GT Sport Discussion Monday - Gran Turismo Series

[Paul Jeffrey]

From Gran Turismo on the PlayStation 1 all the way through to the new GT Sport, it's Monday morning so let's have ourselves a good discussion!

Polyphony Digital have held the lion share of the console racing game marketplace pretty much ever since they released the original Gran Turismo back in 1998, however the landscape is changing and as technology continues to march forward and new rivals appear on the scene, Polyphony and the GT series have had to make some dramatic departures form customary form to stay ahead of the times.

Always presented in near flawless graphical fidelity and benefiting from a mega development budget, how does the GT franchise of games resonate with our readers here at RaceDepartment?

From tips on how to get the most from the various different GT games, to sharing your personal favourite moments, please use the comments in section in this article to discuss all things Gran Turismo!

Mondays be like....

 

[CC]

Some of my best memories of racing are from GT1 with friends and family ,
but like u say times are changing and the future of simracing is looking really bright indeed!

 

[Bazooka_Joe]

It was Gran Turismo 5 that made me venture into simracing world, so it'll be always somewhere in my heart as a series that shaped my life.
Pass the weird UI awaits a huge choice of cars, not awful handling, nice graphics.
Saying that, after switching to PC platform I never looked back with the choice and quality of other sims available here.
Great feeder into 'proper' simracing. And with additional sentimental value for me.

 

[kamackeris]

Got to say I have never played a minute of GT. The new game certainly looks stunning though. Gonna dl the demo later

 

[Sky]

I had gt2. It was ok, but i never really got into it. It just felt a bit too cold and sanitised.

 

[Macxyn]

My first GT was GT4. I got a PS3 for GT5 and played GT6 for the most time. It was the game, that made me get a racing wheel. Until AC, there was not a other racing game / sim racing game, that I enjoyed more.

 

[John Chaser]

It was GT that got me interested into cars and racing, but after GT4 the series has declined a bit. The lack of a career mode puts me off buying Sport.

 

[kamackeris]

I'm downloading the demo now.... Anyone played it yet?

 

[ears]

I remember seeing my brother playing Gran Turismo on my old PlayStation (I'd moved on to playing Doom 2 and Championship Manager 2 on a PC by then) and being really impressed by the graphics.

I later bought a PS2 and played GT2 on it. I did really enjoy it. I remember being very pleased with myself when I won an Opel Touring Car. Never got much further.

I did buy another one - I remember it had a 'prologue' version where you had to drive around cones. By then there were titles like PGR2 on Xbox with online modes, so the GT series seemed a bit dated.

Never went back.

 

[James Cook]

My gateway into sim racing. I have great memories of racing online in a GT5 community.

I'm not going to be too critical of the Gran Turismo series as it does what it does very well, but I could never return to it from PC racing sims. It simply doesn't offer the depth and level of simulation I'm looking for.

 

[Paul Jeffrey]

GT 2 (I think) was my first Gran Turismo game, and brings with it many a happy memory from my "yoof". Loved it with some mates setting times in 10 lap stints then handing over the controller for the other person to go beat my ghost. For its time it was a highly enjoyable experience.

Migrated over to Forza when Xbox became the go to device for us, then shortly after discovered PC's and sim racing and never looked back.

As mentioned above, both Forza and the GT series do what they do very well indeed, just not enough of a simulation to scratch the itch I now have.

 

[Ghoults]

It is a game series that has lost its way imho and is afraid of reinventing itself. The first gt was a great game. Tons of content and while not a fresh take on driving games it was the type of driving games people had been wanting for a long time. It also introduced many of of us to the skylines, supras, rx7s and mitsubishi gtos. The car tuning aspect was great and it did many things right with tracks. The first games also had that quirky japanese feel to them while still being accessible without overdoing it. The games also imho had a killer sound track and were just so much fun to play.

But by game 5 it was kinda clear they were not sure what kind of game they were making. They added laser scanned nordschleife which was industry first. And you could run it in the rain in the night. It was also the first game to be very drivable on a steering wheel and the online game mode of it was super solid. It was just great game on some aspects.

