Well, I
officially got 🤬 off reading some of the comments in here. I should probably walk away, but "someone" is
wrong.
Anyway,
Numbers
(totally ripped from Wikipedia):
Game...Cars............Tracks
GT........178..............11
GT2
......650
...............27
GT3......180+.............34
GT4
......722
...............51
GTPSP
...830
..............72
GT5......200+ / 800+...20 / 70
So, how many of you would rather the game had
only the 200+ premium cars? What about circuits (we still don't know what premium means here; my guess is it's linked to the "track editor" - or
layout editor, as I've come to believe.)
The point is, PD have avoided the problem GT3 had in seriously downscaling the choice of cars from GT2 (which in some ways still has not been recovered) by including them "for free" as a "standard" port...
Customisation?
Now, we don't have the foggiest idea what was required to port these assets (models, textures, physics data, upgrades, sounds, etc.) from GT4 engine spec. to the (
all-new) GT5 engine. Given the engines are different, especially with respect to the way the suspension is handled, and that we
know the standard cars will have dents, scratches, dirt etc., it's possible some light re-touching of the models and "rigging" was performed. During this time, it may have been possible to re-jig the models into their component parts, with the appropriate naming conventions of the new engine etc., thus allowing for "customi
zation", at least at a basic level (depending on how customisation will actually work - I hope they don't "brute-force" it and have separate models of the same wing for each car...)
Now, all this means that it is a simple case of dropping in new meshes with the correct names and voilá! Premiumified standard cars, with little extra faffing required, except telling the game to ignore the on-disc meshes for this car.
Naturally, this would best be covered by DLC.
DownLoadable Content
Assuming a full price for GT6 of $60 (where the rest of the cars would assumedly be up to scratch, plus some more), the remaining cars could be premiumified for a total of much less than
8 cents each. Round that up to 10 cents (100 cars for ten bucks - not bad!) That way, you only get (=
pay for) what you care about. Clearly, this has much bigger value if the standard cars cannot be customised. Similarly for the tracks, assuming there is an issue with standard vs. premium.
Then, of course, there's the Collector's Edition (see
Amar's winds...), assuming that any DLC to this effect (i.e. Premiumifying) would actually be
free for owners thereof.
My justification of the price comes from the fact that GT3 only had the new cars; we had to wait until GT4 to get most of the old (GT2) cars back, plus some others. GT5 + DLC could avoid this issue, for those that actually care so much to the point of repeatedly complaining on a message board.
New Platform -> New Engine
It might sound obvious, but a game is not its assets. GT5 would play just the same if the car models were replaced with ones of mushrooms, or old biddies. (Alright, the experience would be different, but functionally, it's the same.)
It's clearly taken a lot of effort to include some new features, as provided by the
engine and its ancillaries. I.e. visual effects, online functionality, photomode improvements,
physics,
damage, "customi
zation",
Face-tracking,
Native 3D etc. etc. etc.
PD have not just been sat around modeling cars, getting bored and simply importing the rest. This
game (that is,
not just its assets) has taken a lot of effort and money to produce; hence complaining that the ported models have wasted their time is at best naïve, idiotic at worst.
Summary
Yes, it's quite possible to feel "betrayed" by this "sudden" revelation of just what the standard cars are. However, we've known about the existence of standard vs. premium since before TGS last year.
However, it is just a game (hey, I'm as hardcore as they get - I still play 10-year old PC sims; oh and I don't really rate the cockpit view for driving feel in GT5
)
Oh and vacuum cleaners? If I keep reading that, I'll probably have to throw together a demonstration of what a car would sound like with a vacuum cleaner for an engine.
One last thing, the static pictures of the standard cars do not do them justice. They
really do look that much better in motion, since the textures mask some of the underlying mesh detail, that has clearly been improved over the base GT4 - albeit by some basic smoothing algorithm - the headlights are a key area where this is
very apparent.
Done.
