PS4 racing game GT Sport will refuse to save your ingame progress if you’re offline. Developer Illusion (thanks to a discovery by Nenkai) has released a patch to remedy this “issue”, 5 years after the game’s launch.

GT Sport Online requirement, even for solo play

Polyphony Digital’s 2017 Gran Turismo Sport is one of those games that will only accept to save your progress if you are connected to the game’s servers. Allegedly, this is to prevent players from cheating online (e.g. by levelling up through save file editors), and developer polyphony have justified this in the past to implement similar restrictions on their other games too:

The requirement for the online connection isn’t specific to the Cafe per se – it’s just to prevent cheating overall from people trying to modify the save data, so that’s the reason for the online connection. – Kazunori Yamauchi, GT creator, talking about GT7 release

But it’s baffling (or just lazy programming) that such a limitation would also exist for offline/solo play.

This might sound like a minor issue in an era where everyone has a solid internet connection, but the implied consequences are the real problem: the day the company decides it’s not worth the cost of maintaining those servers (or if they go bankrupt), the game will simply stop working. Now, for a free online game this would be frustrating. But for a game with a solo mode, that you paid for, this is just unacceptable in my book. (And yes, we all know that the GT solo campaigns aren’t as good as the online modes, but I feel that’s not the point).

GT Online save limitations – Hackers to the Rescue!

This is where hackers Illusion (whom we already know very well on his blog for his many 60FPS patches for the PS4) and Nenkai (a modder dedicated to car games in general, and GT in particular) come in, with a patch that disables the “online” check when saving.

The patch doesn’t seem to have any negative impact, it just works. You’ll of course need a Jailbroken PS4 to patch the binary and still be able to run it… incidentally, Jailbroken PS4s can’t (or shouldn’t) go online anyway, so that’s pretty convenient.

Download and apply the GT Sport Offline Save patch

• You can download the patch from Illusion’s github here.
• You’ll need a tool to unpack/repack your PS4 package. Modded Warfare’s PS4 Patch Builder might be what you want (tutorial here, working links here)
  • You will want to extract, modify, then repack eboot.bin with this technique
• Follow illusion’s instructions to patch the eboot.bin with py_patch (then repack with PS4 Patch Builder above).

Source: illusion