Competent AI opponents are the key to a good single-player racing game. And with this week’s update, Gran Turismo 7 is getting an AI upgrade as Sony rolls out its Sophy AI agent as a permanent feature of the game. The entertainment company experimented with it earlier this year for a few weeks in a limited test, but when the GT7 Spec II update rolls out to consoles tomorrow morning, Sophy will be able to race 340 of the game’s cars on nine of its tracks.

Ideally, you want the AI in a racing game to be good enough that the race is a challenge, but perhaps not quite so unbeatable that it’s a fool’s errand to try to win.

That has been harder than it sounds to get right—the older players among us will remember the AI in earlier installments of GT, which mostly stuck to a preprogrammed line with little concern for where you, the human player, wanted to put your car. Microsoft’s long-running Forza franchise actually has its origin in a neural net experiment, and more recently, its developers used each human player to train an AI agent that would populate their friends’ games, albeit with imperfect results.

Sony AI introduced Sophy to the world in 2022, publishing a paper in the journal Nature explaining how the company trained the AI to be able to beat the very best human GT players in the world. In late February of this year, a time-limited feature added a series of four-versus-one matches against Sophy set to different difficulty levels, as well as a match where the AI is completely unleashed—and almost completely unbeatable, at least to us mortal players.

“One of the challenges that really sticks out was trying to find a good balance between having the Sophy car be respectful of opponents around it—so have good sportsmanship—but at the same time being competitive in a race and making sure that it tries to take advantage of positions,” explained Kaushik Subramanian, senior research scientist at Sony AI.

“Finding that gap is the fine line,” Subramanian told Ars. “Because you don’t want to be overly aggressive. You might be trying to be overly aggressive to gain that position but at the cost of very poor racing etiquette. And our team has gone back and forth trying to find a way to walk that line because (a) that line is not clearly defined, and (b) people have different interpretations of that line. I might look at a race and say this was like this, but [Polyphony Digital, the game developer] or somebody else might have different interpretations.”

It’s not quite as simple as just replacing the old in-game AI with instances of Sophy, however; you’ll only be able to race Sophy in the Quick Race mode (née Arcade mode).

“The technology allows us to run 20 cars at the same time, so that’s a limitation,” said Peter Wurman, director at Sony AI. “In the past, we had a policy that [you] could drive one car or small set of cars, like in the race together last February. And that’s not scalable—like one car at a time across all the track combinations. So we’ve been working to make policies that can drive many, many cars.”

“The research goal is to get an agent to the point where it can completely replace the built-in AI and make the racing experience much more realistic and much more enjoyable for all players of all types. The current setup is mostly ‘chase the rabbit’ scenarios, and you have to go online and race humans to get a real racing situation, but that’s also its own complicated mess. If you could do that by yourself with the AI that’s in the game, it would be a lot more fun, I think,” Wurman told Ars.

The update also adds seven new cars (including the Lexus LFA, Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.5-16 Evo II, the latest Porsche 911 GT3 RS, and the Tesla Model 3), a new snow track with three layouts, some extra events to complete, including 50 new license tests, and four-player split-screen races (only on the PS5).

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Last year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital, the developers of Gran Turismo, developed a new AI agent that is able to race at a world-class level. At the time, the experiment was described in a paper in Nature, where the researchers showed that this AI was not only capable of driving very fast—something other AI have done in the past—but also learned tactics, strategy, and even racing etiquette.

At the time, GT Sophy—the name of the AI—wasn’t quite ready for prime time. For example, it often passed opponents at the earliest opportunity on a straight, allowing itself to be overtaken in the next braking zone. And unlike human players, GT Sophy would try to overtake players with impending time penalties—humans would just wait for that penalized car to slow to gain the place.

But in the intervening year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital have been working on GT Sophy, and tomorrow (February 21), GT Sophy rolls out to Gran Turismo 7 as part of update 1.29, at least for a limited time. Until the end of March, players can try their skills against Sophy in the GT Sophy Race Together mode in a series of races with increasing difficulty levels. There’s also a one-versus-one match where you race Sophy in identical cars, so you can see how much slower you are than the AI.

“This evolution of AI is a symbolic moment across the 25-year history of Gran Turismo, and it’s as important as the evolution of the automotive physics simulation, which is at the heart and core of a racing game,” said Kazunori Yamauchi, president of Polyphony Digital.

