A little unexpectedly, three days after the Gran Turismo World Series live event in Los Angeles, Sony and Polyphony Digital have announced a first-ever paid DLC pack for Gran Turismo 7.
The DLC goes by the name of the “Power Pack”, and it seems to comprise an expansion to the game’s career mode with 50 new races — including endurance races, at least one of which is a 24-hour race — based upon “authentic motorsport scenarios”.
Alongside the races themselves, which are described as being variously focused on real-life events, car culture, and national series across 20 different categories, there’s also the return of qualifying with the Power Pack — for the first time since Gran Turismo 4.
It’s not clear how many of the events are covered by this scenario, but for those that are you’ll be able to play through a full race event with practice and qualifying before taking part in the race itself. That means no more “chase the rabbit” races in which you start at or near the back and have to battle through.
Not only that, you’ll likely be given a bit of a hard time as there’s an AI upgrade too. Again, this is something briefly covered in the announcement — so more details are coming — but this will see players racing with a new version of the machine-learning Sophy AI, dubbed “Gran Turismo Sophy 3.0”.
Buying the DLC — price currently unknown, but available from December 4 — creates a new location on the World Map bearing the “Power Pack” name near the Showcase location, mooring a three-mast sailing boat at the cute little jetty (and evicting one of the seaplanes). This gives access to the races therein.
There looks to be quite a complex progression path, with at least five (and probably up to eight given the arrangement) colored routes. One, highlighted in orange, is labelled “Japan-Asia”, while others could plausibly be Europe and US-oriented, but we’ll have to see how the mechanics play out.
In addition there’s three cars shown with upgrades that aren’t available in the base game: a Volkswagen 1200 and Porsche 911 930 in the hero image, and a Toyota Corolla AE86 sneaked into the progress tree image. It could be that this hints new parts, either in Spec III or the DLC, but it’s curious it’s only these three cars.
An alternative explanation is a range of new pre-tuned versions of factory cars like we saw in Gran Turismo: HD. Oh, that was 19 years ago by the way; feel old yet?
Also of interest, the Power Pack announcement looks like it reveals two additional pieces of information about the Spec III update. Firstly, the screens seem to show that the new Collector Level cap is 70. Assuming the post-50 levels work like most of the prior ones, you’ll need a car collection valued at 110,950,000cr to hit this new level.
More importantly, it also appears to soft-announce the launch date for Spec III. The Power Pack itself will be available on December 4, but it requires Spec III/1.64 and the promo trailer includes the new Ferrari 296 GT3 that will arrive in Spec III. That very much hints that December 4th is the day it all lands.
One quick caveat here though: the presence of GT Sophy 3.0 means that the Power Pack is for PlayStation 5 players only and won’t be available on PlayStation 4.
At present we don’t know what the price for the Power Pack is, but along with all of the above you’ll receive 5,000,000cr in-game when you buy the pack which (given price scaling for the credit add-ons) we’d estimate at $30-$35 of equivalent value — though you’d need to spend about $50 to buy separately.
We’ll bring you more on all of this when we get it!
See more articles on Gran Turismo 7 DLC and Gran Turismo 7 Game Update.
