I remember VVV saying something along the lines of that he'd played an early version of Shift 1 (like, an alpha version or something) and he had been remarkably impressed with the handling, which had then felt to him like it had been nerfed in the final release. It is a bit conspiracy theory though, and it is possible that he just got one of the good cars to test in the alpha or that his perception or recall was totally off. Comparing two things a long time apart isn't exactly a good recipe for accuracy.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want anyone to take my version of things as the definitive version, because I wasn't there - but all the same, as far as I know, I don't really know of anyone external to the team who has dug into as many of the Shift game systems / as deeply as I have overall. Definitely you see some cars that are / were at a better state than others - things like the Porsche 997s, and most of the Ferraris, I would absolutely believe were reined in a bit to fit into the rest of the game. But the overall impression you get is of someone in a
serious hurry going through and setting the game data to conform to the career/ui capabilities/number of cars/etc. Past those cars I mentioned, you are pretty heavily into stuff that looks like the overriding priority was "don't break anything and keep it near something we know works".
The engine itself is fantastic, and it allows a lot of 'emergent' sort of behaviours from tyre sizes, wheel positions, car dimensions, etc, to shape car behaviour a lot more than if they were simply using the straight ISI _motor engine. That part is great. However, the leftover parts of the ISI engine aren't so great at eating generic data. In a way it's kind of a strength turned into a weakness - the greater the capability for different dimensionality of car behaviours, the less likely it is to turn out well if you just throw any old thing in there, if that makes sense.
For a lot of cars, this works out - I think Kaz even mentioned during GT5 development that really, these days, a lot of cars end up exactly the same - the days of manufacturers making radically different layouts, suspension designs, etc, are pretty much over with now, and to an extent a given car with a given wheelbase and a given HP and a given suspension layout is going to behave pretty predictably compared to another car sharing 99% of the same basic properties. But in some cases they went a little bit too far with this stuff, or didn't make a decent default tune for the car, or made something that was suited to different game settings than people ended up actually using, etc. That stuff is generally the sort of thing you see towards the tail end of game development anyhow, once all the data is more or less locked down, and it really doesn't seem like there was much time for that in Shift 1.
Anyhow, from what they've said so far, pretty much all the key complaints I mentioned to them about Shift 1 are addressed:
I don't know that I have a feature list so much as a process list:
* No farming out of QA to the cheapest possible eastern european testers they can find
(promised "less bugs" and testing seems to involve a lot more people all through dev/qa)
* No involvement from Black Box in anything at all
(black box is dead, looks like they hired someone to prototype/design the UI in flash in house)
* A general commitment to drop features if they can't be done properly. I would rather they picked either a livery editor, or a replay feature, and dropped the one they didn't have time for, than do a half arsed version of both where neither is any good.
(seem to have dropped some significant things (online drift, etc) and improved both replay/photo mode and the livery editor substantially)
* Same for cars. No more generic double A arms, differentials, TCS, etc. Can't do the car right? Don't bother. Stop trying to compete in a losing race with Forza and GT on quantity and go for quality.
(no more generic suspensions and involved drivers of the real exact specific cars whenever available)
So, you know, pretty much everything I've found that kind of sucked, from modding the first game, looks like they went out of their way specifically to look at it. I will be interested to see if I was right about what sucked in the first game when the sequel ships
