- 7,830
- U S A
- Tetsumura
- Nigel Fox
The bold part is my point, that there are double standards between Forza and GT5. You may not agree with what I post, but what the hey.
See, even today, people are posting in the thread of how Forza has 500 cars in five years development time - which actually is more like seven years dev time: FM1 was released five years ago, and they speak of it as if it has no drawbacks or flaws. Which to me sounds like a double standard.
In a similar vein, people say that Polyphony have wasted five years only coming up with 200 some odd Premium cars, as if the rest of the game was hashed out on napkins in a few weeks of scribbling, or they dug it out of a forgotten folder on one of their workstations or something. I associate myself with IVORBIGUN's remarks on this.
Turn 10 and Polyphony - well, mostly Kazunori - are pretty much the two icons of what two prominent visions of racing games can be, Forza and Gran Turismo. Forza has its own style and theme: very muscle and supercar heavy. Emphasis on cars from America and Europe. Lots of work on personalization features. And a lot of copying of a certain game. Methodology is also very different, as a lot of work is farmed out, including to my dreaded pet country, Vietnam.
I know some of you snicker at this as if I don't know that much of the world has marched into the 21st Century along with the west. But you fail to notice that Vietnam is still very much emerging from the third world. There are no known high tech companies there people flock to for subcontracting work. Most of the video game companies are busy producing web based Flash driven games like MMOs. I couldn't find a single 3D modeling company in a recent search, even at a site which promotes Vietnamese companies.
And okay, this doesn't necessarily reflect on the game T10 produces. Except it does. Forza is notorious for having horrendous issues in every game, even unpopular game features. FM1 wasn't so bad, but most of the car models were so-so to even downright bad. There were many glaring flaws with the car models and upgrade system, some of which have even been carried over unfixed to Forza 3! The Nurburgring itself was poorly modeled in many ways. The game engine was a mixed bag of good physics but a flickery 30fps framerate. The iffy car and bodykit models caused problems with the livery editor. Even with a standard XBox hard drive, you could only save 32 replays?? What was really bad were the bots, which could get so mean, they would even gang up on you.
Along comes Forza 2, with its own even worse issues. Livery vinyls would shift around when you took the car out of the garage, requiring constant fixing after every race. Woops... unless it had a fixed livery you couldn't change, in which case, all you could do is watch the livery shift ever more into a mess, unless you could manage to get it to the original maker to fix it. And once again, car and bodykit models caused headaches as livery painting problems once again plagued the surfaces of cars. Getting disconnected from the Auction House could inadvertently cause the Live system to permaban you. And it wasn't hard to do, because scrolling through the Auction listings or even your garage could crash your 360. Graphics were mostly improved from FM1, though photo mode images were sometimes crappy looking. On top of that, promised goodies like 12 car races and all the content from FM1 and then some proved to be false. Then there were the horrible tire sounds...
Forza 3 promised to be the perfect version. Well... not quite. The tremendously expanded livery and photo mode system, allowing you to save unlimited numbers of images, decals and entire liveries, bogged the file system down horribly when you exceeded 130 or so items. And if you wanted to make great race cars, you need a lot of decals. A patch only partly alleviated the problem. The nifty online system of Forza 2 was scrapped in favor of a poorly thought out sandbox style system. Tire sounds still sucked, and yes, there were still issues with the car models, some of which were still unfixed from Forza 1, and caused the livery editor to go wacky. And still, there were just 8 car races.
I have no doubt that some of these issues came about because of bad models and code which weren't fixed at Redmond HQ, for whatever reason. But then, why weren't they?
On the GT side, we have our own situation. GT4 was hoped to be the definitive Gran Turismo game, and much of it was stupendous. But physics were still a bit primitive and mushy. Low speed physics were iffy, and the poor PS2 had been pushed about as far as it could graphically, though the framerate was a pretty steady 60fps. People even reported that GT4 caused their PS2s to die, most likely early production versions with older, larger nm form factor chips which ran hotter. An online version was scrapped at the last minute, as online functionality wasn't well implemented on the PS2, and tens of millions of units refused to work with the broadband adapter, even those which were supposed to such as mine. Sound as always was either pretty good or lame.
