The unspoken truth about Gran Turismo 5
Gran Turismo 5 is finally out! (Or possibly almost finally out!) Woo! It’s no more than four or five years late! And worth every minute!
I haven’t played it, obviously. But there’s something you should know.
Because over the last half-decade you’ve probably seen all the amazing screenshots (of replays) and videos (of replays), and struggled to hear the comedy collision noise (think someone dropping a bag of wet sand onto a wooden floor) over the sound of fanboys fapping themselves raw.
All I’m saying is, just try to be aware that for roughly 92% of your playing time, what you’re actually going to be looking at is this:
“Archaic online multiplayer, an unwieldy interface, terrible optimisation and obtuse structure” (Eurogamer)
“Shadows jitter and crawl, frames drop below 60 per second at busy times, the screen tears, and from some angles at some times the game can look quite plain.” (Eurogamer)
“GT5 doesn’t control that well on a pad” (Eurogamer)
“There is cosmetic deformation of the car models from the biggest impacts, but it’s very unconvincing, as if the coachwork was made out of plasticine.” (Eurogamer)
“Worse, the impact physics still have the racers either bouncing off or snagging on each other like toy cars.” (Eurogamer)
“Eight-tenths of the staggering line-up of over 1000 cars are Standard models imported from previous GTs.” (Eurogamer)
“These cars, available in the used car mart, have been reworked, but still almost look rough – their notched wheel arches, heavily smoked windows and lack of in-car view betray their origins” (Eurogamer)
“As a public game, though, GT5 needs a lot of work. There’s no matchmaking at all, so you have to browse a list of rooms and pick one, or enter an alphanumeric code, as if you’re playing a PC game and it’s 1999. The netcode is unstable; after a long pause I started one race alone on the grid, with the rest of the field halfway around the track already.” (Eurogamer)
“There’s no persistence or reward for participating in multiplayer: no experience, no money, no ranking, not even points carried over consecutive races. Polyphony was left behind by online gaming long ago, and it has a lot of catching up to do. The gulf to its upstart rival on the other console is wide indeed.” (Eurogamer)
“A cumbersome game with odd priorities” (Eurogamer)
“9/10” (Eurogamer)
Oh Eurogamer, you little slut:
"All I'm saying is, just try to be aware that for roughly 92% of your playing time, what you're actually going to be looking at is this:"
Actually no, you'll spend 92% of your time looking at the loading screen.
And ACTUALLY no, right now you'll spend 92% of your time waiting without being able to do anything as it tries to contact Sony's servers, which are down, resulting in literally minutes wait to do anything.
Gran Turismo was never a game, it was a tech demo for CD-ROM that showed how many different cars and tracks you could put on one disc.
GT5 could have done the same for the PS3 if it had come out when it was supposed to, but this late in the console's life people also expect a game to be enjoyable, not just a bunch of rendering tests for the new GPU.
Amazing.
Looks pretty good to me – can't wait.
"9/10 Eurogamer"
Assuming 10 is good yes?
It's made me safe in the knowlege that my £150 on the signature edition hasn't been wasted!
There haven´t been a lot occasions where I had to literally laugh out loud lately, but this did the trick:
link to i.imgur.com
Seems they have been so distracted with individually modelling bolts on the underside of a Nissan Skyline that they forgot that they should upgrade the graphics of the PS2 tracks at least a little bit. I couldn´t care less about how detailed a zoomed-in headlight of some random japanese car is when some of the tracks still looks like they´ve been directly ripped from PS2 assets.
Because when I play racing games, 95% of the time I look at the track, not at my beautifully virtual hands fiddling with the knobs in the cockpit constructed out of 4 million polygons.
Dear me. Five years of delays and THAT'S what they've signed off on?
Ahahaha! Simply great….. you should post it in GT planet forum, if you even say "I don't like…." comes a moderator to ban you XD
I can't be arsed to go signing up for new forums just to get banned. But be my guest 😀
Having played GT5 for a couple of days now, I'm beginning to compare it to The Phantom Menace in terms of let down. Everyone waited for it so long that they wanted it to be really great. The team that created it, and the director, are just like George Lucas – it's their property, and no-one seemed to have had the balls to point out the massive flaws en route to mediocrity.
The uncomfortable truth is it's just OK – a whole bunch of other racing games, going back as far as the likes of TOCA2, are far better.
