GT5 Updates

Kazunori Yamauchi has been fielding questions from fans on Twitter over the past few hours. The tweets are in Japanese, but with a little help from Google and medhi_san, we can get a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about. Here’s the highlights:

As was quickly reported here in our forums, the latest 1.02 update for Gran Turismo 5 has just made available for download. 1.02 allows the game to take advantage of Polyphony Digital’s upgraded server infrastructure while enabling maximum power and weight restrictions for online races.

First, the good news:  Yamauchi announced at yesterday’s press Q&A session that many updates and patches will be issued at the “first of December” (though it wasn’t entirely clear to me if that literally meant December 1st or early within the month). Polyphony Digital has also posted this notice on their website to reassure us that the game’s online services will continue to be optimized and upgraded to handle the additional load generated by players around the world.

The first downloadable update for Gran Turismo 5, version “1.01” (133MB in size), has already been issued in preparation for Wednesday’s worldwide release. Although a complete summary of the changes 1.01 brings have not been published by Polyphony Digital, many players have already started to notice small tweaks in our forums.