“Unlike the conventional built-in AI, GT Sophy drives with continuity in a large variety of situations, which allows users to enjoy the excitement of a close battle as if they are playing against a professional racing driver. This is an important evolution even from the standpoint of racing game history. We will continue to evolve GT Sophy to realize our concept of “Race Together,” where we envision providing a fun opponent for players to race against and learn from,” Yamauchi said.

Although this version of Sophy will be time-limited in the game, it won’t be the last we see of the AI. Sony says it will collect feedback on this initial feature and use that to improve the AI for future updates.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to seeing how badly I get schooled. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty…

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When Gran Turismo 7 launched earlier this month, it was no surprise that the game’s economy was not exactly forgiving. But displeasure among players boiled over a couple of weeks later after a bungled update took down the game servers—and therefore basically the entire game—for more than a day.

Now, the head of Polyphony Digital, Kazunori Yamauchi, has published a post at the PlayStation blog to apologize to players and let them know the studio has been listening:

I would like to apologize for the frustration and confusion caused last week with our patch updates which resulted in not only a server outage but also adjustments to the in-game economy which were made without a clear explanation to our community.

Every player who had a copy of the game by the time the post went live in the early hours of Friday morning will, at some point in the very near future, find an extra million in-game credits in their account as a goodwill gesture.

But bigger changes are in store for the game’s April update. This will revamp the in-game economy, increasing payouts by as much as 100 percent for some races, as well as adding better rewards for completing the Circuit Experience section of the game.

Endurance races will also appear, with eight one-hour races added to the Missions section of the game. Yamauchi says that these races will have higher reward payouts. Similarly, the payouts for online races are increasing.

Players will now be able to accumulate 100 million (non-microtransaction) credits as opposed to just 20 million credits, which may come as welcome news to those busy exploiting the game with Remote Play PC scripts to earn credits.

Other tweaks will expand the game. Yamauchi says that the game will get “a few additional patches deployed between now and the end of April, which will add new cars and course layouts.” Other near-term updates include more endurance races (including 24-hour races), the ability to sell cars, and more races at the game’s various world circuit locations.

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If Sony and Polyphony Digital stick to their current deadline, the newest installment of the 25-year-old Gran Turismo franchise should launch on March 4. Gran Turismo 7 will be the first GT game for the PS5 console (there’s a PS4 port for those of us who can’t get a hold of the latest-gen hardware). The game will have a bunch of new features and see the return of plenty of older ones.

Earlier today, Sony published a half-hour “state of play” video showing off GT7, and earlier this week, the company briefed Ars on the new game. Read on to find out what we know—and crucially, what we’re still waiting to find out ahead of the game’s launch,

When Gran Turismo: Sport debuted in 2017, it left many die-hard GT fans wanting. It solved some long-running issues with the franchise, notably in how it simulated tires. But Sport was almost entirely focused on e-sports and online multiplayer gameplay. To some fans raised on previous games that were giant sandboxes full of cars, this felt like a betrayal.

If I’m describing you, take heart, because GT7 looks like a return to the expansive (if at times grindy) GT universe you probably fell in love with in the late ’90s.

But GT7 is not just for graybeards. The game’s lead designer and Polyphony Digital head honcho Kazunori Yamauchi says that society has changed a lot since 1997. Young people don’t have the same interest in cars as they once had, and GT7 understands that societal shift. Instead, its goal is “exciting people to the allure of cars.”

Think of GT7 as the car life simulator, Yamauchi says—a sandbox of life with cars, with no clear ending and plenty of mileage for gamers. As ever, you start the game with a small amount of credits and compete in races to earn more, winning prize cars along the way.

To begin with, GT7 will ship with 400 cars, which you’ll find split between Brand Central (for new cars from 2001 through today), Used Cars (which is self-explanatory), and the Legendary Car dealer (where you’ll find notable vehicles that won’t be cheap). And yes, the car wash and oil change are both back where they belong.

The return of customization and tuning will no doubt be welcomed by many. There are hundreds of custom parts you can add to a car; some add performance, while others are more cosmetic, like new wing endplanes or different-colored brake calipers. Each car has an expansive tuning menu, and a “measure” function simulates the effect of your tweaks in real time—something Yamauchi likens to a mini-game.

What won’t be easy is sharing your setups with other players. Despite an always-online requirement—necessary to prevent people from cheating with their saved games, Yamauchi says—the only way to share a setup is to take a screenshot and share that image. (We were told the reason is that players could have different parts installed on the car, and facilitating sharing was too complicated.)

