Sophy In The Sandbox

Going into Sony's State of Play presentation at the start of September, I wasn't expecting or hoping for much of anything. All of it feels like jingling keys to try and sweep the reality of Sony, a long time champion of physical media, has turned coat on the medium and by extension those who use it in the process. It's hard to care about what comes next when we, as users, are being argued that we don't actually own what we buy and that the licenses being sold instead can be withdrawn at any time so that something new can be made instead to further appease shareholders.

But then one of the last physical games I will probably ever buy for the Playtation 5 gets an update as a part of the presentation, and it completely catches a lot of people off guard.

It's always a pleasant surprise to see Kazunori Yamauchi grace our screens with an update on the ongoing post-launch development of Gran Turismo 7. It's clear that he and his team are deep in the trenches with whatever the future may hold in between his trips abroad to the automotive world's biggest cultural touchstones and overseeing the GT World Series. It wouldn't surprise me if Gran Turismo 8 is deep in production, but with seemingly no real release schedule in sight it does make sense to keep the ball rolling in a bid to make GT7 all that it could be.

Come the December leg of the Spec IV update, a fair weathered friend will be making it's return to the franchise in Autumn Ring. For veterans of the franchise who's start came before the turn of the millennium, the short course may have been the first track we actually raced on; being the opening leg of the Sunday Cup in GT1. It remains one of the highlights and one of the payoffs of having to wait that little bit longer after a wave of quality of life improvements and Sportsland SUGO that come in the first half of the Spec IV update package. The six cars confirmed to be coming thus far are all show the range and the purpose of modern GT, while ticking some of the boxes of what's missing in the process. The E60 BMW M5 is a personal highlight, with the returning Mugen Motul Civic a pleasant surprise to see getting a 4K glow up.

The trick with the any additional cars and tracks that get added to a racing game like a Gran Turismo is about it's integration into what's already there, or if it can add a new dimension to the game as is. The true value of any addition gets muddled with GT7's much more generalized single player race offerings that often fails to get large swaths of the car list a place to be used in a environment that makes sense for them. There aren't dedicated Super GT or JGTC races, merely that they're a part of broader Group 2/3 or World Touring Car events for instance. Outside of a few examples, namely the Evolution Meeting and Silvia Sisters events, there aren't one-make races either when they would help fix one of the core issues of Gran Turismo 7. This is the case for the majority of people playing the game if you aren't willing to invest the time and the credits to make such races yourself with the Custom Race option using your own garage cars. The fact you can make those races yourself is one of the biggest additions to GT7, but it shouldn't be a requirement to make the most of what's there.

But come the December leg of the Spec IV update, there might be more on offer with those self-made races as well as it seeing a boost in the most recent update.

In the update details for the December leg, one of the bullet points was The next evolution of Gran Turismo Sophy. GT Sophy is a collaboration between Sony AI and Polyphony Digital which has resulted in a new form of ai opponent in racing games. Instead of it's racing and driving cadences being programmed fully by the development team after teaching it how to navigate a race track, Sophy uses developments in machine learning that reinforces and builds upon intended results happening to create an entire ai opponent infrastructure that can drive and race within GT7. The resulting ai agent requires a lot more power to run leaving PS4 players out in the cold, but has also resulted in a much more robust ai model than the norm within GT when it's allowed to run free.

The initial Race Together events proved it had the pace to go beyond what players of all skill levels can do, while also was willing to go to the very extremes of race craft. It was a blast to see them follow me to the pit wall at Suzuka Circuit, a common tactic on defense in Super GT and Super Formula races, and then go to the outside to try and make the pass at turn 1 the long way around. Contemporary ai in racing games just isn't built to do that in lieu of how it interacts with the track it's racing on; and it gave me optimism for whatever comes next out of this piece of so-called ai that isn't fueled by the plagiarism machine. And compared to how Gran Turismo ai has historically been, it was a revolution the franchise and could be for the rest of the genre depending on what comes of it.

