Gran Turismo 7 Was Down For More Than A Day And Fans Are Upset

"Gran Turismo 7", the newest in the line of renowned racing car simulators exclusive to PlayStation consoles, was inaccessible for over 30 hours between March 17 and March 18. The downtime was due to an error with the implementation of patch 1.07, which was designed to keep certain car information up to date with their real-world equivalents, but coincidentally locked certain PS4 and PS5 owners out of logging into the mandatory game servers.

In an official update from longtime "Gran Turismo" director Kazunori Yamauchi, he apologized and explained the circumstances that led to "Gran Turismo 7" becoming inaccessible to many users for over one whole day, stating, "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."

Some angry fans have turned to Reddit with more than one complaint about this extended downtime, with a few even citing disappointment with how "Gran Turismo 7" approaches vehicle handling and microtransactions. Yamauchi touched on those microtransaction complaints as well, saying, "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."

Despite its shortcomings, critics seem to love "Gran Turismo 7" for its return to form. It combines plenty of beloved but recently overlooked features, such as the career mode that made past "Gran Turismo" games so compelling for hardcore racecar simulation fans and casual gamers alike, and melds them with the graphical and vehicle handling improvements introduced in the otherwise slim "GT Sport," upping them further with HDR support (and limited ray-tracing support for PS5 consoles).

Fans might be turned off by the fact that "Gran Turismo 7" is always online, which can lead to events such as the recent downtime locking people out from playing altogether, though this extended maintenance was hopefully a rare occurrence that won't happen much in the future. The best parts of classic "Gran Turismo" career modes remain in the latest iteration: players can slowly build up their collection of cars, tune them out, and develop a name for themselves across a broader career path, (mostly) without interruption.

The official "Gran Turismo" Twitter account has yet to make a statement about the downtime being over, even though internet-connected players may now fully access "Gran Turismo 7" and all of its features once more according to The Verge. "Gran Turismo 7" is currently available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles for $59.99 and $69.99, respectively.