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Gran Turismo Sport review: A brilliant, but very new, direction for the series

The latest game in this legendary franchise is all about racing online and e-sports.

Jonathan M. Gitlin | 81
Gran Turismo Sport is the 16th game in the long-running franchise. It's also very good.
Gran Turismo Sport is the 16th game in the long-running franchise. It's also very good.
Many of our favorite tracks from previous GT games are absent, but the new additions are good.
The lighting and reflections are pretty.

Gran Turismo Sport is a great racing game. What it's not is a simple PS4 port of the last GT game. Almost everything about this latest release is different from every game that has come before it in the series. There are way fewer selectable cars than the competition (and previous GT games). There aren't many tracks. You won't spend hours buying new parts for your car or taking it for an oil change or a car wash. Gran Turismo Sport might not be the world’s most accurate driving simulation, but it’s fun—a lot of fun, particularly with a steering wheel. And refreshingly, it doesn't try to make you open your wallet to unlock anything.

But if racing against other humans online isn't something you care for, GTS is not the game for you. Unlike GT games of old, GTS is all about racing online, and maybe—just maybe—becoming a real racing driver at the end.

You can count on some game franchises to release new titles with metronomic regularity. Not so for the irregular and infrequent installments from Kazunori Yamauchi and his team Polyphony Digital. Deadlines were always a problem with the series, horribly exacerbated by the "nightmare" caused by the PS3 and its Cell processor. But now there's a new GT for the PS4, packed full of super-high definition and virtual reality. By my count, it's the 16th game (including the two-wheeled Tourist Trophy) in a series that dates back two decades with over 70 million copies sold.

Pretty much all of those games followed the same formula. You earn credits in races, then you spend those riches buying and tuning cars to win more races. Gran Turismo Sport bucks that trend in ways that make it quite clear why the developer didn't name the game Gran Turismo 7 (even if Yamauchi thinks that name would have worked).

Late to online, but early to e-sports?

The focus here is very much on the online experience, an emblematic example of an industry trend away from big-budget single-player games. The online focus is present to the extent that the game is quite limited when it can't speak to its servers. This has generated a lot of consternation in certain corners, and anyone looking for an updated version of the excellent GT6 is going to be disappointed. There are only 170-odd cars, and only one of those is a Mazda MX-5 Miata. The solo "Campaign" mode will probably keep you busy for a week, if that. And a lot of favorite tracks are missing—although the 'Ring is still present and correct.

Polyphony Digital was late to the whole idea of online multiplayer racing, only adding it in for 2008's GT5: Prologue. In some ways, GTS can be seen as making up for lost time.

But the series was way ahead of its time in taking the venture seriously enough to boost it from being a mere game to an e-sport. Back in 2008, and together with Nissan, Sony created the GT Academy, which has used the game to find promising talent to turn into actual racing drivers. GT Academy did a lot to legitimize racing games among the professional racing crowd, and e-sports features are now standard issue for any racing title released in 2017. (It's a must-have for actual racing series like Formula E and Formula 1.)

Before you can race online, you have to watch a couple of short videos.
In addition to regular Daily Races (which happen every 20 minutes) there are some FIA and Polyphony Digital events to compete in.

In GTS, that online competition is the core of the game. Polyphony Digital has even partnered with the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, or FIA, the body that organizes world motorsports and series like Formula 1. The two got together in 2014 with the idea that an FIA-approved game could earn players a "digital" FIA racing license that may translate to the real world. Racing licenses are required by sanctioning bodies to compete in their series, and they aren't cheap to obtain, which is a major roadblock for many aspiring racers. However, it's still a bit early to see how this "digital" version will pan out; we asked Sony if there is any fresh info but were told to expect news about licenses in the next few weeks.

Officially sanctioned online racing is the game's Sport mode. There are a number of regular Daily Races, which take place at 20-minute intervals throughout the day. Then there are two different FIA series and a Polyphony Digital Championship. Those three all get underway in early November, so our only experience is currently with the daily races, each of which is a 15-minute affair on a relatively short track suited to beginners. (Right now, that's the Brands Hatch Indy circuit, the East Course at Suzuka, and the fictional Northern Isle Speedway oval, although they will change periodically.)

The solution to crappy driving standards

Teaming up with the FIA is a great privilege, but it's also a great responsibility. The organization takes its racing seriously, which is something you can't always say about players in the average online racing game lobby. You only have to look at the hot mess that's the average Forza drivatar to see how people drive when there are no consequences to their actions. To that end, before you can dip your toe in the online waters, you have to sit through a couple of short videos explaining the concept of sportsmanship.

At its essence, it means don't drive like a dick in GTS. All those tricks and bad habits you learned in past GT games are now a liability. Bouncing off other cars to make a turn? Bad. Rear-ending someone because they hit the brakes for a corner and you didn't? Very bad. Intentionally weaving across the track to block another car? Very bad indeed. Basically, anything that would cause you to get hauled up in front of the stewards at an actual race meeting will cause you grief in GTS. Should you mess up a corner and depart the track, spin, or collide with someone else, your car will ghost for a short duration to prevent anyone else from making your day worse (and vice versa). In the race, these will also be felt as time penalties awarded after the checkered flag.

