Gran Turismo 7 knows what I want from random loot drops: Cars, parts, and money to buy cars and parts.
Better still, it never gets in the way of my insatiable hunger for these things. It’s always giving me cars and money for progressing through the campaign and performing well.
Gran Turismo 7‘s sole RNG loot component is a ticket earned through play that can be redeemed for a drop from a Lazy Susan laden with prizes. The only prizes on the Lazy Susan of Destiny are cars, parts, and money.
It feeds a beautiful, vicious feedback loop. I want cars because I like driving them. Driving them makes me money. Money burns a hole in my pocket and I want to upgrade my cars. Everything the game gives me is a cherry-coloured fuel cap atop a beautiful, petrol-flavoured sundae.
This is a lesson I think Forza Horizon could learn a thing or two from.
I’m not coming in here to sling mud or contribute to PlayStation vs Xbox console war nonsense. I’m speaking strictly about the different schools of game design at work here.
Forza Horizon 5 is a game that’s designed to be a living platform as much as a game. It changes and evolves, and pushes its online component to the fore at all times. It pushes online so hard because it wants you on a treadmill for Wheelspins.
Wheelspins are the Forza Horizon franchise’s version of the RNG loot drop. The problem is that the loot pool in Forza Horizon 5 is vast. It knows what you want are cars and money, but because it needs you to keep playing for months on end, it needs a way to keep you on the hook.
It does this by giving you an insane amount of clothes for a digital Drivatar you barely see. Shirts, jackets, pants, shoes, socks, glasses, gloves, hats, watches, jewellery. All these individual items that I don’t want get thrown into the Wheelspin loot pool along with the cars and cash that I do want. You see the problem: without algorithmic intervention, it’s going to take many, many spins to get the cars and cash you actually want. That means grinding for them, a process that takes up a lot of your time, which keeps you playing the game online, and … you get the picture.
I long for the days of Forza Horizon 2 when none of this was a problem yet.
Gran Turismo 7 has heard my plaintive cries and smiled upon me. Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t care what my driver looks like because Gran Turismo 7 understands that the driver is me. It doesn’t matter that my character model looks like The Stig from Top Gear because the understanding is that that’s me behind the visor.
There are plenty of ways to customise my helmet and race suit in GT7, but none of them is connected to RNG. It’s all either unlocked through campaign play or bought with cash earned from play. It feels like a video game, not a job.
GT7 takes what feels like a revolutionary step by the standards of AAA game design in 2022 – it lets me keep indulging the part of the game I actually like without asking me for money. It lets me enjoy the thing I showed up for – the driving – without any qualifications or asterisks. I can certainly use real money to buy in-game cash, but it gives me so much of it for playing the game that I can’t see a scenario where I’d ever need to do that.
The Forza Horizon series is good, but it could be so much better. I hope it looks to Gran Turismo 7 for its cues in the future, because the old man of console motorsport is still out here showing the young pups how it’s done.
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