Despite a strong launch and favorable reviews from critics and fans, Gran Turismo 7‘s reputation took a mighty tumble after only a couple of weeks. One key complaint was how difficult it was to earn credits to purchase new cars, something a post-launch patch only made harder by decreasing the credits earned from specific races.
Developer Polyphony Digital has since taken heed of the complaints and has issued a new patch. While it makes numerous adjustments and improvements, perhaps the most important one is that the amount of rewarded credits has been bumped up, in an attempt to better balance the in-game economy. As detailed in a blog post, this applies to rewards for events in the latter half of the World Circuit, Arcade races, Custom races, Lobbies, and Daily races.
Three new events have been added to the World Circuit as well and you can now earn credits for clearing all layouts of circuits with Gold or Bronze results. If you’ve already achieved this, you can still get the rewards for it by going into the sector selection screen and then exiting.
While welcome, this ideally shouldn’t have been a problem that needed fixing. As a reminder, Gran Turismo 7 features microtransactions, so the initial decision to make earning credits difficult really came across as Sony and Polyphony attempting to push players into spending even more money on a $70 game. Between that and severe server issues that made the game completely unplayable (since it requires a constant Internet connection), the game’s user score on Metacritic is now a dismal 1.8.
