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If you know me, you probably know that I own a PlayStation 4. Unlike my Nintendo consoles, I generally don’t spend much time on it. However, on Christmas Day, I was gifted Gran Tourismo 7.
It is a racing game published by PlayStation Studios and it prides itself on providing an experience somewhat close to real life. I would argue that it is one of the most popular racing games out there, if not the most popular game.
I spent Christmas Day installing the game because this game takes up over a whopping 140GB of hard drive space (some people probably don’t find this to be an issue, but you have to remember I am a Nintendo fan who has survived with no issues on 160GB total for 4 years on my Switch with 30GB to spare.
I thought I was done installing this on Christmas Day to be honest, but when I opened the game up on Boxing Day it still took a solid half an hour to install (I’m glad that I don’t deal with this on Switch)…
Anyways, I probably shouldn’t go into a mini rant over storage sizes, because that’s not particularly important to the main point of this article. When I started playing the game, I was enjoying it with no issues. But then, it happened…
I disconnected from the internet. It happens for me occasionally with my PlayStation, it tries to switch to the 5GHz band but ends up with no connection. I have both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks in my house on the same WiFi SSID since it makes things easy.
When this happened, I got a pop-up letting me know that the game couldn’t connect to the PlayStation Network and I was in an ‘Offline Mode’. I thought this wouldn’t be an issue, but you literally can’t do anything whilst offline.
Before I continue onwards, I thought it might be helpful adding my best explanation of the different functions in the World Map of GT7 (there’s another mode called Music Rally, but I haven’t bothered to play that).
I know I’m missing something here, but I am fairly confident that we’ve covered the main options.
Moving back to where we was, how many options do we have offline exactly? Are you thinking perhaps 7? Think lower. 5? Think lower. 3? Not even close.
You have just one option offline: a limited World Circuit. In this limited World Circuit, you can’t really make any progress in the Story Mode quests.
I find it absurd that you are literally limited to just this one mode and you can’t even do story mode quests. In my eyes, I do not understand why we don’t have action to the full World Circuit, Cafe, Garage, Vehicle Shops (Used Cars, Legend Cars, Brand Central), Licence Centre and Missions. Why do I need an internet connection for these modes?
The only reason I could justify needing an internet connection are friend rankings and perhaps rotating the shops (I’m not sure how the shops rotate, but the Splatoon series of games require you to connect to the internet for the shops (maybe I should talk about the Splatoon experience if you don’t have Switch Online in the future as that would make a good topic).
I know some of you are probably screaming at the screen asking me on why I don’t just use Ethernet.
Cabling up my devices would be awkward, as my PS4 is upstairs (above the kitchen) and my router is downstairs in the living room. I could use powerline, but the latency is bad from what I’ve heard (plus speeds can be all over the place). Using some sort of coaxial solution isn’t possible either since I don’t have coax coming into the room. I honestly don’t see the need for me to get extenders either (I think VM might offer them for free to me because I have O2 mobile service).
It just isn’t possible. And anyways, my focus is for when the servers for this game eventually shut down.
As far as I know, we haven’t experienced any major permanent shutdown for certain aspects of PlayStation Network, but the network has been down for as long as 30 days in the past (2011 hack). People should not have to avoid a game that they might adore for 30 days just because a company decides to not have the servers up. It honestly sucks.
Also, I didn’t mention this initially when I first published this, but I had a disconnection happen (I’ve had roughly 5 in total now) during a 15 minute race. When the race finished, I was still disconnected and I lost the progress that I made during that race (I was doing it for a quest). This meant that I had to waste 15 minutes doing this again. Thanks Sony!
I’m going to end this since I have covered the main points that I wanted to cover here in today’s rant. I wish that we would talk about stuff like this more, because it is a serious concern.
Thanks for reading.