Fair point, though at least from my point of view, the people who find the inclusion of Standards unacceptable has gone up in the two years since release. It seems those of us who were disappointed by them when they were announced were in a minority, but going by posts these days, the percentage has roughly flipped. This is all rough guess-work based on my browsing the forums, though. And yeah, I didn't expect 1000+ cars all to the Premium level, but I expected at least something to be done to the GT3/4 models themselves.
I had hoped they did something, too, and I even went to great pains to invent things they could do based on half-baked notions of content creation pipelines for video games...
I don't have a wide view on posters' opinions (although these fora are still only a relatively minor and heavily skewed sub-set of players), but perhaps there's a link between that and member numbers? People newer to the series probably don't care about the "legacy" like some of us do. I don't even know if we should.
True, and that is exciting 👍
I think the expected mainstream standard of having a more or less consistent level of detail across the entire car lineup isn't too much to ask. Even the Premiums lag behind other racing games' available modification options, the Standards obviously more so.
The strange thing about PD going against the grain is that their original game did that, and changed the course of console sim racers. Now much of what's expected in that sub-genre has grown out of GT's legacy. Multi-hundred car options? More in-depth tuning than some pre-fabbed "packages"? The quest for realism? What was then against the grain is now pretty much standard practice, and coupled with the advancement of technology over the past 15 years, I don't think it's unfair to say there's far less unexplored territory in the sim-ish genre than there was then. I'd also be inclined to say I'm more concerned with PD nailing the basics of the package before they start exploring yet more "unique" features to add to the game, that might end up only partially included.
You have a point regarding consistency - but again, that's an issue of perspective and of how the Standards were "sold", for me. We were told that we needn't even look at one (well, use one, really) if we so chose - that clearly isn't true, and is disappointing because, having endured the "pain" of transitioning from GT2 to 3, I'd hoped that PD would get it right, and the Standards wouldn't be spat upon and vilified as much as they have been. I still think it'd be great to see them in the Museum.
The thing about the "genre" is that there are plenty of games that are taking those leads and polishing things up - I'd actually rather GT kept on trying (operative word) to do something new. Everyone else is taking what worked, distilling it into something "polished" and "mainstream acceptable", which is win-win - except for the "need" to buy more than one game. Of course, this process works both ways, I hope PD can take some of the others' innovations and do something interesting with them, too.
And actually, there is a lot left unexplored - slightly less than before, maybe, but still plenty.
How would it look better with the much smaller amount of vertices to work with? Plus, at Standard quality, we'd still run into the major issue of single-piece modelling.
Not that I'm saying any other game has perfected damage, because I recognize the colossal amounts of computing power needed to do it on-the-fly and avoid the pre-made damage levels of other games. But the smeary/droopy look a lot of cars in GT5 end up with is pretty poor.
That's where I imagined the adaptive tessellation would come in, it need only double / quadruple the vertex resolution where it's needed and you've got ample detail to play with and probably still 5 times the per-vertex power to actually perform the deformations than with the Premiums. The single-shell thing is unfortunate, but it's still workable - the droopiness to me still seems like a tuning / parameters issue, because I've seen "better" in the past with less detail (but that game also had a full multi-body Newtonian physics model, which GT still doesn't have...)
But you can't have everything - this comes under the whole "vanguard philosophy" (hilariously pretentious-sounding, I know) I mentioned above. Other developers will see that it's possible (or knew already and needed the nudge) and perhaps give it a proper go in future and do something good with it. We can reasonably expect improvements with a few more flops to throw at this sort of thing on PS4. Prove the concept (who knows how much of this is in PD's labs), make it "work" in practice, iterate to some satisfactory standard.
).Even if GT5 standards don't have interiors (I don't give a buck about it anyway) I can still admire how long these cars have existed and how close to real life they really are even if they're blocky and jaggy looking.Now I'm just waiting for that green '75 Maverick like my family used to have to appear in GT6 (we sold it last year 
).
