GT5: The Dev Process

Welcome to another Perch of StaticFalconar. This is a retrospective blog on gaming in 2010.

            Think to a time back in school before you really learned how to study. Not only was the material new but so was the school and nobody really knew how to study for it. Add on to it your personality is of being a perfectionist. This class really wasn’t more of take a test as much as do a project, and you can turn it in whenever. That is the basic analogy to the dev process to gt5.

            Out of all these events that happened, there was only one single thing to blame for all this: HYPE!!! Five years ago was when the hype machine started from Sony since they needed to push all the brands they had for the PS3. Even though the first trailer was released in 2005 at E3, PD has been working on Tourist Trophy which they released 2006. So then they finally had time to get started on GT5 right? Well one year later in 2007 they did release GT5 Prologue so it really seemed like progress was being made. Then of course years go by only snippets and rumors appeared. Well in 2009 just when it seemed like something was finally going to be released, PD was all like here’s Gran Turismo………… for the PSP!!!!.

            PSP? Really? So they haven’t been spending all this time making GT5? Well according to an interview at E3 that year GT for the PSP has the same physics engine as GT5P. So then in the time since GT5P they have made some 800 odd cars for GT PSP and with one year left they made GT5; that’s in 3D, has head tracking, a “track editor”, weather effects, day/night cycle and the last minute damage modeling. All those features as well as getting the Nascar and WRC license probably was in the works for more than one year, ever since prologue perhaps. Too bad they only had 200 cars done to their liking and with most of the past GT games having more than 600, why not just add in the assets you have from GT PSP? That would put you north of 1000 cars, what can go wrong? Lols.

            As projects go, things may have been in the development phase ever since the end of GT4. But 5 years ago, the most they could have done was get close to new cars to model. A new physics engine probably took a long time as well since I actually do notice a difference in the engine since prologue. Add to it the fact that when the game was first in development, PD only had the concept specs from PS3 to work with. You know, the PS3 that is supposed to output everything in 1080p and 60fps?

So PD probably had a much higher expectation of what the PS3 is capable of and rendered everything picture perfect. In fact the premium cars had so much detail in them that most of us would probably never appreciate the detail in them. PD said it took them 6 months to render every model to premium standards and constantly wants to update the physics engine since they noticed the car behaved slightly differently on a bump on the track in a super exotic car that most of us will probably never drive.

Yep, in trying to get all that done, they forgot about making the game, play like one. Five years had gone by and PD seemed to flip flop on their design choices. Prologue had a ranking system for their cars called the PP system which is real helpful in trying to find what kind of race you are looking for. They also had subtle fine tune tweaks like adding and subtraction weight and HP by 20% so races between different cars that are slightly different could be leveled according to the PP system. But that is a start of a different blog as I ranted on enough.