How are the gold/silver/bronze target times set?

[Famine]

With each iteration of Gran Turismo there are driving standard tests and challenges - licence tests, driving missions, coffee breaks and, more recently, Seasonal Event time trials and GT Academy events.

In each test there is a minimum passing standard time (bronze)* and two more challenging standard times (silver and gold). Generally speaking, the bronze standard time is easy enough that most novices can achieve it while gold is just hard enough that I can usually get it without too many retries (though a little harder in GT1 & 2 and a little easier in GT5 & 6). Times are usually at tenths of a second, though in some earlier games a very specific figure to the thousandth of a second (GT3's ten Mission Races) is used.

How do the PD team come up with these times - and make them so surprisingly accurate to novice/reasonable/spent-too-much-time-playing standards of GT gamers? Is there an internal team of playtesters who are responsible for determining how good is good enough - and if so, who's the best Gran Turismo driver on the PD team when it comes to licence tests?


*Some earlier GT games included an additional standard, just outside bronze time, with the shoshin untensha hyoshiki - Beginner Driver's Sign - too!

 

[smitty33]

Sometimes they get it wrong. As an example I give you super licence test 4 and 5 in GT6. No novice is going to achieve these times without grinding forever.

 

[Famine]

Sometimes they get it wrong. As an example I give you super licence test 4 and 5 in GT6. No novice is going to achieve these times without grinding forever.

Indeed - though it has to be said that the higher the grade the less likely a novice is to even get there anyway to take the test!

Occasionally even gold is too low - I've started a new game recently for testing purposes and the Focus ST test at Motegi (B4) has an amazingly low gold time.

 

[TRLWNC7396]

This is an extremely good question! Great thinking!

The worst miss in ALL of GT Gold flubs is the Tahiti maze challenge in GT2 Super license. I golded that by five seconds on the first try after playing some pretty hard ping pong off the walls through the course.....

But MOST are pretty darn close!