There will also be 34 different race track locations with a total of 90 different raceable layouts—you’ll find all of these in World Circuits. Despite the name, this is a mix of real and fictional tracks, including the return of the much-loved Trial Mountain, among others. Each track also has its own tutorial program, much like in GT: Sport.

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Sony broke a months-long game of silence today with a wide-ranging PS5 showcase, announcing two new Marvel games from Insomniac, a remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and a March release date for Gran Turismo 7, among other news. This is the first significant update from the publisher since it opted to skip multiple major industry events throughout 2021. The industry behemoth is now offering first glimpses of several games in production from PlayStation Studios and third-party developers.

Leading the charge was news that a remake of BioWare’s classic 2003 RPG Knights of the Old Republic—which many players consider the best Star Wars game ever made—is in development as a PS5 and PC exclusive, at least at launch. Though only the briefest clip of what looked like a Sith knight was shown, we already know this is a joint project between Lucasfilm, Sony, and Aspyr Media, a studio known for porting classic Star Wars games to modern hardware. Without a release date yet, we wonder whether BioWare’s Old Republic MMO will still be in operation by the time this remake launches.

PlayStation Studios galore

Sony also had some first-party news to share with actual PS5-only releases. Insomniac is expanding its vision of the Marvelverse in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, due out 2023, and, unexpectedly, a new game starring Wolverine.

Spider-Man 2‘s in-game trailer had Peter Parker and Miles Morales teaming up or possibly fighting (or both) opposite fan-favorite Venom. The game is being led by creative director Bryan Intihar and director Ryan Smith from the staff of Marvel’s Spider-Man.

Marvel’s Wolverine is still early enough in production to skip showing gameplay. Instead, we only got a CG tease of the mutant unleashing his adamantium claws in a rundown bar. No release date here, but the creative team behind Spider-Man: Miles Morales aims to bring the same faithful-to-the-spirit-of-the-comics touch to this one.

As a welcome change given the franchise’s usual “it’ll be done when it’s done” approach, Gran Turismo 7 announced a March 4 launch on PS4 and PS5. The news was accompanied by an operatic montage trailer that was as polished as you’d expect from Kazunori Yamauchi’s detail-precise team at Polyphony Digital, highlighting the game’s arcade circuits, a complicated-looking photo mode, a livery editor, reams and reams of meteorological data used to create photo-real weather and lighting, and, finally, the return of campaign mode. Though a new numbered GT is always something to look forward to, bringing back a real campaign is a huge victory for fans after its absence in Gran Turismo Sport.

Winter comes to Midgard, with gameplay

After only a logo announcement last year, Santa Monica Studio gave a first look at God of War: Ragnarok, picking up with Kratos and Atreus some years after the events of the 2018 reboot. Despite being cross-gen, the game’s visuals looked stunning on PS5—Kratos using both his ax and Blades of Chaos against a number of mythological monsters. But more than combat was highlighted—there was also a lot of dialogue between the Spartan, his son, and other hardy-looking characters who served to show off the game’s very high-poly models. No release date for this one, either.

However, one big question still remains for Ragnarok and GT7 after today’s splashy event: how will these two tentpoles scale down their visual splendor to PS4 and PS4 Pro consoles? Unsurprisingly, no clarification was given.

Sony’s other top-shelf studio, Naughty Dog, made a quick appearance, though not related to any unannounced projects. Instead, the studio announced Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy are coming to the PC—and PS5—for the first time. Bundled together as the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, the studio appears to be handling the PS5 remaster itself. Meanwhile, the PC release is being developed by former Sony VP Adam Boyes’ studio, Iron Galaxy. The collection will be out in early 2022, with the PC launch coming slightly after PS5’s.

And some third-party originals

And if you’re the kind of Sony fan who gets exhausted by sequels, this presentation had a few gems for you, as well. Particular standouts: Tchia, a cute-looking cross-gen indie that resembles Zelda with animal-shapeshifting powers that are based on the indigenous culture of New Catalonia; a closer look at Tango Gameworks’ bizarre, aesthetically compelling Yokai-combat first-person, uh, magicker Ghostwire: Tokyo; and, coming completely out of left field, Kid A Mnesia, a Radiohead interactive “exhibition” (whatever that means) in development with Epic.

