These days the competition has caught up on that front, which highlights other areas were the GT series has been lacking.
PD has essentially been turning out the same game, with the same failings, since the original's debut, the only significant improvemts have come on the physics and graphics front.
Doesn't every GT fan want more than GT5P with revised physics and extra content?
I think you're exaggerating just a scouche.
You could say to a degree that other racing titles look stellar graphically, in fact most games these days do, and offer a lot of content. I should just cut to the chase and discuss Forza. As much as I hate Microsoft as a monopoly trying to absorb just about every aspect of the electronic side of our lives, and as full of themselves as Turn 10 is, Forza is a great achievement in racing games. Forza 2 and 3 have terrific graphics. The physics are very good. The damage modeling is very good. The car models, though often flawed, are very good, as are the sounds and sensation of racing or drifting. The extent to which you can customize your cars is crazy cool, and with the livery editor, you have the capacity, especially in F3, to recreate just about any race car in history of the offerings in the car list.
Then again, the entire series is plagued with bugs and issues, so it's evidently not so easy to produce a stellar product in every aspect. Gran Turismo comes close, very very close. Other racing games look great, but none of them have replays that look like racing film footage. None of them offer half the cars a Gran Turismo game does, save for GT3, especially considering the wealth of sports cars we get. And this is excluding dinky cars and a herd of Skylines, so don't even go there. No game gives me so much to collect and do.
Perfect? Obviously not, but then you can't name one that is. Now, they are trying at Polyphony. Everything you mentioned is in their to do list. But you have to understand that every video game runs up against a performance budget. Even the most powerful computing system can only draw so much on screen, and when you demand a big feature set, especially if they are performance hogs, something has to give. Take skidmarks. Those have to be drawn too, and if you have 16 cars on track at once in a graphically superior game, they may not last too long. Maybe seconds.
Proper weather is a huge performance pig, especially getting it to look right. A lot of games fudge certain things to get the dynamics on your car right, but the only game I'm aware of that has proper looking weather effects is F1 Championship, which does a lot of fudging, and certainly not the best graphics around.
Damage is another performance albatross, and every game does some short sheeting to get a decent damage build. Heck, just look at Toca 3. If you watch replays, your car is the only one with any sound properties attached. It pulls a lot of smoke and mirror tricks like that to perform as well as it does. The worst issue seems to be getting agreements with the various car manufacturers, and I think we'd be shocked what Microsoft had to spend to get companies like Ferrari to go along with their requirements. If you've followed interviews with Dan Greenawalt as I have, you'll have caught him mention on rare occasions that each carmaker has to be dealt with individually, and sometimes even different models! If you'll notice, some race cars won't let you paint the windshield banners, and a few teams - or possibly sponsors - didn't want to go along with allowing any user content in their spot.
Kazunori doesn't want to do that. He knows he has to, with even a beast of a machine like the PS3, but he wants to do that as little as possible. And he's determined that the cars and racing be near perfect, and that nothing has a noticeable impact on these two things, so everything else has to yield. While many of us here, myself included, would be happy to have a lower res 720p GT5 to give more horsepower to the programmers, it seems Kaz wants to go 1080p again, even if its a stretched 1280x1080. And with these better-than-Prologue graphics, some things may not make it, like tire marks, dynamic weather and time of day transitions, or a livery editor. Loss of the livery editor in particular would make me sad, but I want the game with whatever features I can get. Besides, what other serious racer
really innovates anything? Each GTR game is pretty much the same as the last.
It's not like Kazunori-dono doesn't want rain to mess up the pretty look of his cars. He has his priorities, and we can like them or not, but he's The Man, and this is His Game.
