I knew there was a thread I had forgotten about. Gave myself some nasty food poisoning this week, from sushi, imagine that.
Ah, so opinions aren't valid talking points now? Good to know.
Look, opinions are fine, but you consider yours too often as established fact with no supporting evidence whatsoever, and then if some fan of GT even slightly calls you on it, you often pull out that "source" card. Which is pretty cheeky, really.
I guess this means you can't provide any support for your claims? Good to know.
Oh dear lord. And of course your posts are rife with sources... oh wait, those are all you. My mistake.
I notice the ONE source you did quote is from the UK, rather parochial of you. And assuming that all cultures are like yours is a recipe for absolutely nothing but contention.
Listen, your debate on this topic doesn't have anything to do with Gran Turismo, Polyphony, whether they're technical wizards or any of that. It's just a personal dig at Kaz, and that's it. Now, I'm actually going to bring this particularly misguided OT back on track and offer something of VALUE to this discussion.
If you want to criticize PD and how Gran Turismo has come out over the past couple of games, you can chalk it up to one basic aspect: Japanese creative types are strange. They think oddly, take weird chances, do things that no one in the west would consider. They're outsiders, in some cases, "outcasts," and many of them like being iconoclasts. They love the freedom of not being constrained by Japanese herd mentality. And this is why many of us here in the west love Japanese games like their RPGs, because their quirky nature is usually quite surprising and delightful. Usually.
The PS1 and 2 were amazing machines for their time, but they were more like megaconsoles than computers, so anything a developer wanted to do had to be culled back from grand ambitions realized on their workstations. I recall a number of shots of game scenes on dev kits which looked amazing, while realizing that the game itself would be some sort of pixellated cut back version. Nice, but not nearly what would be available in the game. Gran Turismo games were gradual evolutions from that first title, mostly offering slightly better physics, more cars and tracks - save for GT3 - and events to participate in. Though GT4 did offer something nice in Photo Mode, and showcased the true models the game engine had been hiding, but other than that, the progression from GT1 to 4 was a graduation.
PS3 changed that drastically. While ram gimped, it was a system which finally blew the doors off of most gaming PCs of its day. Pretty darn photo-real content, at least in GT5 Prologue, and more cars than had ever been seen in such an ambitious console racer. Most of us expected GT4 on megasteriods. Instead, we got some sort of experimental hodge podge, full of annoying things like experience points, a separate B-Spec Mode making the overall game seem incredibly short - which it was, paint shops with no paint because we had to grind up cars to make into paint chips for each car we wanted to paint, car horns and racing outfits to collect, and a whole host of things I can't remember right now because GT6 cleared that bad - but fun - dream away.
It was a very Japanese, Pokemon kind of game, and many of us in the west threw a fit, asking for our old Gran Turismo back. Now to an extent we got it in Seasonals, and Arcade Mode in concert with the Course Maker gave some life to the game as it served as a micro Event Maker for us. And online was fairly decent, providing a platform for online leagues and clubs. But for the most part, it was still up to us to make this odd Japanese thing into what we in the west could relate to as a racing game. And with GT6, some of us here in the west are crossing our fingers that Kaz isn't going to get Japanese on us all over again, and expand GT6 in ways that we'll find unorthodox and unlike what we expect in a racing game.
So this is my point. Kaz is a weirdo. PD is made of not lazy slackers, but oddballs. The latest gens of Playstation allow their minds to wander and dream, and their minds wander and dream in ways ours simply won't. Having said that, Kaz can be taught. He and the higherups at PD are listening to us, possibly still culling data from our PS3s of what we're doing in GT6 and grousing about on the boards, and making decisions both about what to build first for GT6, and down the road, GT7.
Now listen. I know you and a whole gob of folk here think you know just how the whole planet collectively thinks. But you don't. And Kaz has the whole planet to make happy. Many of us, like me, want GT to evolve into a racing sim, at least in aspects, while at the same time, millions of kids which outnumber us just want a game where they can grab as many cars as possible, mostly supercars and race cars, and throw them around a track at high speed with wild abandon. At the same time he has this Asian market to contend with which wants that Pokemon stuff for whatever reason, and other things we don't. I would love for PD to be able to make an Asian GT and a western-slash-European GT game, but that would be a big workload on the coding team to make two whole games for different markets, so I'm not even going to seriously consider that.
Which means we're going to get some steak and sushi. If you don't like it, oh well, there's always Need For Speed on PS4 or Forza or some PC sim. The rest of us have developed a taste for Gran Turismo, and what this mad visionary in Nihon produces. We have to have this game, because Kaz offers us something that just doesn't exist in the rough n tumble world of Forza or the dry and dusty realm of PC racing.
I guess we're oddballs too, but I'm fine with that.
Just needs alittle upgrade in graphics and physics to make it even better for PS4. 👍
Hear, hear!