Prologue was a nice stand in for GT5, though it only offered 35 cars and five tracks with one variation at first. A free update doubled the car roster and added a new track. There was no photo mode, limited modification of performance parameters only, though you could swap through the usual classes of tires. And in the first Japanese version, disconnecting from a server could lock up the PS3, though this was patched within a week or two. Online capability was very basic, with only the choice to join certain event servers, and connection to Japanese servers from America was laggy. Europe was even worse.
And of course we know about the rollercoaster of GT5. Delayed time and again from vaguely stated release time frames as new features were added and physics were refined. The gaping crater known as GT Mobile was forced on Kaz by SONY, causing Polyphony to drop work on GT5 entirely for an unknown span of time. Rather than release a tiny GT3-like game, the decision was made to port over the GT4 models in order to provide a decent car roster to play with, but the exclusion of cockpit view caused a small uproar in the fanbase. And now, even word that the wheels can't be changed has caused a further ruckus, and for some, a reason to have nothing to do with the Standard cars. Some are even angry that the Standard cars will be in the game at all.
So, there you have it. The design choices made by both developers have resulted in some things which don't set well with fans of either camp. Frankly, I prefer one over the other, but others see things differently. But one thing that utterly baffles me is the call from a handful of people to rip out the Standard cars completely.
Like... what the hell are you thinking?
The simple and I'd think common sense solution, if you guys really can't stand the Standards period, is ignore them. The rest of us that want to race in the SilEightys and 240SXs and odd supercars which are Standard can still enjoy our rides with their advanced physics, and you guys can sit behind the wheels of your splendid and smashable Premiums.
I think my remarks from the customizing thread are very fitting for many of us. Very few of us will ever own more than one or two cars at a time, or be rich enough to experience some of these ultimate machines, as well as sweet sports cars from every decade. Well, GT5 gives all of us a chance to do just that.
I want to drive some damn cars, and own them, a lot of them, a thousand of them, and have the drive of my life! You malcontents can do whatever you want.
Well, I found out recently that Micro$oft went behind my back to get my updated debit card info and renewed my Live without permission, which is making me very not fond of MS right now, but at some point I might upload some of my bot car pics I took when I found out about the differences between them and the driver's car LOD. If I ever get around to setting up my 360 anyhow.
But as for the Standards and Photo Mode, I'm going to be snapping a lot of them. I've been gushing about how awesome I think they look in GT4, and GT5's graphic engine is going to polish them up nicely. Just like I hadn't noticed the bloaty bot cars in Forza, I couldn't tell there were any Standard cars in the recent videos at all, so I'm very happy with them right now.
It's pretty obvious you don't run a business or work in the government.
In order to have an outside company do any modeling work for you, first, you have to hire the services of the company before numbers and quality of models is even an issue. This is an up front and immediate cost. THEN, work is added to the bill, and because the company needs to make a profit, pay rent and salaries and stuff, that bill is going to be more than it would cost your own company to do itself. Remember, unless you're going out for fast food, a meal you make yourself is going to cost less to make at home. Microsoft doesn't care because monopolies like them are made of money.
As for the cost of GT5 vs other games, that's completely apples and oranges. The Air Combat and Metal Gear teams don't pay for wars to be staged in order to collect info to use in their games. Gran Turismo is a little different, in that Kaz sends teams across the planet, sometimes even to individuals to acquire the rights to test and model very unique cars. Kaz even participates in racing events, though the Nurburgring 24 Hour event this spring was certainly the high point of that.
Microsoft also used its vast wealth to build a server infrastructure longt ago which is also highly useful for running a gaming network, which they've been running since the late 90s. SONY is still playing some catch up in that regard, and Polyphony had to spend a chunk of change to work out the kinks in GT5's online system to work well with the regional PSN. There are many reasons why GT5 is inordinately more expensive than just about every other game.
I'm curious about what "some" cars means exactly in this regard myself, though I'd kind of like to be surprised about this. Will temptation get to me...?
