GT5: Sublime or Ridiculous?

Installing…

It’s been over three weeks now since Gran Turismo 5 spent a seemingly never-ending 61 minutes installing its way into my life. For the last ten of those minutes it was teasing me with a remaining time of three seconds. I guess my expecations that GT5 exists in the same time continuum as the rest of us should have already been crushed by its extended development. Yet somehow all its ‘interactive teaser trailers’, GT HD Concept, GT5 Prologue and the Time Trial demo a year ago, seem to have altered my perception of the wait.

After waiting for over an hour with only a dull, inaccurate progress bar for company (really Polyphony, you couldn’t come up with a more interesting install screen?) I finally got to watch the opening movie. Then from the main menu it was straight into GT Mode for me.

Maybe that was the wrong thing to do as immediately GT wanted me to do something I couldn’t. It was urging me to set my home page colour, profile picture, etc., only setting a picture was impossible because I hadn’t taken any yet.

Profile done, I dropped into the usability disaster that is the GT Mode main screen. While I’m now used to it, it is an exceptionally poor interface. That screen and the inconsistent menus throughout the game lead me to the conclusion that that unexplained delay just days before the original release date happened because they released they’d forgotten to create any menus and had to get each member of the dev team to create one quickly. Why else would they be so consistently different?

Once I’d fought my way through the menus to the driving though I was pretty much ready to forgive GT5 all its other failings. GT has always been keenly focused on being a driving simulator and in GT5 Yamauchi-san and his team at Polyphony Digital have crafted an amazing driving experience.

For the most part it also looks as amazing as it feels to drive. However, there are elments that really let it down. I can accept the lower quality models reused from GT4 and GT PSP and look forward to the promised upgrades of some of them (Mazda Furai please Kaz, if you’re reading).

The problem I have with the graphics are the shadows and alpha processing as highlighted by Alex in his review. For such an otherwise stunning looking game it is immensely disappointing to see the flickering triangles beneath a car’s wing mirror, number plates that look like they’ve been cut with pinking shears or the car in front reduced to some parody of 8-bit rendering when it becomes surrounded by spray.

GT5 vs. Forza 3

This is of course going to contentious, but it is purely my opinion. I’ve got both games and have played all UK-released predecessors in each series apart from GT4 and the original Forza. Both GT5 and Forza 3 are great games that have each monopolised my time for weeks following their release.

They seem to me to be very different games with different focuses and each excels at hitting its target. GT5 is the best driving game on consoles. The amount of joy to be had in simply driving around the Nordschleife in the car of your choice is incredible. Solo laps of The Green Hell is not something you’ll find me doing for fun in Forza though.

In Forza I find the driving to be a fairly soulless experience. Forza is all about the racing. Obviously it is way over on the simulation side of the spectrum compared to arcade racers like the brilliant Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, but it is still a distance from GT5 in that respect. Racing is Forza’s beating heart and GT5 doesn’t come close to the feel of being part of races and championships that I get from Forza.

A favourite point of comparison between the two is how they handle crashes. There is no doubt that Forza’s damage modelling is superior to that in GT5. It clearly wasn’t a priority for PD and with the limited modelling they have included I think I’d have preferred it if they’d left it out until at least GT6 Prologue.

The damage modelling isn’t the only aspect of crashing that gets called into question though. The crash physics are also a regular part of the debate. The Forza fans will hit out at GT5 with videos like this:

Leaving the GT5 fans to counter attack with something like this:

While cars flipping like that isn’t without real-world historical precedent:

So for the sake of world peace we’ll call that a draw shall we?

GT5 needs some tuning

Here are some small changes or fixes that would improve GT5 from my perspective.

1. Fix the Live Timing screen so all the sector times are visible.
   I’ve noticed that on some tracks, like Circuit de la Sarthe and Cape Ring, you cannot scroll across to see the sector times for the final sector.  It’s a minor annoyance, but clearly a bug and it should be fixed.  It’s one of those small things that accumulates to give GT5 an unfinished feel in some respects.
2. Tyre Restrictions – Make it a button that links to the Tyre Shop.
   The tyre restrictions for each race that appear next to the ‘Typical Opponents’ button could easily be made a button that took you straight to the tyre department of the Tuning Shop.  The shop could even then indicate the tyres needed if you didn’t have them.  At the moment if you haven’t memorised which tyres you have for your current car you can end up going into your garage, then to your current car, then to its tuning screen.  If you don’t have the right tyres it’s then back out to GT Home, into the Tuning Shop, then the tyre department.  Then back to GT Home, back to B-Spec, and finally navigating back to the race in question.  A somewhat long-winded route.
3. Different playlists and volume settings for A-Spec and B-Spec.
   I don’t know about you but the music I would like to listen to in the two different modes is very different.  I like a good thumping choon while driving and a more ambient soundtrack while managing (and often reading).  Similarly while driving hearing the engine is key, but while I’m sat on the pitwall I’d rather hear more of the music than the engine.
4. Well done Mr B-Spec!
   I’d like to feel that my B-Spec drivers were more human and less of an algorithm responding to the slow down, don’t slow down, speed up and overtake inputs.  I want to be able to say something like either “well done” or “pull your finger out” in addition to the current commands and have different drivers respond differently to each.  So to get your best out of your drivers you need to understand a little more about their ‘personality’.
5. Consistent opposition drivers.
   Like Forza 3 has its M. Rossi, who fans have grown to like and loathe in equal amounts, I’d like the members of GT5’s OpFor to be persistent characters whose driving styles you could get to know.  Perhaps C. Costa has a tendency towards caffeine-fuelled aggression on the racetrack, whereas I.Brunel will carefully engineer his overtaking opportunities?  At the moment you cannot know as they’re random temporary entities.

Congratulations you have 100 cars, here’s Horn No. 278.  278?!  FFFFFUUUUU!

The horns you acquire in GT5 were simply a curious ‘WTF?’ kind of quirky addition to the game.  That was until I got number 278.  How many of these utterly, utterly pointless horns are there in the game?  How much development effort was spent on this ludicrous endeavour?  Maybe I’m just bitter because I haven’t found the one off the General Lee yet?

TSA Community Support

Finally, I must highlight the support available for GT5 players within our forums.  Some of our community have put a serious amount of effort into gathering information useful to GT5 players.  These are just a few examples, there’s plenty more as well as help and advice available in our GT5 forum:

• B-Spec-tacular at B-Spec (A Teflon & Co. Production)
  All the help you’ll need to get your B-Spec drivers lapping the opposition.
• Comprehensive Community Unlock Guide
  Find out which cars are unlocked by which events.
• Tuning cars to perfection
  There’s lots of options, this’ll help you find out where to start.
• Sebastian Vettel Challenge – few tips
  Frustratingly close to completing the game?  These might help.
• Truce’s Tuning Shop
  Tuning not your thing?  Hannes will help in exchange for a cheap car to help pad out his garage.

So that’s my experience of GT5 so far.  What are your highlights and lowlights?  What parts of GT5 do you think are in need of a tune-up?