Gran Turismo 5 Catch-All

Certis wrote:

Thanks Japan.

The assimilation has begun.

Thanks Drunken Gamers.

AP Erebus wrote:

and if what Thin_J is saying, it hasn't been changed since the prologue... makes you wonder what the hell they are doing over there

For the record, that was my bet. I haven't played the demo yet. I definitely will. I'd love to have two super high quality racing games like this. Seriously. If GT5 was awesome I'd even put up with the PS3 controller to sink a hundred hours into it. I just don't think it will be. I imagine the physics will still be solid, but with the same disconnected feel that was there before. We'll see.

GT5 Prologue's physics felt pretty accurate (and are actually much more realistic than Forza when it comes to AWD cars), but you don't feel nearly as connected to the road as they do in Forza. There's something in Forza's modeling of tires and the way traction with the road works that feels right. Gran Turismo has never had this, and it's one of those seemingly small things that makes a huge world of difference when it comes to actually playing the game.

In a perfect world the two dev teams would pool their resources and make one ultimate console sim racer. Polyphony would do all the visuals and car modeling and Turn10 would do the physics and interface stuff.

It would swallow my soul.

The thing that makes me scratch my noggin about this demo is that they have turned all the driver assists off, and it's not even an option to have them on. I'm sure they did it to even the playing field for the contest, but I think that alone will turn many casual racers off of it right out of the gate. And most people probably won't even realize why it feels so off. Especially when you compare it to GRID or NFS Shift for sheer driving feel, which those game do superbly.

Thin_J wrote:
AP Erebus wrote:

and if what Thin_J is saying, it hasn't been changed since the prologue... makes you wonder what the hell they are doing over there

For the record, that was my bet. I haven't played the demo yet. I definitely will. .

Ah, my apologies for the misquote.

It just seems a shame that they can get one part of it so right (visual, etc) but seem to miss on the other major parts.

Thin_J wrote:

In a perfect world the two dev teams would pool their resources and make one ultimate console sim racer. Polyphony would do all the visuals and car modeling and Turn10 would do the physics and interface stuff.

It would swallow my soul.

That would be amazing but of course it would never happen, I would die a happy man if that ever did occur though.

I say the following as a gamer that prefers arcade racers. I generally know what I like, but I like to also give some of these games chances they perhaps never deserved.

With that said, I didn't much care for the Forza 3 demo, and I doubt I'd like the GT5 one any more. But I enjoyed Gran Turismo 1 - buy a crap car, supe the heck out of it, and race it - crap AI or not, it was about the car and if I could pull ahead of the leader faster than last time. I played #4 last year, and it's not bad, but it got very... repetitive. Circular tracks? Oblong tracks? Hexahedron tracks? Honestly, I'm get tired of going in circles. It was ok 10 years ago, but for me, it has become boring.

And on another note: 10 years later and I still couldn't care about damage modeling. When I careen my car off a cement divider on the track and "Do A Barrel Roll!", limping to the finish line is not my idea of fun. Just crack my rear window and loosen my rear bumper, and I'll be fine. Affect my performance and I'm gone.

trueheart78 wrote:

I say the following as a gamer that prefers arcade racers. I generally know what I like, but I like to also give some of these games chances they perhaps never deserved.

With that said, I didn't much care for the Forza 3 demo, and I doubt I'd like the GT5 one any more. But I enjoyed Gran Turismo 1 - buy a crap car, supe the heck out of it, and race it - crap AI or not, it was about the car and if I could pull ahead of the leader faster than last time. I played #4 last year, and it's not bad, but it got very... repetitive. Circular tracks? Oblong tracks? Hexahedron tracks? Honestly, I'm get tired of going in circles. It was ok 10 years ago, but for me, it has become boring.

And on another note: 10 years later and I still couldn't care about damage modeling. When I careen my car off a cement divider on the track and "Do A Barrel Roll!", limping to the finish line is not my idea of fun. Just crack my rear window and loosen my rear bumper, and I'll be fine. Affect my performance and I'm gone.

I'm seriously considering sigging that.

Evo wrote:

NFS Shift for sheer driving feel, which those game do superbly.

This is very much semantics, but Shift nailed the experience of driving fast. They nailed the look and sound of it. The feel of driving was pretty far off from driving a real car.

Thin_J wrote:
Evo wrote:

NFS Shift for sheer driving feel, which those game do superbly.

This is very much semantics, but Shift nailed the experience of driving fast. They nailed the look and sound of it. The feel of driving was pretty far off from driving a real car.

I think that's fair.

I've found that racers that can successfully straddle the arcade/sim line offer up the most thrills for my tastes. Recent games like Codemasters' GRID and DiRT 2 have taken waning interest in clinical racing sims (Forza/GT) and all but shattered any interest I ever had in them.

