrown into the spotlight, and the fact that Polyphony has removed the user-created workaround without offering an alternative outside of “trust me, I’ll fix it soon” is not going to please people.

Hopefully Polyphony Digital is able to address these things soon, because when you actually get stuck in an play it, Gran Turismo 7 is great. In our review, I wrote:

“Gran Turismo 7 takes everything that was excellent about GT Sport’s fantastic multiplayer, high fidelity cars and circuits and innovative Scapes mode, and builds up a more traditional GT experience around it. It’s got its own quirky new ideas which will likely be passing diversions to most, but at its core, this is the Gran Turismo you know and love. Broad and accessible, but with depth, nuance and competitive racing for those keen to find it.”

Source: Gran Turismo

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