While Gran Turismo Sport doesn’t offer a single-player campaign in the traditional sense - one that features story, characters, and so on - the game does offer a Campaign Mode. The Campaign Mode allows players to complete tutorials and challenges, progressively unlocking new rewards including vehicles. However, due to the game’s harsh online requirements, players cannot progress in Campaign Mode while the servers are down.
When disconnected from the Internet or from the Gran Turismo Sport servers, players are unable to access any mode beyond the Arcade Mode. Sony describes these requirements as necessary for fairness:
A PlayStation Plus subscription, luckily, is only required for online multiplayer. It isn’t required for other gameplay modes, though an Internet connection is.
That Gran Turismo Sport requires an online connection for single player content by itself would certainly have frustrated players on its own. This isn’t the first game to feature such functionality and it’s rarely considered in a positive light by players. But Gran Turismo Sport’s server issues seem to be exacerbating things.
Frustrations go beyond the overall scheduled and unscheduled server issues in Gran Turismo Sport, however. Players on Reddit are reporting that connectivity is notoriously finicky and that brief disconnects can occur mid-race, single player or otherwise, requiring the player to return to the game’s main menu. Even by the standards of games that require a permanent online connection, Gran Turismo Sport seems troubled.
Polyphony’s scheduled server maintenance for Gran Turismo Sport implies that the studio is working to improve the situation. Whether that results in improvements for players or not will be seen in time.
Gran Turismo Sport is available now on PlayStation 4.
Source: Reddit