Finally, Forspoken, a sweeping third-person adventure previously teased by Square Enix, got a long-awaited gameplay reveal that makes it look less Final Fantasy-derivative and more like a charismatic, magic-pumped breath of fresh gaming air. It’s co-written by games industry legend Amy Hennig, which Ars generally considers a good sign—and it gives her an opportunity for redemption after her fallout with EA and Star Wars.

Listing image by Sony

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On Wednesday, Sony published a wide-ranging interview with the head of its PlayStation Studios division, arguably to set expectations ahead of the usual barrage of mid-June game announcements and reveals. In Sony’s case, setting expectations now requires telling fans which console to expect future games to land on—especially in a world where chip shortages have made it tough to purchase the company’s new and very popular PlayStation 5.

This week’s PlayStation announcement marks a change for multiple games that had been previously advertised as PlayStation 5 titles. We have now learned that God of War: Ragnarok and Gran Turismo 7 are officially coming to both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The news follows last week’s confirmation that Horizon: Forbidden West will also launch as a cross-gen game.

While the God of War sequel’s backward-compatibility status was unclear, the Gran Turismo 7‘s announcement comes as a big surprise, since it was revealed to the world in June 2020 with a loud “get ready for next gen” tagline, followed by an outright declaration six months later that the game would be a “PlayStation 5 exclusive.” Both video advertisements for the anticipated racing game revolved around intense reflection effects that take material properties and car surface warping into account. While Sony Interactive Entertainment has yet to detail exactly how the game’s tech works, what we’ve seen so far will likely hinge on next-gen processing power, perhaps with ray-tracing or double-rendered geometry.

We’ve thus far seen zero footage of GoW: Ragnarok, which was recently delayed to sometime in 2022.

“A chance to raise expectations”

Scaling Sony’s ambitious-looking racing game down to run on the PS4 might not be as simple as reducing pixel resolution or disabling a few fancy effects. In fact, up until this week, Sony has been keen on emphasizing this very line in the sand that the PS5 offers gamers, arguably as a response to its rivals at Xbox.

In an August 2020 interview with GamesIndustry.biz, SIE marketing VP Eric Lempel offered the following quote about a trailer’s emphasis on PS5-exclusive tech like its fancy DualSense controller:

We’re moving into a new generation, and to us, generations matter. It’s a chance to raise the expectations from players and gamers and really introduce something new.

This statement followed a massive technical deep dive on PS5 architecture by longtime Sony hardware lead Mark Cerny in March 2020. The presentation focused on how the new console’s PCI-e 4.0-rated storage wouldn’t just speed up loading times but “give game designers freedom” to build larger, unobstructed virtual worlds—the kinds that arguably cannot be simply ported to platforms with last-gen storage systems.

This all came during the peak of Xbox’s bullish advertising campaign about “Smart Delivery” and backward compatibility. Microsoft has been keen to assure its fans that they can buy many future games, even first-party titles, and expect them to work across multiple Xbox generations, save for a few clearly marked exceptions. One of Xbox’s biggest upcoming games, Halo Infinite, continues to be advertised as cross-gen, leading me to wonder whether that decision explains the game’s technically disappointing reveal.

While PS5 console sales have been strong, demand has absolutely outstripped supply, perhaps even more than the company anticipated (thanks, chip shortage). And recently, Sony suggested that PlayStation 4 will represent 70 percent of the company’s gaming revenue for the current fiscal quarter. As a result, at least one outlet has suggested that GT7‘s cross-platform fate is a response to both of those market realities. In a recent op-ed, VGC editor-in-chief Andy Robinson wrote:

I understand the decision to release a PS4 version [of Gran Turismo 7] was made only fairly recently.

How you look at this news depends on what you think of the promise of next-gen console gaming, especially how it leverages fast solid-state drive storage—which, honestly, neither new console has shown off to any great extent yet. PS5 exclusives like Demon’s Souls and Returnal look gorgeous but arguably lack SSD-fueled innovations, while the Xbox Series X and S have been absolutely bone dry in terms of high-end console exclusives. But so long as a game is compatible with older consoles and tried-and-true storage like hard drives and slower SSDs, it is also more likely to receive a PC port—something Sony has been increasingly willing to do.
Sony’s upcoming PS5 exclusive Ratchet & Clank: Worlds Apart, launching June 11, may very well show off Sony’s next-gen technical prowess, but we’ll have to wait for the game’s release to find out. https://arstechnica.com/?p=1769551