Polyphony apologises after fixing long Gran Turismo 7 outage

pocket-lint.com:

(Pocket-lint) — Gran Turismo 7 is back online after around 30 hours without players being able to access the vast majority of its modes, with developer Polyphony Digital apologising for the unexpectedly long maintenance period it imposed.

The game was supposed to be down for a couple of hours while it updated to version 1.07 earlier this week, but instead the maintenance period stretched on with only one update from the developer to say that an error was making things take longer.

This has drawn more attention to the fact that the game's always-online requirements mean that only its arcade races are playable without an internet connection or while its servers are down. This means that even a disc copy doesn't necessarily entail access to the game unconditionally.

Now that the issue has been fixed with a new version, 1.08, Polyphony has put out a blog post from the game's creator, Kazunori Yamauchi, to apologise for the outage and to explain it a little.

While the scant technical details are interesting, the post also addresses the community's complaints after the previous update reduced the credits that certain races earn, in a perceived hit to players' approach to earning currency in the game.

That process is a slow one, with more expensive cars than previous Gran Turismo titles, and is coming under attack as a potential tactic to drive microtransactions. However, Yamauchi states in the post that the game's long life-span will soon see rotating events that will implicitly let players earn credits more easily without grinding out the same races repeatedly.

It doesn't detail these changes in any specificity, but it's good to see that the developer is at least aware of the concerns coming from its most dedicated players.