But some aspects were huge let down. While the online lobbies were one of the best ever seen in racing sims the other online components were extremely poor and basic compared to forza 4 for example. The ai in game 5 was horrible and basically as bad as it was in the first games. Slow, stupid and unpredictable. The sounds were attrocious and couldn't hold a candle to forza 4 in which some cars were just delightful bliss to your ears in comparison. The career mode was also hampered by totally unnecessary levelling system which felt like pure afterthought and lots of the career events were locked behind random unicorn cars which were really difficult to get. And if you wanted level 40 you needed to grind like mad. Some cars also cost way too much. The choise of including hundreds of lower graphical fidelity cars was also controversial although personally I think it was better to have them as they were than to no have them at all.

Gran turismo also started making some truly weird choises. Instead of trying to mimic the human eye they chose to mimic a camera as far as graphics go. And same thing with the sounds. Instead of human ear they were trying to mimic a microphone. This meant that for example if you drive over a kerb you get the muted effect of the car sound because the game lowers the car engine sounds to make the kerb sound stronger. Similarly in traffic your own car sound fades away as you get close to other cars. These all made the driving feel more like watching and listening an onboard video instead of driving.

I have kinda mixed feelings about the game 5 although I played it a lot. The accurate nordscleife alone made it worth anything they could have asked for but some aspects of the game were huge let downs. Then the game 6 came out and it was basically game 5 with some things moved around. Some graphical issues were rebalanced with other issues. I think it was shadow flickering which was made worse so shadows would look better. And then they also added races on the moon.

Their push towards adding more real life content in game 6 was kinda strange move. By adding tracks like willow springs and adding all those concept cars I feel they just made their game more like everything else. The first games were great because they were unique and while they did not reinvent the wheel they made sure it was a fresh take on the genre. A new game that is different to what is available. But the new gran turismos just feel like they are faceless sequels to succesful brand. I'd really want to see them try something fresh with their career mode because that is what made the first games so special and what has made the latest games so forgettable and boring.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

I have a PS4 Pro with GT Sport on order and should arrive in the next week. If it gives me half the fun I had with GT5 it's my euros well spent. Can't wait to plugin the T500 and start racing.

 

[Furnace Inferno]

The thing the original GT's did which Forza never understood or captured (or any other racing game for that matter) was your attachment to each car. You'd have your starter car and grind away at the Sunday Cup upgrading piece by piece, not because you were trying to get some stupid unbeatable tune but so you actually had a car capable of competing for the win.

It was a whole meta game within itself just trying to maximise your credits with what little you had and not just about winning every race. Working out what the cheapest car you could buy was to earn the most credits (Mistusbishi GTO Twin Turbo in GT2 for drag racing did the trick nicely for example the FTO was also a great car) or what has the best prize cars added a lot IMO.

It is undoubtedly though the most influential car game in the history of gaming and introduced more people to racing titles than anyone else, just imagine how different the market would be if GT had never existed especially on consoles.

 

[skylineforever]

 

[Phoenix77]

I loved Gran Turismo since GT1... I remember the quite thick driving guide that came with it, going into weight shifting etc. For it's time it had really good physics... (compared to other driving games)
And I loved the progression of buying a cheap used car, upgrading turbo's, mufflers etc. Also a great point was the license tests... The fun (and frustration) of trying to get all golds was really addictive.

After getting a PC... GT's physics have always seemed dated... I hope GT Sport changes that and I have a reason to look into it again

View attachment 215925

I used to love the Seattle track... Would be an amazing track to have in AC!

 

[JoelRR]

Played GT3 (on a friend's ps2), GT4, GT5 and GT6.

GT3 and GT4 were the best one yet, as no one was worried about engine noise or standard/premium cars!

But I was disapointed about engine sounds, even more when comparing with FM4, or Even Forza Horizon.

(sorry for the crappy English, hangover is still strong lol)

 

[TylerDurden4321]

I never played a GT game with a wheel up until 2014. Had a lot of fun with most of them, but GT6 I even platinumed and 100%ed the Senna DLC. I signed up for the closed beta earlier this year within 3 minutes of the sign-up site being up and got in.