But there are longer-lasting consequences, too. Your driver profile ranks you in several different ways. Driver level is a numerical score that increases as you gain experience points. More important for multiplayer racing are your Driver Rating and Sportsmanship Ratings, both in the form of letter grades. Certain races will be off-limits to those with low scores, and the desire to keep one's nose clean to prevent any loss of status should ensure that racers exercise restraint in the heat of the moment. The system is quite similar to that of iRacing, and it's gone down well with players of that game during its beta and demo stages.

You have a lot of granularity when it comes to setting up a lobby.
Penalties are configurable.

One tip: make good use of the pre-race practice sessions. These will let you "dial" yourself into the track so you know when to brake for that first corner (and all the others). Your fastest time in practice will determine where you start the race, and up front with the hot shoes is definitely preferable to being at the back with the newbies or griefers. If you do start mid-pack or worse, you'll need to be OK with the fact that you will probably finish there. The races aren’t that long, and there’s no rubber banding with human drivers, so if the person in front is a second per lap faster than you and doesn’t make a mistake, they will finish five seconds up the road in a five-lap race. That's OK! You will still earn credits, and as long as you keep your driving clean, your rankings will also improve.

Online races don't have to be the formal Sport events; you can create your own game lobbies with custom rules, private entry lists, and so on. There's a lot of granularity in the settings, as you can see in the image gallery above, although a Playstation Plus subscription will be required to access either of the online racing modes.

It looks and sounds better than any Gran Turismo yet

Earlier this week, Ars' Sam Machkovech dug into the game's 4K resolution (on PS4 Pro), HDR-10 color, and Virtual Reality modes. Even in plain old 1080p, it looks very good. It is distinctively a GT game, with plenty of attention paid to the way everything is lit. At times, the cars look more like illustrations than the real thing, but there are other times when I could have sworn I was watching real footage rather than a game replay. Polyphony Digital also came late to the genre-wide trend of rendering the interiors of cars, and it shows. Unlike GT6, all the cars have properly modeled cockpits, but good-old bumper view is where it's at. (Don't even get me started on people who play in third-person view...)

Even bigger strides have been made in the sound department. This was one of the series' continuing bugbears, as explained in this three-part post by Yamauchi from 2014. Cars no longer sound like vacuum cleaners. Give it some gas and you'll hear the interplay of air rushing through intakes and exhausts together with the mechanical sounds that engines make as they reciprocate. Lift off or brake into a corner in a racing car and the howl and whine of straight-cut gears dominates. The pops and bangs some cars make as you back off from part-throttle are the most true-to-life of any current racing game I've played.

In-car view can look great, like with this McLaren concept hypercar, but more often than not it doesn't.
Driving the very fastest cars can feel otherworldly at times.

It handles better than any Gran Turismo before

Cast your mind back 20 years to the launch of the first GT game. Back then, Sony (justifiably) made a lot of noise about how its game was a true driving simulator and the most accurate four-wheeled experience you could have on a console. In 2017, that's not really a defensible statement for the series anymore, particularly when titles like DiRT Rally, F1 2017, and Project CARS 2 exist. But that should not be seen as a dismissal; the game is aimed at a very wide audience, and it's highly engaging to play either with a controller or wheel.

If I have any complaints, they are in the way GTS models how tires bite and that grip feels a little off. It can be hard to feel exactly what the front tires are doing under heavy braking, and by the time you can feel them losing grip, it’s already too late. But that's a minor complaint. There are also times—usually in one of the bonkers Vision GT cars specially designed for the game, and at speeds few mortals would attempt for real—when it almost feels as if the cars drive themselves (or perhaps I'm just that good #humblebrag). It does feel awfully rewarding when you catch a slide with the smallest hint of countersteer, and it's these moments that will keep you coming back for more.

I played the game mostly with a Logitech G29, which might be the optimum way to experience it. Be warned—the game only supports a handful of wheels, although there are a number of adapters you can find online for $50-$60 that should let you use an unapproved one. (We make no promises about the ease of use with any of those, however.) Additionally, you have many fewer settings to tweak compared to Forza or Project CARS, but the flip-side of that is that setting up a wheel is easy, and I had no complaints with feel or force-feedback.

About that (lack of) variety

An oft-repeated criticism of prior GT games was the inflated car counts. Boasting over a thousand different models is fine, but a good deal of those cars were subtle variations on the theme of the Nissan Skyline GT-R or Mazda MX-5. Well, people, if you wanted a GT game without 300 different Skylines, you have it. This means many old favorites will be absent—they may come later as DLC if this 2016 post at GT Planet holds true, but as of now we have no info on that process.

