After skipping out on an update in February, Gran Turismo 7 ‘s next content update will arrive out of its usual month-end sequence next week, with confirmation by series producer Kazunori Yamauchi in his routine — if unexpectedly timed — pre-update teaser announcement this morning.
For the second update in a row we’ll see a three-car update, which has been the standard across GT7‘s life time; three-quarters of all its content updates have brought this number of cars, so this is about as regular as it gets.
As usual, we don’t have a specific date for this update, with Yamauchi being no more precise than “next week”. However it’s rarely been the case that a game update hasn’t arrived on a Thursday so we’d expect it to be March 12th, just eight days into the title’s fifth year on sale.
Unlike the last update, we’ve not had any particular teasers or previews either from manufacturers or from Polyphony Digital or any level of PlayStation/Sony Interactive Entertainment. We’re only really still expecting two cars — the Xiaomi Vision GT and the Yangwang U7 Xtreme — in terms of what the studio has confirmed for future updates but neither is under the covers here.
The covers do a better job of obscuring cars than the silhouettes do (after all, the US-market GT1 box cover car is still more or less a mystery), but we reckon we can determine the broad models from the shapes even if we can’t be more precise. That starts at the front with what’s obviously an FD-generation Mazda RX-7 which we reckon could be an early Series 6 Type R, returning to the series to complement the Series 8 Spirit R already in the game.
At the back is a modern crossover shape which we’re quite certain is a second-generation Renault Captur of some variety. There’s really too many variants and too little detail to be sure which, and it could even be the badge-engineered Mitsubishi ASX, so we’ll have to wait and see.
If that one’s hard to really pin down, the middle one is like nailing jelly to fog. While it’s clearly a first-generation Chevrolet Camaro — the front-end precluding its F-Body sibling Pontiac Firebird — we do already have an example of that in the game in the shape of the Z/28 and we’re not quite sure what else would fit. It could perhaps be a more regular SS model, or something wild like the GT Award-winning Stielow Red Devil last seen in GT6. The Power Pack DLC brought some PD-tuned cars, so maybe it’s something along the lines of the Mustang American Racer.
This teaser is the regular first step on the path to a GT7 update, only giving us clues to the cars coming and not any other content. However we can pencil in a few other things given what other updates have brought along with them in the past.
New circuits are unlikely. More than a year passed between the next most-recent update with a track and the arrival of two (three, if you count the reverse Nurburgring Endurance track) in December’s Spec III update, so we’d not expect more. New layouts are a possibility, and it looks like PD is starting to add Circuit Experiences for existing tracks as we’ve now had two in a row.
We’d expect new races in series that support the inbound cars, likely in the Japanese FR Challenge 450 for the RX-7, a European series for the Captur (perhaps Sunday Cup 400), and an American FR Challenge 550 or Clubman Cup 700 race for the Camaro depending on what it turns out to be. New race-based Bonus Menu Books are unlikely as it’s been a long time since we last saw one, while GT Sophy support for one of the 19 locations yet to feature this advanced AI could be coming but has so far missed four successive updates.
Otherwise there’ll likely be a new collection-based Extra Menu Book and a Seasonal Menu Book for buying the three new cars, new engine swaps — new cars rarely get them, but a Renaultsport Clio swap for the Captur seems like a shoo-in — and new Scapes to round out the update.
We’ll learn more about the update around the time when it arrives, with an info-dump the day before now becoming a regular occurrence and more extensive patch notes accompanying the update itself, likely on Thursday 12th March.