While Gran Turismo Sport offered a tantalizing taste of the GT experience using the original PlayStation VR, allowing users to wear the headset for a limited portion of gameplay, Gran Turismo 7 supports PS VR2 without any compromise. . Cars, tracks, races, and licensing tests are all there (save for split-screen support), and replaying the game with the new headset and DualSense controller is nothing short of less than telling, even though someone has logged over 200 hours on the track throughout 2022.
Here are four reasons to be excited to buckle up for GT7 on PlayStation VR2.
Big surprise – it looks amazing
Gran Turismo 7 is stunning, but I assumed that converting to PS VR 2 might come with some obvious (but understandable) trade-offs. That said, I’m happy to report that my concerns were unfounded, as the game looks wonderful in its VR conversion. Image quality and clarity is vastly improved over that of GT Sport, and I never felt like I was weighing the pros and cons of the visuals versus just playing on a “flat” TV screen. In short, the game looks great and really showcases the virtues of PS VR2.
Admire your all-time favorite cars in the VR Showroom
Players can now look around any of the game’s 450+ cars using the VR Showroom, accessible from your Garage. It feels like the natural culmination of Polyphony’s incredible efforts to bring every car to life; plastics, woodwork, leather, vinyl and plastics are now visible as you see fit. Getting up close and personal with various stereo systems, dashboards, and dials is (strangely) one of the things I’m most looking forward to once I have a PS VR2 at home. The novelty of looking around the back seats of every car cannot be underestimated.
Head tracking is a game changer
Although it may seem trivial on paper, being able to look around freely during a race – without having to look from the front of your car – offers tangible benefits, both in terms of performance and presence in the world. virtual. For example, when driving around a tight bend, it is possible to look beyond the immediate bend to the rest of the track and plan your next move. It’s one of those intuitive “real-life” driving behaviors that feels a bit strange to experience in a game.
A new sense of scale and speed
Another result of the “I actually drive a Mazda 787B” feeling is a new sense of… claustrophobia and danger (in a good way!). Motorsport can be quite dangerous, and those of us with no personal experience may get a better sense of it in virtual reality: the heightened tangibility of the rough, ready-made interior of a race, as well as real limitations of visibility (narrower windscreen, roll bars, etc.), considerably increase the feeling of speed and intensity of a race.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, PS VR2 offers a new perspective on track environments themselves. For example, the Dragon Tail mountain range looks really huge and imposing, and the Willow Springs desert somehow looks like, well, a desert – the vast emptiness of this expanse of Southern California is noticeably vast and empty. It’s a feeling I’ve never had in a game before and it made tearing through the arid landscape feel liberating.
My time with GT7 also highlighted a side benefit of the new PS VR2 hardware that I hadn’t considered before: since the headset no longer needs a camera to track your position in 3D space, you don’t no longer have to be too concerned about your relative position on the TV. It’s a small change that I anticipate will make me much more likely to use the headset during daily gaming sessions.
The free Gran Turismo 7 PS VR2 update arrives on February 22.
Table of Contents
