bud said:
an optimized version translated by myself:
Disappointment for the "Gran Turismo (GT 5)" fans: The much-anticipated PS3 debut of the brilliant racing game series no longer appears in 2009. At a press conference held at the Tokyo Game Show GT-father Kaz Yamauchi announced the release date: march 2010 in Japan! When the game will appear in Germany, he left open. When visiting the developer Polyphony Digital studios in Tokyo, our news team got new infos about "GT 5" (there are over 950 vehicles, more than 20 places and over 70 track variations) and spoke to studio head Yamauchi on the date issue.
COMPUTER BILD SPIELE (CBS): There are now almost 150 people working on "Gran Turismo 5" and yet the game is not finished, why?
Kazunori Yamauchi:"GT 5" is difficult to develop.
CBS: Why?
Yamauchi:The dimensions of the game are huge, it is simply too great. It is so complex, so vast in its scale.
CBS: Is "GT5" too ambicious? Are you too ambitious?
Yamauchi: We must reach a certain standard. The benchmark for a "Gran Turismo" is now very high.
CBS: Isn't there a great danger that the people who don't want to wait anymore go out and look for other racing games?
Yamauchi: That may be true, but there is nothing that would let us develop the game faster. It's not like we're slowing down at the end. We do our best.I didn't have a single day of rest this year, but the game is still not finished.
CBS: "Gran Turismo" is one of the most important games for the Playstation brand. Isn't Kaz Hirai (CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment) knocking on your front door every day with the request to finish the game? And finally, to sell more PS3 consoles?
Yamauchi: He is not always here, but we really have pressure. And we do the whole thing not just for him, in my eyes it's more of a liability to the company Sony, which has encouraged me and helped me to this life.
CBS: Is it true that you don't test other racing games and that you draw your inspiration solely from real racing?
Yamauchi: Almost true, but our people will buy a lot of the newest racing games, try them out, and discuss the features and differences between our games. And as far as I know, it's usually so that the other developers take us as an example. So we get rather less inspiration from them for the creation of our games. I think the most important thing is to really drive the car and take part in races - so thats the way I refer a lot of inspiration.
CBS: Why is it so important to accommodate a variety of online options in a modern racing game?
Yamauchi: The original games were played simultaneously by a crowd of people, like soccer or baseball. And what is obviously happening here, is the communication between all of these people. Video games have only been there relatively recently and are a rather rare format in which one man plays the game for himself. I believe that the games with online connection, simply return to their original shape. You meet with your friends on a course and show your car, drive a time race and then come back to your friends for a little conversation - these are normal things that you would do in real life too, and so far this wasn't possible in "Gran Turismo ", but now it is. That makes a big difference. I think it is more about the natural progress of things, I would not even describe it as a great new feature.
CBS: The damage model does not feel very realistic, why?
Yamauchi: The main reason is probably that the game is still in development. What we are currently showing, is not the final product.
CBS: We may expect realistic accidents?
Yamauchi:It depends a bit on how far you go.I have seen real accidents, where cars were squeezed to 30cm (12 inches, my american friends) height, we can not go that far. But we want to make it as realistic as possible.
CBS: And speaking of new features - as it looks, with weather and time of day?
Yamauchi: If you look back at the history of racing games, there were different weather conditions, or day and night racing games in the eighties already.But when we released "Gran Turismo" in '97, we didn't care for such features, they did not bother us particularly. We are constantly experimenting with weather and lighting conditions, and such things. If we had to, we could integrate it into the game by tomorrow. But whether this feature is present or not is not the decisive factor. It's about whether this feature actually increases the overall quality of the game or whether it reduces it. And there lies the main part of our attention.
CBS: So you don't want to tell whether these features are in the game or not?
Yamauchi: We are experimenting with it. I want to stress again that the value of a game does not really depend on how many features are offered and what will be available in the final game. That does not decide whether a game is good or not. What we really focus on is the question of whether the game is good in its entirety or not. We have to proceed somewhat cautiously.
CBS: If you were not into motorsport like you are now, what kind of games you would like to design?
Yamauchi: Before the first "Gran Turismo", I had brought about a hundred proposals for a variety of video games, from adventures to puzzles to RPG games and from pretty much any genre. But if I had to choose one off of racing games ... Recently, I began to think that I would like to make a game that deals with the issue of life and death in the life of a man. Their meaning ...
CBS: Why are the Polyphony Studios housing so many bicycles?
Yamauchi: Well, everyone in the company loves bicycles.
CBS: They're just standing around like that?
Yamauchi: They are also riden.At the moment, there is a huge cycling-hype in Japan , road bikes and mountain bikes are very popular.
CBS: Then we can expect a tour-de-France game from you?
Yamauchi:Yes, that would be something that I would like to make and to have Lance Armstrong in here ...
