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The original was posted on /r/granturismo by /u/Foxxear on 2025-01-13 02:07:33+00:00.
Just to preface, I think Gran Turismo is a great driving sim. I've heard the naysayers, but honestly, I think you can learn to drive in the real world pretty well with Gran Turismo. Obvious GT Academy example aside, I've had my own "oh wow" moments, discovering I can push performance cars hard in real life, and I having little to credit outside prior GT4-GT6 experience.
I've also played Assetto and iRacing. None of these games, nor real life, feel exactly the same... but it's all a fairly transferable skill set. And if you've become a good adaptive driver, you can adjust to the differences like you'd adjust to a different car in the same game. But even then, my MR2 at its limits in real life feels very similar to the virtual one in Gran Turismo. GT7 feels better than ever.
If you want to say Gran Turismo isn't the very best sim out there, go for it... as long as we aren't pretending we're even halfway to playing Need For Speed here. I don't even buy that the physics are "optimized for DualShock gameplay" so much as acknowledge why we have so many extreme driver assists available here. I definitely believe this game is well within it's right to market as the real driving simulator. Nitpicks aside, you are learning largely applicable driving skills in GT.
What Gran Turismo isn't (and perhaps doesn't claim to be), is the real racing simulator... and I'd say it's mostly because you're driving a borderline indestructible car. In real life, everyone drives like their vehicle is indeed too fragile to afford even a single guardrail tap, and that carefulness changes everything about the way a race goes down. People are far more hesitant to go near the true limit, they crash less, and they take far fewer risks when battling an opponent unless they really know they can pull something off. You don't get to be like Max Verstappen until you actually kinda are.
I probably don't need to tell you that online racing in Gran Turismo is frequently a madhouse, and even when you're up against people who can be fairly clean, you're forced to drive just as desperate as everyone else if you want a shot at winning. Everything is so at the limit, so there are more mistakes, and there's less room to try a bold move without simply overcooking it. That's just not how real racing generally is. You chase that limit, but you keep a respectful relationship with it. You don't touch it unless you can reliably do so, meaning things often stay fairly clean and sane, from the low to the high tiers of racing... compared to GT, anyway.
This isn't me being salty because people are too fast for me or something, either. I win my fair share of hard races. But what I want to illustrate is the dichotomy where Gran Turismo absolutely deserves to be called a driving sim, whilst it really falls short of simulating real world racing. And I really do think the beginning of the fix would be less about penalties, and more about an option for more punishing damage.
Even if the visual damage model is minimal, a good smash needs to make the car mechanically undriveable, and at worst not fixable within the race timeframe. Once you have so much on the line, people drive very, very differently. You might think severe crash consequences sound unnerving, but it's actually really nice to drive with people who REALLY, REALLY don't want to crash. It's a different world.
I don't know if high damage would be better suited to the higher levels of Sport Mode, or just custom lobbies, or if the majority of the playerbase would even want it. Maybe Gran Turismo doesn't need to be iRacing. But one way or another, I believe the lack of damage is a key factor in why it is very hard to obtain a realistic racing experience in this fairly realistic game. At best, when people are so determined to race clean & not crash that it borders on real world sensibility, you perhaps get there. But it's just hard to end up in that room.
EDIT: If you disagree with something here, please consider commenting your thoughts instead of just downvoting. This post has been up for an hour and is magically tied across a handful of downvotes and upvotes, so I'm clearly hitting an interesting controversy. If there's a prevalent disagreement I'd earnestly love to hear what your positions actually are. I'm very curious about the state of this game's community and the general feelings people have about it.
