PlayStation racing sim Gran Turismo 7 has been offline for upkeep for over a day. Usually, that wouldn’t be an enormous deal, however as a result of a lot of the sport requires an internet connection, together with quite a lot of single-player content material, followers have successfully been locked out of Sony’s newest console unique.
Gran Turismo 7’s builders introduced it will bear prolonged server upkeep on Twitter early on March 17. Over 24 hours later, the sport continues to be offline.
“Resulting from a difficulty present in Replace 1.07, we can be extending the Server Upkeep interval,” the group revealed later within the day. “We apologize for this inconvenience and ask in your endurance whereas we work to resolve the difficulty.”
It’s nonetheless not clear what the difficulty with the newest replace was or what affect if any it may have on gamers’ current save information. What is evident is that GT7 followers haven’t been in a position to play the sport exterior of its arcade mode, and so they’re pissed about it. Regardless of having a number of single-player content material, GT7 follows a dwell service mannequin, making a lot of it inaccessible with out with the ability to login. This contains the primary marketing campaign and the intensive storage of automobiles gamers have unlocked. Sequence creator Kazunori Yamauchi informed Eurogamer the net requirement was to “forestall dishonest.”
As of this morning, replace 1.8 was beginning to grow to be downloadable for some gamers, however the recreation remained offline. Sony didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Whereas this contemporary inconvenience has grow to be commonplace, the prolonged outage has led gamers to reevaluate our present all the time on-line hellscape. The 2013 launch of the Xbox One was mired by Microsoft’s try to design the console to require a continuing web connection to authenticate gamers’ video games and information. The corporate ultimately reversed course, however not earlier than rival Sony went on a now notorious counter-marketing offensive the place it joked about how all gamers would wish to do to share video games on PlayStation 4 was to present one another the disc.
“‘PS4 disc-based video games don’t should be linked on-line to play’ THUNDEROUS DEAFENING APPLAUSE,” The PlayStation Twitter account wrote at the time.
Pissed off gamers have now been resurfacing the tweet in mild of the current outage. “How about Gran Turismo 7?” wrote one consumer shortly after the sport’s upkeep was prolonged.
In the meantime, longtime critics of on-line DRM have jumped on the outage to remind individuals of the longer term that in the end awaits all video games that don’t have strong offline modes.
“Maybe people can perceive why I’ve been in opposition to on-line DRM in video games/{hardware},” wrote Digital Foundry’s John Linneman. “There are a lot of different video games and {hardware} that are tied to server connectivity that won’t all the time be there.”
Developer and retro recreation YouTuber ModernVintageGamer was more succinct: “Fuck DRM.”
Replace: 3/18/21, 11:15 p.m. ET: The sport’s servers are again on-line and Yamauchi has posted an replace on the GT7 web site explaining the problems in additional element.
“Instantly earlier than the discharge of the 1.07 replace, we found a difficulty the place the sport wouldn’t begin correctly in some circumstances on product variations for the PS4 and PS5,” he wrote. “This was a uncommon problem that was not seen throughout exams on the event {hardware} or the QA periods previous to the discharge, however as a way to prioritize the security of the save information of the customers, we determined to interrupt the discharge of the 1.07 replace, and to make a 1.08 correctional replace.”
Yamauchi apologized for the downtime however point out criticisms of the sport’s on-line DRM. He did say the event group is taking a better take a look at how grindy the sport is. Gamers have been important of how microtransaction heavy it’s regardless of not being free-to-play, a standard theme nowadays.
