When Sony announced the microtransaction prices for Gran Turismo 6 , they swore these were "entirely optional."
I'm not so sure about that.
Hey, I've been playing this franchise since its inception back on the original PlayStation. You won't find a bigger supporter of the series, although I certainly agree that we need an AI upgrade. I know full well why a game like GT6 is a car lover's dream, and why it rewards those who actually want to learn how to race. I get all that and I also understand that in regards to the microtransactions, nobody is putting a gun to my head. And I don't need them to finish the game.
But wait. There's something significantly different about this new installment and coincidentally, that difference greatly hinders your ability to rack up credits. For the record, you always had to grind if you wanted to earn a huge amount of money in any GT; it usually required finding a reward car that's worth a lot, and just racing that same event over and over and over. Yeah, it took several hours to earn the money you wanted and yeah, it could get boring. But you could do it.
In GT6, the most expensive cars are around 20 million (and higher) credits, but I'd probably be happy with Red Bull awesomeness that "only" goes up to about 5 million. Even that, however, seems extremely difficult. And why? Because quite simply, we're not getting anywhere near the number of reward cars we used to. In all GT games prior to GT6, we'd get lots of cars; we'd get 'em for completing sets of events and we'd definitely get them for completing tournaments. I finished the GT National Championship and was shocked to see I didn't get a car.
One could argue that indeed, we'll get those GT Vision cars from time to time. And maybe that makes up for things, especially if you take advantage of that well-documented glitch involving the gifted Mercedes AMG. That's cheating, though, yes? We never really got enough in standard winnings to rack up enough credits to purchase the best cars in the game. That's nothing new. But the reward cars always compensated; just find one that's worth a big chunk and keep winning it. You have to work to get to that point, too, remember. It's not like it was a glitch or an easy way out. You still had to be able to win the event that delivered the fancy car, which definitely required a lot of effort.
That was just fine. This…the the way game is set up, it feels suspiciously like they knew microtransactions would be an "option" all along, and they tailored the game that way. I could be wrong; Yamauchi and Co. maybe just wanted to make the game harder. They did exactly that with the new PP limitations for every event (so now you can't just put a supercar out there among Corollas). Still, this feels heavily skewed and you know, I've always said microtransactions are a slippery slope. Could this be an example of that? I'm afraid it might be.
Related Game(s): Gran Turismo 6