In the three years since that Race Together event and it's initial showcases against GT World Series drivers, the question was then how would it be implemented into Gran Turismo 7 proper. The answer would be the ability to use it as the style of opponents in quick and custom races after more machine learning for new cars and tracks was completed, as well as further refine it's ability to drive and race. It feels like those extreme cadences that Sophy is capable of have been scaled back, when the option to have them still operate at those extremes should be available. An opponent aggression slider, a common option on PC realistic racing games, would be ideal in this circumstance. But hidden within those options for a custom races is the key to making Sophy truly shine, with that option a major revolution that's at the core of GT7.

There never has been a true sandbox racing mode when it comes to the single player in the Gran Turismo franchise per se. Much of the sandbox has always been left to the online multiplayer where everyone can be on the same page and run to the same rules, which hasn't been the case offline. You can be creative with what car you use and how you modify it, but you were still at the mercy of racing it in the events Polyphony has made for you. A custom race mode was added in Gran Turismo Sport that had a good suite of options at one's disposal, including being able to go way beyond typical race distances in the single player, but was still at the mercy of per-determined opponent pools.

Things would change with Gran Turismo 7 and it's return to the more traditional nature of buying, collecting and modifying cars. An additional rival cars option was added simply called Select from Garage which did exactly as it described. You go into your garage, choose the car for that grid slot, change the driver's name, rinse and repeat for the up to nineteen opponents for the race. The sandbox was well and truly open for business and it's potential continues to grow as more cars are added and Sophy gets taught to drive them. In the most recent GT7 update which added the JZX100 Toyota Chaser, Sophy had been updated to now have access to cars like the Mitsubishi FTO and most notably the F3500-B grand prix racer.

That grand prix racer, along side it's lower-nosed F3500-A counterpart, can be given one of a V12, V10, or V8 engines and various different visual aerodynamic configurations to make them look like most offerings that came out of Formula 1 from 1990 to about 1995. You can run full grand prix distances in the custom race mode replicating grids of your choosing with any pairings of teams and drivers, including a grid of just the rejects that would have been at the back of the field after greatly reducing their cars' relative performances. You can run de-facto multi-class races with Sophy perfectly comfortable navigating lapped traffic at speed, including being able to run mid-90s JGTC races with appropriate road cars able to function as the slower GT300 class in contrast to the full race cars in GT7 representing GT500. You could recreate classic Gran Turismo events like the Japan vs USA championship using race-modified road cars that were in the original GT that remain on the car list today.

The possibilities are near endless with what you want to do and gets buoyed by ai opponents that are actually up to the task, with the primary restriction being the somewhat limited track roster that Sophy has been trained for. As of yet, Sophy hasn't been made available for what limited off-road racing there is or for oval racing either. But for the tracks that it can drive on it is a battle to get to the front in ways previously not thought possible unless you severely handicap yourself.

Though PS4 users are stuck using the game's vanilla ai opponents that often refuse to use 100% throttle, they can still engage in that sandbox all the same and do what they want within that racing environment. They can still engage with an ideal way to spend your credits after doing everything you wanted to do in the game. They can still engage with a racing game that finally has the sandbox capabilities that lives up to what you could do to the cars you drive. It's still that automotive museum where you've been given the keys to the kingdom.

It is key when Gran Turismo 7's event offerings remains lackluster and the Power Pack is left as a paid expansion. There needs to be something that fills the gap and allows the full freedom of performance upgrades, combined with visual upgrades and the best livery designer on the market to be best expressed by the user if Polyphony Digital won't do it themselves. GT7 is right there with the on-track action of a custom race using garage cars; complementing what can be done in online racing and in it's fantastic photo mode.

And then you add Gran Turismo Sophy to the mix and it gives people that explore the sandbox offline something that it has needed for a very long time: a worthy competition. A competition that ideally takes on another dimension come December.