We all agree that Gran Turismo 7 is one of the best racing games in the world. In its simulation mode, the game is ideal for competing and organizing professional leagues. Now, an AI aims to better train its players.
A competent AI is the key to a good single-player racing game. And with this week’s update, Gran Turismo 7 receives a key improvement in this aspect, as Sony introduces its Sophy AI agent as a permanent feature of the game.
The company tested the AI earlier this year for a few weeks in a limited test, but when the GT7 Spec II update hits consoles tomorrow morning, Sophy will be able to race 340 cars from the game on nine of its tracks.
The ideal scenario is for the AI in a racing game to be good enough to make the race a challenge, but not so unbeatable that it’s foolish to attempt to win.
Balancing the AI, the most challenging part of the process
This has been more challenging than it seems: veteran players will remember the AI from the early GT releases, which stuck to a pre-programmed line without caring about where the human player wanted to place their car.
Microsoft’s long-running Forza franchise has its origins in an experiment with neural networks, and more recently, its developers used every human player to train an AI agent that would populate their friends’ matches, though with imperfect results.
Sony AI introduced Sophy to the world in 2022, publishing an article in the journal Nature explaining how the company had trained the AI to be able to defeat the world’s best human GT players.
At the end of February this year, a limited-time feature added a series of four-against-one matches against Sophy at different difficulty levels, as well as a match where the AI is completely unleashed and is almost unbeatable, at least for us mortal players.
However, it’s not as simple as replacing the game’s old AI with instances of Sophy; you can only compete with Sophy in the Quick Race mode (also known as the Arcade mode).
The update also adds seven new cars, a new snow track with three layouts, some additional events to complete, including 50 new license tests, and split-screen races for four players (only on PS5).
