worldstiniestpenis said:it's the inevitable cost of this generation.
think of it like this: final fantasy took that route. in final fantasy xiii they couldn't provide towns in consistent detail, so what did they do? they took them out, turning the game into a railroad of stunning but barely navigable environments. this wasn't a half-hearted effort from a low-budget developer: it was simply not practical despite the massive budgets to do what they had done in previous generations with the current high, extremely time-intensive standards.
the problem is, without compromising in quality, final fantasy xiii was shite. the technical limitations in turn limited the gameplay drastically, and what we ended up with was nothing close to the engrossing experience we'd had in iterations before it
that's the reason i trust the GT developers: they are doing the right thing. they are bringing high standard and depth, at the price of inconsistency. for me gran turismo wouldn't be gran turismo if i didn't have a used car shop jammed with hundreds of curious relics to motoring history; it wouldn't be gran turismo unless i could globe-trot between night-races in tokyo and the shores of monte-carlo, places more fantastic, and everywhere in between.
that's me, anyway. gran turismo has always been about the simulation's dizzying depths, and i just don't think that would have been possible by constructing every asset from scratch, to this generation's ridiculous, untenable standards
I disagree. If it had only shipped with 200 premium, it still would have been more than GT3. It's the typical GT cycle of the first game of the gen shipping with relatively few cars and the second shipping with a crazy number.
Cramming in a ton of sub-par models and stripping out features makes it look half-assed, rather than looking like a finely polished, albeit smaller, game.
I guess it's just a matter of what I expect of PD.