I certainly respect the sims for what they are, though.

Yeah, Grid and its ilk are definitely different kinds of games than Forza or GT. They both involve racing and cars, but that's about where the similarities stop.

My issue with Shift has always been that it claimed to do both arcade and sim and in reality it just did a crappy job of both. Grid was a much better game.

Thin_J wrote:
Evo wrote:

NFS Shift for sheer driving feel, which those game do superbly.

This is very much semantics, but Shift nailed the experience of driving fast. They nailed the look and sound of it. The feel of driving was pretty far off from driving a real car.

That's what I meant, but it's sort of the same thing in my experience driving actual circuits on track days and doing Solo II events. The feeling of speed and the weight and momentum of the vehicle.

I just ran several laps in the "upgraded" Z car, and this demo is the anti-fun. Perhaps it was designed for a wheel and pedals setup, because it is unwieldy with the Dualshock. It did do one thing extremely well: Make me want to play Burnout Paradise really, really bad.

Why does any racing game default to using face buttons instead of triggers for acceleration and braking? Totally lame.

Just played the demo this morning and am a bit baffled. The demo is clearly an extremely stripped down version of what the final game will be, and without being able to change assist modes and whatnot I left wonder what their aim was with this demo release. Were the simply rushing to get something, anything, out during the holiday season?

In any case, the lack of feedback from the driving model was rather disappointing. I honestly can't comment on its physics, as I don't know how much was my imagination or the game, as I didn't feel the game was communicating what was going on all that well. Part of this might be that the Playstation controller just doesn't work that well for precision driving, even after remapping the throttle and brake buttons to the triggers, but like ThinJ mentioned there's a serious disconnected feeling about driving the cars in the demo.

Tried it again. Still very disappointed. The worst part for me is that I was looking so forward to driving the road course at Indy. I've been there for the F1 race and the Ferrari cup stuff, and I know the layout of the track. It's just so un-fun to drive in GT.

ARISE!

hot off the presses:

Gran Turismo 5 delayed in Japan, new date unknown

Sony announced that the Japanese release of Gran Turismo 5 has been delayed from its unspecified March date to an undecided future date, to be announced later. Sony apologized for the inconvenience, citing some kind of "circumstances" around the release date. No concrete information was provided about what exactly caused this drastic move.

Things seemed to be looking up for Gran Turismo 5 for a while. Sony announced a March release for Japan and a tentative summer release for North America, sent out a very popular demo, and even revealed the North American box art design. But this latest move suggests that Polyphony's latest racer may not be as close to the finish line as expected.

via Joystiq...

maybe they got some specific feedback from the demo... maybe?

I'm saying it now... This game will never come out.

larrymadill wrote:

I'm saying it now... This game will never come out.

The problem by pushing it back they are killing the buzz around it - releasing a game when it's perfect isn't a viable software release model and I honestly think that, when it does arrive, Forza 4 will have trumped it more so than Forza 3 would have.

Meh. Needs more turtle shells.

I arise this thread to ask but one question: "NASCAR?"

Mass appeal.

Shall we just use this as a catch-all?

Now that a release date has been pinned down, my anticipation for this game is really starting to ramp up, especially after I saw this random feature list on GAF:

Night/Day transition
Stunt Arenas
32 player online lobbies
16 player online races
Track (not map) Editor
Spectator mode
Weather
200 PS4 cars and 800 standard cars
Nascar license
WRC license
Super GT license
Rolling and damage (eerily real weight)
1st person walkabout photo mode
YouTube uploading
1080p
PS Eye headtracking
Motion controls
HDMI 1.4 Stereoscopic 3D @ 60fps
Split-screen
Best graphics in any driving game (lighting, physics driven smoke, attention to detail..etc)
Real life tracks recreated in maddening quality (up to 2 year dev times)
20+ locations with 70+ variations
PSP Connectivity
Go karts to Rally to classics to sport to Drag car, ordinary cars...etc etc etc
Animated drivers, handling and gear shifts, pit crews, tire changes etc
Custom soundtrack
Text and Voice chat
Narrative involvement by popular drivers and Top Gear crew
Top Gear Test Track
Open free-form Track Days
GT Life (career mode, this time with earth map and real time clock) & Arcade mode
Profile pages
In-game (bulletin-board) message boards
Gran Turismo Video store (Top Gear Show has 350+ million viewers)

I know Forza has pretty much stolen the crown in the absence of a proper GT game, but I'm anxious to see if GT can take it back come November 2nd.

I think my biggest issues with this game are all hinged on how long it's been in development. I was willing to overlook things before, but the longer the wait goes on for the final product the more and more annoyed I get with its every mention. This game has been in production for ages now, and yet it still doesn't offer things that Forza started offering on the original Xbox.

