I arrived on the
Gran Turismo scene with GT3 and a PS2, purchased at the same time (shortly before joining up here, in 2003). I never owned a PS1 or played GT1, and only played GT2 in very limited amounts.
Also, at least for
Gran Turismo, I have very little interest in head-to-head online racing. Good Career mode / single-player local play is much more important to me. If I want head-to-head online, I'd much rather get involved in a more formal, curated organization like iRacing.
So those points bias my opinions a bit.
#1) -
GT4. GT4 wins because it had 85% of the goodness that made GT3 so playable, with the added bonus of a bunch of great tracks (new and old) and cars. Adding Sears Point (Infineon), the 'Ring, and Le Sarthe alone would have made it the best. The triumphant return of used cars! There was a ton of other content, in all forms; some useful, some not so much. Photomode was cool. There were some miscues that kept it away from perfection, though:
- A lot of race formats were worse than GT3. GT4 was kind of the start of Kaz's obsession with highlighting performance differences by putting cars of radically different abilities in the same race. Not as bad as it would get later, though.
- The A-spec points system was clunky. I understood the point, but it was mildly annoying. Anybody who cared wouldn't destroy the entire game with an F1 car anyway, and anybody who didn't care didn't matter. So those of us who challenged ourselves anyway got penalized in order to punish those who wouldn't play the game on Kaz's terms.
- AI 'rubberbanding' a little too heavy-handed (if only I knew how bad it would get later).
- The user interface wasn't quite as good as GT3.
- I won't call it a 'miscue', but I hardly touched B-spec at all, because...
- They messed up some of the great enduros from GT3. Yeah, I know, 24 hours! But still. MX-5s at Apricot Hill? Sublime! MX-5s at Tsukuba for 4 hours? Drudgery.
#2) -
GT3. A close second. This is actually my
favorite GT title, even if it is not quite the
best GT title. It's the only one I got 100% completion with all gold licenses and other stuff. This was my first GT title so I wasn't bothered by any perceived "lack of content" - it looked great, it drove great, career mode was really straightforward, yet flexible and fun. You could definitely play this game the way
you wanted to. A few items that I thought were better in GT3 than in GT4:
- As mentioned by @wagnerFAM98 above, GT3 has the best versions of Trial Mountain, Grand Valley, and Deep Forest. Add Apricot Hill to that list for me.
- Rally handling physics was a little better in GT3 than in GT4.
- Enduro formats were better in GT3.
#3) -
GT6. A distant third. A little better than GT5 but not a patch on GT3/4. A few cool new tracks and vehicles, like the Kart Space, and a variety of interesting real world tracks were added. But overall I lost interest in this game pretty quickly.
- Handling physics slightly better than GT5, but still pretty terrible. You couldn't even do a donut in a rear wheel drive car.
- The race formats are horrible. This game continues Kaz's trend of putting a rabbit out in front of every field, started in GT4 and made notably worse in GT5. Catching the rabbit requires that you have to blast past the entire rest of the field as quickly as possible, and then chase the rabbit down an empty track. Actually RACING a somewhat balanced field for several laps would be much more interesting.
- Waaaay too many 1-3 lap races. Longer races are better and more realistic.
- The banzai-run "pass the whole field in one lap" format is just stupid and completely unlike real racing. Time Trials would have been much better than this crap.
#4) -
GT5. An even
more distant fourth. Some great additions - the Top Gear Test Track chief among them - but
so much so wrong. I gave up on this game about halfway (?) through. It was just so frustrating and
unfun. The bullet list:
- Rubberbanding cranked up a couple of notches over GT4 levels. Yuck.
- The handling physics SUCKS OUT LOUD. At least with a steering wheel.
- They messed up the tire traction model fairly comprehensively. The skid physics were weird, and the 'temporary overheat' thing caused by skidding meant you pretty much had to idle along until the affected tires cooled down. None of this is anything like an accurate model of how tires behave in race conditions.
- Seriously, the handling sucks. You couldn't even do a donut in a rear wheel drive car. Unless it was mid-engine, in which case you couldn't keep it pointing forward on the straights, or make it turn in the curves.
- For every good track addition - Daytona, Monza - there was a serious loss - Sears Point, Apricot Hill, Midfield.
- Cape Ring was just plain stupid.
Games not rated, because I either never played them at all, or not much:
So, overall, my hope would be for GT7 to have single-player gameplay and race formats as good as GT3, lots of the real world tracks like GT4-6, better AI drivers than we've seen to date, and as accurate handling / traction physics as possible.
I really don't care if I can see the windshield wiper retaining clips in the car models if the racing action is poor. Graphics might be flashy, but I'd much rather the resources be spent making the game play much better than the most recent editions.
.
I hope that GT7 will be a very good game that might give you the love for racing games back again!
