What seems to be the final Gran Turismo 7 trailer dropped a few days ago during the Sony showcase. While I fangirled over the bigger picture of the trailer and its connections to older Gran Turismo games, there was actually a lot of info packed into the trailer with a few important confirmations for the future game. Here are five cool things we learned from it.
A Return to the Old Menus
I talked about this in my initial piece but it is an important tidbit of information that lots of us longtime GT fans are excited about. It adds some life and motion to the front end of the game and makes it more enjoyable to interact with rather than rolling collages of cars or just straight-up text-and-box menus like Gran Turismo 6. Visualizing the globe and local community of your car network also aids immersion and can make the experience feel more like a lifestyle and less like a game.
A Revamped Livery Editor With Window Stickers (!)
This is something that I’m excited about as a serial livery creator in the Forza series of games. Speaking of Forza, that is a big reason I’m frothing for the fresh addition of window stickers to the GT7 version of livery editing; Forza has refused to listen to fans for over a decade who demanded the ability to place decals on windows. Not for it being technically impossible because several Forza cars had window decals, like the Formula Drift cars. We never got access to that.
So GT7 and Polyphony Digital get a serious thumbs up from me for listening to their fanbase and giving us what we ask for. It may seem small but the key to designing a good livery is giving it life and depth, and especially adding style. Most of us aren’t making corporate liveries on these games and we have varied inspirations. I’m excited to finally dig deeper into my aesthetic obsession with early ‘00s Japanese drift cars, famous for their heavy use of stickers and chrome.
Good on them for following an example that was originally set by Forza Motorsport, then exceeding that example, at least functionally. Whether the GT7 livery editor will work as nicely as the Forza one is yet to be seen. Don’t get me wrong, the Forza editor has bugs and problems as well, so all GT has to do is make a decent one with good functionality.
More GT Scapes (a Lot More)
GT Sport has 1,017 Scapes locations after DLC. Suffice to say, that is the definition of prolific. GT7 ups the ante by more than double with 2,671 Scapes at launch. The original number feels ambitious to me, but Polyphony is aiming to blow people away it seems.
For those of you asking what a “Scape” is: it’s a library of photogenic locations across the world that Gran Turismo allows you to place cars in with some clever tricks. They send out a photographer with a high-resolution camera to various locations around the globe, and generate a landscape and perspective calculation that places the car in the scene as it would appear in real life. Thanks to the photorealistic aim of GT’s lighting engine, this makes for images that are damn near indistinguishable from real life.
I spend a lot of time in Scapes, mainly just to visit and contextualize iconic spots in places I want to visit. It’s also supremely cool when the scapes come to your town, with Los Angeles having a few scapes that I could visit any old time. I’m hoping that a few more LA and Bay Area locations are mixed in with the 1,500 new scapes, maybe even another angle of Lower Grand Avenue.
The Return of Car Modification
This was almost certainly a given because every modern GT title has some form of car modification in the game. GT Sport did not have a full modding system, but allowed you to add power and reduce weight with a dial. GT7 brings back the stuff that made Gran Turismo what it is: GT Auto and an in-depth modding system called Understeer Engineering.
Now we can go back to adding turbochargers or superchargers to our personal cars, along with all manner of suspension, wheels, aero, engine mods, and most things you can think of. The famous power-adding oil change and car wash are back as well, along with the ability to restore frame rigidity and rebuild the engine. All of this contributes to the immersion of the game over the long term, where cars need maintenance and degrade in condition over thousands of virtual track miles.
A Rare Car Shop
Gran Turismo has hosted a used car shop in the past where you could purchase rare cars for a limited time in random cycles. Especially in Gran Turismo 5, the used car dealer would present you with a library of 845 standard low-definition cars from the pre-HD GT universe to buy, with lots of random things like the Toyota Altezza Gita and Lexus IS 300 SportCross alongside several types of Subaru STI, and Honda S2000. All random collectibles that didn’t add much to the game content-wise but had a fun collector element that I enjoyed.
GT7 seems to have added a dedicated collector car dealership, an interesting addition to the overall gameplay of a GT game. Forza trialed a similar concept with unicorn cars a few console generations ago, but now gives rare cars with prize spins. To be frank, Forza unicorn cars were incredibly lazy repackaged old car models sold as rare, where the sole screenshot I have from GT7 shows some amazing machinery to collect. I’ll have the Porsche 356 Carrera and the Castrol Tom’s Toyota Supra, please.
Let’s Go!
The new Gran Turismo is setting itself up for real success with substantial updates and excellent anticipated features. I would have loved to get into the variety of cars shown in the trailer, but there were just too many for one post. Rest assured, the car encyclopedia of old GT games is coming back, with all sorts of rare models and trim levels rendered in exquisite detail. We all have a lot to look forward to on March 4 of 2022.
