Journal RogueyWon's Journal: Gran Turismo 5 - three things to watch for 2
Gran Turismo 5 will finally be released less than 24 hours from now, after many years in development. We've already seen the game's graphical prowess and I suspect that this, along with the sheer scale of the game (which will make the review process tricky) will ensure that early reviews are filled with burbling praise.
Now, I'm greatly looking forward to the release of GT5 and will be picking up my pre-order on the way into work tomorrow, but I'm by no means prepared to lavish praise upon it in areas where it may not be merited. Indeed, the sheer length of the game's development time, as well as the deeply poor GT5: Prologue have me in a suspicious frame of mind and there will be a number of things I will be looking out for.
The areas where I'll be focussing my attention are:
1) The racing experience: this is an absolutely fundamental aspect of the game and I've been worried that there's been a near total absence of coverage of this. The game can have stunning graphics and as many cars as it wants, but if the actual racing isn't up to scratch, then most players will ultimately end up underwhelmed.
GT5: Prologue was significantly behind the competition in this area in a number of respects (as was Gran Turismo on the PSP). The most important areas were damage modelling, artificial intelligence, difficulty scaling and event design. In every single one of these areas, Forza Motorsport 3 performs significantly better than GT5: Prologue.
Now, of course, GT5: Prologue was released quite some time ago and we can expect the game to have moved on since then. We know that damage modelling is in GT5, which is an extremely good thing. Proper damage modelling encourages proper racing, in both singleplayer and multiplayer, as opposed to the game of high-speed dodgems that previous GT games have tended to become. So in this specific area, it's clear that the racing experience has been improved.
I've not seen or heard anything about AI, though, and this does worry me. The opponent AI in GT5: Prologue and GT:PSP is woeful compared to that in many competitors. Opponents in Forza 3 and Grid actually race against the player. They will block the player, put pressure on him when chasing him, and even, on occasion, make serious mistakes that send them spinning off the track. Throughout the entire history of the GT series, AI opponents have never done anything other than drive around a pre-determined racing line, largely ignoring the player (until they crash into him). The first thing I'll want to see from GT5 is a more convincing sense that my AI controlled opponents are actually racing against me.
Difficulty scaling has become more advanced in a number of ways over the years. The biggest (and best) innovation has been the "rewind" button, which allows players to zap back in time to before they made a major mistake. This was pioneered by Grid, but has shown up in the Dirt series, as well as in Forza 3. In a genre that tends to eschew quicksaves, the rewind feature has been a huge frustration reliever, particularly once players get into races which can last 30 minutes or longer. I will be expecting to see one of these in GT5 and will be seriously unhappy if it isn't there.
I'd also like to see more thought put into the toggleable driver assists. One of the great things about Forza 3 was that you could toggle any number of assists on and off. While this has some singleplayer value, its main use was in balancing multiplayer matchups, allowing for players of wildly different skill and experience levels to have competitive matches in head to head multiplayer. When you have a bunch of friends or family gathered around a console, this is a huge bonus. In fairness, previous GT games have not been bad in this respect, but there is certainly more that could be done in GT5.
Event design is a tricky one. Of course, one of the great joys of the whole GT5/Forza genre of racing sims lies in collecting new cars and tuning them to optimise their performance. However, it has been relatively easy in previous GT games to tune a car to the point where it becomes effectively unbeatable in many of the events. The Performance Index system pioneered by Forza went a long way towards countering this and it would be nice to see GT5 also putting some thought into this area (even if it doesn't come to the same solution).
2) The game's sound. First things first, some major kudos to GT5 for becoming the first major PS3 title to allow for custom soundtracks. This has been common in Xbox and 360 games for years, but I've never come across it before on a Sony platform. Custom soundtracks are a huge bonus in a game like this.
But I was very disappointed by the sound quality in GT5: Prologue. While engine sounds were fine, the game still seemed to be using a single "tyre screech" sound, which sounds frankly inappropriate in many of the cars in the game. Sound is a vital part of a high end racing game and listening to your tyres can be a vital tool for working out just how card you can push a car in a corner. This is an area that I hope has had a lot more attention since GT5: Prologue.
3) Career mode: The Gran Turismo series essentially pioneered its particular variety of career mode and it is a model that many competitors such as Forza have imitated over the years. However, pioneering though it was, the old GT4 career mode is looking a bit dated now.
It's interesting that none of GT's competitors have ever seen fit to mimic the licence tests. There's a good reason for this; while the licence tests may have value as an optional extra, as a core part of the career mode, they have never been anything but tedium and frustration. Requiring licences to enter events should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
I'd also like to see GT5 moving towards the Forza 3 model of not locking cars away behind arbitrary requirements, but having them all purchasable (and usable in arcade mode) from the moment the player first loads up the game. Not only does this allow the player more leeway to develop his garage, but it's a welcome feature for multiplayer sessions.
Anyway, those are a few of the things that I'm hoping to see in GT5. These mostly reflect advances that have been made elsewhere within the genre. If Polyphony have any sense, they will have been looking at their competitors and taking notes. If they haven't... their game will have suffered as a result.
Only one thing in GT5 I care about... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Test Track is great... I just wish that they'd included some of the "reasonably priced cars" that have been used over the years, so players could compare their times to that of various celebrities. The current one is a Kia, and Polyphony don't seem to have a licencing agreement with Kia (though I can't believe this would be too hard to come by). But previous ones have been Suzukis, who have cars featured in the game. Just none of the ones featured as the Top Gear "reasonably priced car".