Some might argue that it isn't about that stuff, and that's fine, but to me it just means this game's going to attract a crowd I don't want to play the game with.

And as oft discussed as it has been, this is borderline trolling, but the PS3 controller is still sh*t.

That might not matter if I was setup for the racing wheel, but I'm not. I play these games from my couch. That is the way I will continue to play them. I tried a wheel, and it didn't work for me. I simply don't have the setup for it.

The fact that the demo's driving model still gives the player that same feeling of disconnect between what you're doing with the controller and what the car's doing in the game that it had back in the Prologue release is sort of the last straw. Pretty sure I'm out, no matter what.

The rally and head-tracking stuff has me interested. I would also like to hear more about the split-screen options. Although I still feel like I haven't put as much time into Forza 3 as I should have. I used to use racing games as a time killer, but with so many other good games out (combined with a busy schedule) I haven't had any time to kill lately!

"HDMI 1.4 Stereoscopic 3D @ 60fps"

PS3 has HDMI 1.3.

EvilDead wrote:

PS3 has a massively overbuilt and upgraded HDMI 1.3. port that is essentially feature equivalent to 1.4 anyway.

Edited for truthiness. My understanding is that without that overbuilt HDMI port they wouldn't be able to do 3D at all, which I believe is the situation the 360 is in.

Thin_J wrote:

And as oft discussed as it has been, this is borderline trolling, but the PS3 controller is still sh*t. :evil:

Agreed, but if you're playing driving games (well, any, but especially driving) on the PS3 without these, then you're only hurting yourself.

garion333 wrote:

Agreed, but if you're playing driving games (well, any, but especially driving) on the PS3 without these, then you're only hurting yourself.

I don't have a problem with the shape of the triggers. I think in the interest of not derailing the thread I'll leave it at that, lest we bring up more of the same old discussion.

But seriously, GT5 just has this giant queue of problems, all lined up and waiting to tell me repeatedly not to spend my money.

Which in a way is great. I could do with some money saving.

Thin_J wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Agreed, but if you're playing driving games (well, any, but especially driving) on the PS3 without these, then you're only hurting yourself.

I don't have a problem with the shape of the triggers. I think in the interest of not derailing the thread I'll leave it at that, lest we bring up more of the same old discussion.

*shakes head* You don't know you have a problem with the controller but you actually do. [/derail]

Dyni wrote:

Shall we just use this as a catch-all?

Edited the thread title to reflect this.

Dyni wrote:

Now that a release date has been pinned down, my anticipation for this game is really starting to ramp up...

You must not have played the demo, you poor thing.

Thin_J wrote:

The fact that the demo's driving model still gives the player that same feeling of disconnect between what you're doing with the controller and what the car's doing in the game that it had back in the Prologue release is sort of the last straw. Pretty sure I'm out, no matter what.

I am sure someone will swing in here and tell us that writing off the game based on the demo is just plain wrong (maybe it is?), but I got the exact same impression as you, Thin_J. I would think that with all the driving assists turned off, as they were in the demo, it would make the driving feel more seat of your pants, intense, and connected, but it was the opposite. The driving felt sterile, the inputs didn't seem to have a direct bearing on the behavior of the car, and it gave about the same sense of speed as a trip to the grocery store in a 1984 Oldsmobile station wagon.

After pouring dozens of hours into NFS: Shift, which, despite its many shortcomings, gives you a fantastic sense of speed and makes driving very exciting, there's no way I can convince myself to pay $60 for GT5. Also, I am not convinced that it will actually be released on Nov. 2.

Evo wrote:

I am sure someone will swing in here and tell us that writing off the game based on the demo is just plain wrong (maybe it is?), but I got the exact same impression as you, Thin_J. I would think that with all the driving assists turned off, as they were in the demo, it would make the driving feel more seat of your pants, intense, and connected, but it was the opposite. The driving felt sterile, the inputs didn't seem to have a direct bearing on the behavior of the car, and it gave about the same sense of speed as a trip to the grocery store in a 1984 Oldsmobile station wagon.

QFT. I don't know how it is that devs are able to convey a sense of speed, but I didn't feel any in the demo.

garion333 wrote:

QFT. I don't know how it is that devs are able to convey a sense of speed, but I didn't feel any in the demo.

In the case of NFS: Shift, it seems to be conveyed by making the movement of the car's cockpit independent of what's going on outside, giving you a head-wobble sort of effect. Combined with the fact that you're looking through a very small window out of the cockpit and the very thoroughly textured tarmac surface, you get a very good sensation of speed.

Here's a good video comparing Shift with Forza 3 where this is demonstrated. The actual comparison starts at around 1:20 in. They need to do one of these for GT5.