Then there's the litany of terrible design errors (the interface, for one – and just little things like the out of the shadows 'reveal' of a new car you win from challenges is completely fucking ruined by the name of the car being disclosed before you get to see it).
For a Sony flagship game that's taken six years to develop, I can now completely understand why Sony laid down the day-of-sale embargo to prevent a rash of 'problems' putting people off.
I’m genuinely astonished (from reading the reviews, obviously, not personal experience) how unfinished it still seems to be. I mean, they’ve been making it since about 1987 and it’s hard to see where all that time has gone. Four-fifths of the car models are imported from old games, so it wasn’t on making those. I don’t know how many of the tracks are also imported from previous versions, but I gather it’s a large proportion. Clearly they didn’t spend all their time getting the handling right for the bulk of ordinary players who don’t own a steering wheel.
(And I don’t want any bullshit from anyone saying “GT5 players will all have steering wheels”, because there’s no way in hell that even a tenth as many PS3 steering wheels have been sold in the machine’s entire life as the number of copies this game will shift.)
It needed a 133MB patch on launch day to get it even halfway working online. And fucking hell, all those years and they haven’t even managed to put out a game whose graphics don’t tear. What have they been DOING?
You know, just ignore the central, crucial point about GT5 having the very best console-based car physics engine of all time, which if you love cars and racing, is all that really fucking matters.
(hilariously shit multiplayer functionality selectively ignored, in keeping WoS tradition to further inflame completely petty arguments)
Yeah, because the game we all really want to play is Super Physics Engine 3000. If I want realistic physics I’ll go outside – the graphics don’t tear and it doesn’t completely break down if I try to interact with other players. (And man, are GT fans STILL trying to play the “realism” card about a game in which slowing down for corners by barrelling into the side of an opponent at 150mph is a valid and successful tactic? Aw, bless ’em.)
Nice one for absolutely missing the point. Fuck GT5! Let's all go and play in our real £1.5bn car collections, everyone! The physics are loads better!
Still, I guess utterly redundant reviews-of-reviews spewed out in a coincidentally timely fashion are great for the page hits, non?
Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that driving a pretend Murcielago in your nice comfy living room, merrily playing bumper-cars with the rest of the field, is an even microscopically comparable experience to tonking a real one around Laguna Seca at 200mph taking 3G on the corners and with the ever-present danger of death should you so much as clip anyone else’s brakelight…
Wow.. maybe you should play the game and form your own opinion fuknuts instead of spouting drivel based on the negatives of other peoples reviews.. possibly the most ridiculous thing I've read today
No thanks!
Aww Stu, as per usual in every 'debate' you engage in, you assume you know bestest without having the slightest idea of what the people you're arguing with may or may not know about the subject in hand.
I've actually done real race cars on a race track and sorry, hon, GT5 and Forza 3 are damn good stabs at re-creating that experience. In fact, they're the best console sims of this generation. Lovely, progressive baby steps towards that glorious ideal of 1:1 parity with reality.
Shouldn't that be the REAL meat of a GT5 review? Or a review of a review, in your case? How much closer any given racing game gets to the ideal and if that progress warrants a purchase?
You'd be hard pushed to argue that GT5 doesn't warrant a purchase if you a) like Gran Turismo or b) like cars and have a PS3, unless you're some GTR pc-in-a-cockpit, 16-monitor mentalist, or thought that picking apart bullet points from the press releases and publisher promises was more important than critiquing the central driving experience.
"I've actually done real race cars on a race track and sorry, hon, GT5 and Forza 3 are damn good stabs at re-creating that experience."
Me too (Brands Hatch, racing hatchbacks and open-cockpit Formula Ford), and if you think there's any comparison you're a deluded fool. Any fucking idiot can follow a racing line, it's not complicated. It's following it when your brain is screaming at you to slow down because it thinks you're about to flip over and die in a heap of twisted flaming metal that separates Lewis Hamilton from the rest of us. And that's very unlikely to happen on your sofa.
If you enjoy Gran Turismo games then good for you. But stop fooling yourself. What you're doing bears less resemblance to real racing driving than it does to those games where you steer a metal hoop along an electrified wire. Those take skill too, but they're not an accurate simulation of motor racing.
