Boy, has it been a rough week or so for Polyphony Digital, Sony, and Gran Turismo 7. The gorgeous racing sim’s fantastic gameplay has been well and truly tarnished after a dodgy patch took almost all of the game’s features offline for more than 24 hours and its already stingy in-game economy was made to be, well, stingier. All of this has led to a lot of negative press and players tanking GT7’s user score on Metacritic.
Following the lengthy downtime after the patch, Polyphony stated that it would “constructively resolve” issues with in-game economy in the future. Today, Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi has detailed exactly how it intends to do this in a blog post, and there are some significant changes coming that will certainly please fans.
First off, as a “goodwill gesture”, all players who currently own Gran Turismo will receive a lump sum of 1,000,000 free credits. All you have to do is log into the game before April 25 to claim them.
Then, Yamauchi looks ahead to a big old patch that’s coming at “the beginning of April”. This patch will make several changes to the in-game economy, and will also add new ways of earning credits and some fresh content too. Here’s what’s changing:
- Increase rewards in the events in the latter half of the World Circuits by approximately 100% on average.
- Addition of high rewards for clearing the Circuit Experience in all Gold/All Bronze results.
- Increase of rewards in Online Races.
- Include a total of eight new one-hour Endurance Race events to Missions. These will also have higher reward settings.
- Increase the upper limit of non-paid credits in player wallets from 20M Cr. to 100M Cr.
- Increase the quantity of Used and Legend cars on offer at any given time.
As well as this early-April update, more changes are in the pipeline too. Yamauchi does not give specific dates or windows for these, but says they will be coming in the “near future”.
These include increasing payouts on limited-time rewards, new World Circuit events, proper 24-hour endurance races, online time trial events with scaling rewards, and – drumroll please – the ability to sell cars that you own. Yes, it’s really happening.
Alongside these in-game economy improvements, Yamauchi also says that in other smaller updates between “now and the end of April” some new cars and track layouts will be added to Gran Turismo 7.
It seems that the outcry from fans of the Gran Turismo series has brought about the change they desired. These changes will hopefully mean players can actually afford to buy more than just a handful of vehicles from the Gran Turismo 7 car list without having to dive into their actual wallets to buy additional credits.