Yes, another TD essay coming.
I respectufully disagree TD. GT5 is over two years old and while I appreciate everything PDI has done with it, it's time to move on to another full fledged title.
...I, like you, am very happy with GT5 and I still play it every week, sometimes daily. But, I am ready for GT6.
I'm going to make the order of my quotes a little more topical.
You might have been spoiled by the offerings we got on PS3. The gap between GT3 and 4 was more than 4.5 years, at least for North America. We did get a smattering of next gen GT offerings since then on PS3, as I posted, the main two being Prologue in April 2008 for NA, a little more than three years, and GT5 itself 2.7 years later.
A GT6 released this fall would be another three year span, roughly in line with the key PS3 Gran Turismos... depending. Prologue was too ambitious and large a game for many of us to consider it a demo, but still too small to call a proper GT game, so we leave it at "Prologue."
What Polyphony has been able to accomplish over the past two years is hard to judge. Kazunori-sensei may have overstated things a bit when he said that when content (mostly cars and tracks I assume) was of good enough quality to include in GT5, they would release it. Which so far has only meant a handful of new cars and two tracks, so I'm assuming they've changed their minds on that.
Now, evidently Lucas Ordonez is still a consultant for PD, as he mentioned frankly that there would be a wealth of tracks in GT6 in an interview a year or so ago, possibly spoken as if he had tried them out in person. The question though is, how much have they been able to do in the past two years? PD has been pretty coy about how big their staff is, and Kaz is adamant that they not contract out work for his masterpiece, but they have changed their positions before. I'm assuming Lucas isn't fibbing and at least the track count has been beefed up considerably. But with a Premium track requiring as long as two man-years to make, either they've been focusing most of their modeling staff on track building/conversion, or these are being rendered to Standard quality, at least a good portion of them. Which is my expectation, that having the data from those previous games still on hard drives at PD studios, the easiest and entirely plausible scenario is that they reworked those old race track assets into Standard quality, which is what I want anyway. I love both the Standard cars and tracks, and I want every one of those classing GT tracks. And for many of us, more content is better than less content no matter how you slice it.
On cars, I expect that another 250 or so Premiums are done so far, depending on how much work was allocated to them. I don't expect any Standards making it over this time, though I could be wrong. By and large, the fans seem to not mind them in GT5, and more cars
are more cars. With the potential of dozens more tracks and perhaps 500 Premium cars, that's about as much content as was in GT2, and I'd agree would be fine to release as a sequel, considering DLC can add to the entire game in every sense over time. We'll learn by E3 whether they will this year.
At which point I think I'll move on to topic #2.
...I cannot simply rule out GT6 on the PS3 because we simply do not know how far PDI has come on the PS3 hardware. They could surprise everyone and deliver a Gran Turismo that even the harshest critics would love.
I am of the same thought process. At the end of consoles life, developers always find a way to squeeze an extra ounce here and pound there. Why should PDI and the PS3 be any different?
As I stated before, most consoles are pretty much plumbed of resources by their fourth year. At that point, the focus then becomes how to better manage what you can do with those resources.
kogunenjou must have missed the criticism of Uncharted 3 from a few journalists who were hoping for the same jump in graphics and gameplay from U1 to U2. Well, what did they expect, for the PS3 to suddenly perform like a $1000 PC gaming rig with five GB of combined ram? Uncharted 2 and Killzone are stunning games which were extremely hard to better on something as technologically puny as the PS3 is now, with electronics essentially seven years old. How many seven year old PCs can run Crysis 1 well with most everything cranked?
But this is what you're getting on PS3, and this is also why I don't wet myself over Uncharted 3 over 2, because that level of graphics is really that good in U2, that any improvements are marginal. Naughty Dog didn't mention that they were able to render 20 million more polys or paint 10 megs more textures, because they just can't squeeze too much more performance out of the Cell Engine. They do the "focus thing," and have Cell and RSX push the detail where your attention is, in the center of the screen, or have richer textures like rust on edges of objects.
With a GT6 on PS3, I suspect Kaz will work in a similar constraint, and have to take away in one area to give in another. Drop resolution to 720p, make 3D an optional install, cull textures from distant objects to render on the nearfield, simplify particle effects, stuff like that, unless they make some kind of breakthrough in SPU usage. But we're into the fifth year now. PS3 only has so much ram, the data buss on the Cell architecture is pretty tight, and those software engineers have likely run out of tricks to maximize traffic control between the system cache operations and working ram banks. Plus the bottleneck of that 5400 rpm laptop hard drive.
If Kaz did drop GT6 to 720p with some AA, painted simpler distant textures, simplified particle effects or whatever, I doubt that anyone outside of detail freaks like me would know or care. We would see a prettier image without jaggies around smoke, a steady framerate and... well, pretty much that would be enough for GT6 to look distinctly better. I can't see any more headlight cones in night races, more cars on track or extravagant visible damage, because that stuff is computationally intensive. It all depends on what Kaz is willing to give up for something else.
Gameplay though, that can be expanded all out of reason. Modeling cars and tracks, polishing graphics, A.I. and physics is the real heavy lifting. A Livery Editor would be up there too, making a basic art program within the game engine, or beefing up the online structure. Coding races is nothing in comparison, so we can have events out the wazoo until they run out of ideas, without even getting to online Special Events. Even an Event Maker wouldn't be that hard to program, which would mean essentially infinite races for you to build as you see fit.
And as many have speculated around the nets including max, SONY could have Kaz produce GT6 for both systems, but I see this as a lot less likely than a staggered release in which GT6 might come out this holiday season for PS3, and then an even bigger version the following year for PS4. But I think this two-system approach would disappoint the fans, SONY and Kaz. Millions of us would prefer GT6 to be as big and feature rich as possible, and that would require the more powerful system. SONY will want as many big ticket games to drive PS4 sales as it can get, and no racer has the incredible mass appeal of Gran Turismo. And Kaz will be aching to have his masterpiece on a system which will remove most of the constraints he's had to deal with in PS3.
But the money suits in SONY are focused on one thing, making much needed money, so unless Kazunori can be as persuasive as Ken Kutaragi was in bringing PS1 to life, they will likely have the final say.
My poor wallet.... I want it on PS3 not PS4 unless the PS4 significantly improves over the PS3 in GT disregarding all the technical bits I can understand but don't really care much about.
