Rant warning.
GT1 drew me in, amazing at the time, huge amount of cars and tracks, great handling, license tests forced me to take corners correctly, and not instinctively. I learned a lot, and split-screen skyline vs subraru or something was fun. I missed out on GT2 because I'd already sold my playstation. PS2+GT3 was soon mine, wasn't nearly as fleshed out as GT2, felt more like a tech demo than a full game. I missed out on GT4 because I had sold my PS2 by the time it came out!
My disillusion with GT3/4 and reason for selling my ps2 was because of the only racing game to really grab me since GT1 - MotoGP: Ultimate Racing Technology on Xbox. Ok, it's bikes, but it had a sublime difficultly curve, great controls, amazing multiplayer, great net-code. I could just jump in, pick a bike and have a big multiplayer race with fairly evenly matched bikes, no one really ramming each other too much (because they risk falling themselves). Eventually I'm gutted this series gets discontinued and so I'm looking back at GT to fill the gap...
So GT5 had been revealed, it was coming and it had online! The wait for GT5 was one of the longest, most repeatedly delayed and most painful for any game I can remember. I spent years checking GT Planet, I hyped myself beyond belief. Year after year, but it was going to be worth it, this time the sound would be fixed, damage/crashes are coming, (pictures of deformed rally cars came out), massive online focus, a full rally tournament?, full NASCAR tournament?, maybe even F1? - it's going to be worth it!
I was in denial. I was over-hyped. When it arrived it was underwhelming in most ways, got almost none of that, but I realized I was expecting the earth. GT used to be a game to demo the PS1 or PS2. Now it had pretty cars and still drove well, but sound/tracks were so behind and it was no longer demo material. And that's just the surface level. It's the same old game where you get money by entering boring races vs AI, or maybe a small tournament which is a few random races chained together with no tension. A lot of old crappy old PS2 era cars that I wish weren't there. Racing something like a GTI golf was painfully anemic feeling. The rally/nascar element turned out to be just a few cars and tracks tacked on. The handful of dirt tracks were so bad I avoided them. Graphically the car models were unprecedented, but by the time it released a lot of other car games had caught up somewhat. The track-side graphics were pretty poor. I remember thinking it really didn't look much better than GT3/4, in slightly higher res with nicer car models driving on them. PS3 always did have a shit GPU, and by now was starting to show it's age! We did get some nice smoke effects though, but it was combined with an annoying increase of rolling starts.
The online COULD be brilliant at times, 1 out of 50 tries if the host sets up the right car restrictions, otherwise it's random chaos where the race is determined after the first corner in which a rice rocket or redbull supercar pulls ahead, usually on the Nordschleife. And that was after sitting through I don't know how many loading delays. If I had two TV's I could have played a couple of games of MotoGP by the time I actually got into a race and it started.
Of course I Bought GT6, it's an improvement on GT5, but yeah... PS3 is really starting to show it's age by now, i'm too impatient for the loadtimes, i'm still struggling to just play a simple fairly fair online race or tournament. Outside the driving model, series still has a lot of it's traditional problems. Sound, damage, bumpercars with no consequences, online lacking anything but the luck of the draw lobbies. Sure, both GT5 and 6 got patched loads, and improved in a lot of ways, but the PS4 is arriving, time to jump back on the hype train...
With GT Sport I'm excited again, livery editor looks great, recent screenshots, track-side improvements and trailers look promising, lighting spectacular, and I'm sure the physics and driving experience (at higher speeds) will be amazing as always (from that tournament stream for example). I'm glad they are focusing on online, that's my number one problem with the series, I just want to play fairly even online race/tournament with a minute or two of turning my console on. I can do this with Driveclub (even though it's not very sim) and plenty of other games. I'm also glad they are scaling back the car numbers to 'realistic' numbers considering the detail/time involved in this these days.
Will engine sounds, damage, and sense of speed in 'low end' cars be improved? Who knows. Sound at this point is holding back the series in a big way. Damage not so much, but I feel it would discourage bumper cars or wall/barrier riding in a similar way that this proposed 'online racing reputation' thing will. Also no point in having these'speed oval' tracks they insist on without the potential for damage. I reckon sense of speed with lower end cars would be somewhat fixed by just improving the sounds, but they could perhaps adjust the FOV or move/shake the camera just a tad more without breaking the 'sim/realism' rule.
But all these delays, combined with less than stellar reports of anyone seeing it in reality are giving me a serious case of deja vu. Focus on car history and photo-mode locations bewilders me. But I'm holding strong, I'm checking this thread and GTplanet every so often. And of course, this latest delay won't be the last, I know that for sure :-/