The track list is similarly abbreviated—just 17 locations and 40 tracks in total compared to 40 locations and 86 tracks (plus a DIY track editor) in GT6. That's significantly fewer than Project CARS 2, Forza Motorsport 7, or even F1 2017. Real-life staples of the series like Laguna Seca and Tsukuba are gone, and all of the Polyphony-created tracks from previous GT games are gone as well. Could this be a consequence of the FIA partnership? As the screen capture below shows, the FIA gets to approve the in-game tracks used for its races, and it's possible that Trial Mountain, Deep Forest, and Apricot Hill just didn't pass muster.

In their place, we get seven new creations. None of them are duds, and each has elements of lost favorites: bits of Kyoto Driving Park will remind you of Grand Valley; Tokyo Expressway recreates the actual roads that influenced the old Special Stage Route 5; and Broad Bean Raceway is a trickier version of the High Speed Ring. The main addition to real-world tracks is Interlagos, the Brazilian circuit that hosts that country's Grand Prix. It joins the Nürburgring, Suzuka, Bathurst, and Brands Hatch, but we have lost a lot, real and fictional, and the lack of track diversity may come to limit the game's appeal over the longer term.

Finally, each track can be raced at different times of day with some supporting rain, but there are no dynamic weather effects or day-to-night transitions.

Another in-car view, this time showing the tweakable brake bias setting.
Another MFD setting—this time traction control.

Driver workload

A notable new addition to the game is the multi-function display. Accessed while driving, it will show you your lap times or a track map, but it also lets you alter a number of functions on the fly, the exact mix of which depends upon the car or the rules of the race you're in. Every car will let you adjust traction control and brake bias (the ratio of front to rear braking), and you can change fuel maps in races where fuel consumption and pit stops are a factor. (Richer settings provide more power but consume a lot more gas; leaner ones the opposite.) Some all-wheel drive cars will also let you adjust the front to rear torque split from behind the wheel as well.

Points, credits, and miles

Drive enough races and you'll win sixty different bonuses.
That won't be easy, though—you can see here that getting to level 3 will require a lot of driving.

Prior to races, your cars remain as tunable as they've always been. But the old games' emphasis on visiting the tuning shop to spend hard-earned credits is no more. Component upgrades are limited to customizable racing versions of things like the transmission or differential, for example. A race will often prohibit custom tunes, insisting on stock settings that give everyone the same chance.

Now, there are several different in-game currencies and points to earn. We've already discussed the Driver and Sportsmanship ratings, and you have a driver level that increases as you earn experience points. Winning races and events earns you in-game credits to spend on cars, and on top of that, you earn mileage points for distance traveled. These can be used to buy certain cars that aren't otherwise available. But you'll be happy to know that we found no sign of "loot crates" or any exhortations to spend actual money to get in-game stuff.

While you won't spend much time adding new parts to your cars, you can customize them visually in the Livery Editor. This mode includes the neat option to upload custom decals as SVG files, although we haven't tested that yet in the game.

About that single-player mode

I expect that many people ragequit this review after my opening paragraph about the online multiplayer focus of GTS, so congratulations if you made it all the way down here. It's true: the solo racing aspects of this game are slight, and much of it still requires an Internet connection because any saved progress lives on Sony's servers, not locally on your PS4. The exception to this is Arcade mode, which should keep anyone busy for as long as it takes to get completely bored of the game's 17 locations (note: that's not too long). You can customize races to your heart's content with the same level of granularity as creating an online lobby.

You'll also find the VR mode here. We took a proper look at it on Tuesday, but suffice it to say that it's far slighter than we'd anticipated.

One of the early driving tests.
Next up in Campaign are the Mission Challenges.

But the sprawling single-player career modes we've spent days and weeks on in past GT games are gone. What used to be the career mode is now "Campaign," and it consists of three elements. First, there's the driving school—tedious, but worth your time even if you're not a completionist. This mode encourages you to think about how you control your car, which is important in this game. You will win credits and six cars that will come in handy as you go on to compete in events.

Next are the Mission Challenges. There are 64 of these split over eight stages. Some are short and sweet, others are multi-lap endurance races that can take an hour or more to complete. Finally, there's Circuit Experience, which teaches you the nuances of each track, first in stages and then as a whole. You earn a lot of in-game credits for completing these, much more than the license tests. But that really is the extent of the solo stuff.

I have no hesitation in recommending GTS to those that own a PS4. Just go in accepting that it's not going to be a 4K, VR-capable version of GT6. Instead, Polyphony delivers an online racing game with engaging gameplay and a relatively limited selection of cars and tracks. Think of GTS as a more accessible, cheaper-to-own take on iRacing, and you'll come away happy.

The Good

  • The best-handling Gran Turismo yet
  • The approach to sportsmanship and driving standards is great
  • Some of the new tracks are brilliant fun
  • Sounds very good, looks great in 4K and HDR
  • The AI doesn't suck anymore

The Bad

  • I miss all the old tracks
  • I wish the developer had tossed the rallying stuff
  • If you don't like online gaming, you won't like this game
  • There's really not a lot of VR

The Ugly

  • In-car views are still not amazing.

Verdict: Buy it.

Photo of Jonathan M. Gitlin
Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
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