GT6 ran on a system without the processing power to run a physics simulation à la rFactor - which always seemed like a fair excuse to me. Now on PS4 Project CARS(yes even 1, it was not a great sim, the physics were off more often than not, but it simulated so much more than a GT or Forza) and especially Assetto Corsa showed that the cheap console CPU is capable of running sim physics, there is no excuse for GT to not step up the tire model and other parts of the simulation.
With the lower car count, I was hoping they'd actually modeled the suspensions, to feel bumps affecting the FFB and cornering behavior correctly, but no.
This is the game for me that PD decided that GT is not the best simulator on console, but just a competitor in the Forza -style market, going for the same amount of realism and not an inch more (though, it drives a bit less **** /more forgiving/less annoying beyond the adhesive part of tire grip than Forza 5-7).

But is GTS fun?
Yes and no. It's fun when you can drive like an idiot on the Nordschleife and get away with it because with a lower wheel-lock degree of rotation, you can always catch the car. It's annoying when you brake(a tiny bit) and steer to get better turn-in response and ...then you understeer and overshoot the apex because the braking is stable no matter the brake balance because it's made for a controller. It's annoying when you have to go 100% clutch travel to shift into a new gear (it's a clutch "button" not axis), it's annoying when you down-shift 2 gears in one go without rev-matching and the rear does nothing unusual, and also when you try to correct the cornering radius in a FWD car with lift-off oversteer and there is hardly any of it.
Then there are no FOV options(GT used to have this in the games before, hidden in the multi-monitor options) no option to turn off the onscreen wheel, sound inside the cockpit and lighting exposure setting are really bad...

No, I can't support this thing. I tried with feedback during the beta to improve it, made threads explaining ReelFeel FFB, explaining the importance of FOV, pointing out brake balance, bump- and off-track grip problems that will be bad for eSports. Nothing. Best thing the devs changed was "seat position options" - but no FOV.

 

[Araripe]

I played a lot of Gran Turismo 2 way back then, on PlayStation 2 (my friend's PSOne was stolen and he gave me some of the few games that he luckily got to keep, GT2 included). Even though the graphics could not compare to stuff I used to play like NFSU 2, NASCAR, etc., I got captivated by the gameplay and the huge variety of cars and tracks. It was probably one of the best racing games that I ever played in my whole life. Then, I heard about Gran Turismo 4. It took me a few months to actually buy and play the game, because PS2 games were not easy to find in Brazil in early 2000s. I was straight up blown away by the graphics, which were extremely good for the current standards. Could not have enough of the used car market and Nurburgring Nordschleife, my favorite things of GT4, that kept me coming back for years. I played it religiously until late 2012, when I finally got into "hardcore" simulation. Still, nothing was as hard and challenging as GT4's license system. That 1:34:000 lap with a Citroen C4 in Laguna Seca still scares me at night every now and then (it took me days). I am yet to find a racing game that challenges me as much as GT4 did. It slapped me hard right on the face and made me realize that I knew nothing about real racing.

 

[Nick Hill]

I own every GT, 1-6. I haven't a PS4, so no Sport for me (unless I am reading reviews telling me I'm really missing out on something novel).

Great game series - I don't really actively play it now, but I've sunk many hours into it. Damn near got kicked out of college my freshman year due to poor grades, which was in no small part down to marathon GT/GT2 sessions (which is actually pretty embarrassing to look back on now, but there you have it).

I've really enjoyed Forza over the years to, but I've for the most part found GT to be the series more focused on the driving aspect of the game. Forza always feels a bit "canned" to me in terms of physics, whereas GT feels a bit more dynamic and believable (just my opinion, YMMV).

GT5 & 6 have the worst sound effects of any game I have ever played. Still good games though (even though 6 felt more like a patch of 5 more than a new game).

The series really taught me about cars - to the point where my opinions/tastes on cars pre and post GT/GT2 were markedly different. That's a pretty nuts thing to say about a video game, if you think about it! Not only did those games introduce me to an entire bevy of Japanese and European cars that just didn't exist in the States, but they also taught me power isn't everything - handling, braking, and (most importantly) weight have a massive impact on how quick a car can get around a track. Quite the eye opener for a Midwest kid who grew up slobbering over muscle cars and quarter mile times!