Still, "If you like Gran Turismo then Gran Turismo 5 warrants a purchase" is the sort of insight that'll get you a job on Gamespot one day, so what do I know?
Stu, the article spends hundred of words explaining exactly why the game is so good, despite all the flaws you've cherry-picked from the review. Did you really not understand why the writer liked the game so much, even though the online mode is a mess, and there are some graphical wig-outs?
"Stu, the article spends hundred of words explaining exactly why the game is so good, despite all the flaws you've cherry-picked from the review."
I know what the article does, which is why I point out in the first caption that my quotes are very selective. But the truth of the matter is that the review doesn't do that – every games journalist I know agrees that if that exact same review had been attached to a game called Super Wheelnut Racer 2010, the score at the end would have been a 6, maybe a 7 at a stretch.
The review says it's a shoddy, amateurish job full of bugs and serious flaws, but that if you look hard enough (and fork out £50 on a steering wheel) it's possible to find really enjoyable bits in it. That's not what most people would say 9/10 means.
Todays games industry reviews structure goes like this:
10/10 – Brilliant (or we've been paid by the marketing people)
9/10 – Brilliant (or see above)
8/10 – Brilliant (or see above)
anything less than 8/10 – unplayable shitty mess
P.S – Like the coward I am, I am not blaming anyone in particular of being guilty of this, but it does happen!
Today, incidentally, EG's reviewer gave the 9/10 game this glowing recommendation:
"Whether it's worth buying on its offline merits alone can only be up to you and your personal gaming preferences."
I've been banned plenty of times from Eurogamer for questioning their review scores. They really don't like you going there.
You have shown here that no matter how many negatives a game may have, Eurogamer will slap a almost perfect score onto it when it suits them. Why does it suit them this time?, same as everytime they slap a high score on a average game.
Money.
While there's certainly enough room for both simulation and arcade experiences, whenever games like GT get involved there are always two things that cross my mind. One is how, when offered the chance of escapism – that is, being freed from the shackles of annoying grind, extra detailed layers of work to enjoy and/or do things we can't in reality – people will arrogantly defend simulatory experiences. One thing is to enjoy it (fine, have your cake), but to claim it's better than an arcade racer is pure elitism. We should celebrate gaming because you're able to drive fast, recklessly, perform ludicrous maneuvers and so on (one of the reasons I enjoy Burnout Paradise, though I don't think Stu's into it).
The second is… GT is all fine and well, doing its own thing, but calling it the "real driving simulator" is being woefully ignorant of the fact that, not only are there other racing simulators – predominantly on the PC, with titles like rFactor and iRacing – but the more a game attempts to recreate reality, the more it tends to lose sight of said reality. From play mechanics to graphics, at some point you start to wonder why it realistically depicts a car's chassis but then driving never seems to simulate that roughness you encounter on actual roads. Why some AI racers are aggresive and try to overtake you while at other points – I've seen this today while playing – you get three cars in a single file, at the same speed, doing the exact same movements, as if they're chained by invisible chains or are a locomotive. Why one track is brimming with detail and others are almost 2000ish. Why rain seems adequately real with an outside view of the car and why it's horribly pixelated in the inside view, almost as if it were yanked out of a PS2. Don't get me started on colisions, which are apparently locking players out of chassis deformation until they "level up" – it's woefully inadequate, and more than a little insulting that six years, one hour install and a day one online patch (which didn't resolve what it should) later, players still have to "work" for what the game is meant to offer.
Enjoy it from the comfort of your suburban living room because it's a game, not because it's some sort of lifestyle or ultra-realistic thing (when it clearly isn't).
And 5 seconds with the Nascar in both iRacing and GT5 will tell you just how far from the cutting edge of sim GT5 really is.
Then again, iRacing is a proven training tool for the real thing (and can be found in the race shops of any Indycar team worth their grid position) so it's probably in a different class.
Well, there you go.
If you're a professional racing driver who likes taking lots of different production cars around the same track over and over, but don't like interacting with other cars, and don't have a lot of friends to play with these days, this is the game for you.
So they'll sell one copy to Ben Collins at least…
I'm sure all the extra GT5 articles that EG have been running recently are entirely unrelated to the 9 they gave it. I hope the money they might have* taken from Sony helps them sleep at night.
* almost certainly have.
maybe GT5 does help race drivers..link to gamepron.com
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