Following up on Thursday's PlayStation Showcase event, Sony is sharing new details regarding the games spotlighted during the show. Gran Turismo 7 is a great example, as Sony hasn't revealed as much about the upcoming high-fidelity racing game as many of the others. Alongside a new trailer, Polyphony Digital president Kazunori Yamauchi shared new information about Gran Turismo 7's single-player GT Campaign mode, including some disappointing small print.
The crux of the issue is that while yes, Gran Turismo 7 will feature a classic GT Campaign mod where individual players will tour properly across Europe in a grand journey, there's a frustrating requirement attached to it. Yamauchi confirms in a Gran Turismo 7 blog post that the racing game's GT Campaign mode will require a persistent internet connection in order to play. In other words, GT Campaign is an online-only single-player mode.
Yamauchi doesn't provide any explanation for the necessity of a persistent internet connection in GT Campaign mode. The blog post simply places an asterisk next to the mode's name and then adds the internet requirement in small text at the very bottom of the post. It's obviously not a topic that Polyphony Digital is ready to discuss yet, regardless of the reasons why it's implementing such a requirement.
Before anyone leaps to assumptions, it's entirely possible that the GT Campaign mode could heavily rely on a persistent internet connection. It could populate tour destinations dynamically based on server data to refresh content daily. Races could employ some sort of technology that's depending on server communication, like opponent AI. There are any number of features and mechanics that could rely on an internet connection that Polyphony Digital could be implementing into the GT Campaign mode.
Of course, the opposite could also be true. Polyphony Digital could be requiring a persistent internet connection for a single-player mode purely for DRM, data collection, or any number of unnecessary or unfortunate reasons. There are good reasons for gamers not to trust these types of decisions, particularly due to egregious online DRM.
Regardless, there are going to be a number of Gran Turismo fans who only want to play the game offline who will now not be able to, regardless of the features Polyphony plans to implement. And a number of racing games beyond that who agree that single-player campaign modes should never be dependent on online connections. Polyphony has decided a persistent online connection is worth putting these fans off of Gran Turismo 7. Now it's up to Polyphony to persuade fans that it's worth it.
Gran Turismo 7 releases March 4, 2022 on PS4 and PS5.