I want to love GT5, I really do. I poured so many hours into GT3 and GT4 is insane to even think about it. But GT5 just thwarts my love at every possible turn. Everytime they patch it I run back like a love sick puppy to try and see if now it'll be fun to play and every time I my heart stomped on like my high school prom. First it was the ridiculous load times and installs, then it was the utterly contrived and useless menu system, then it was the remote play functionality that required me to run my game all day long, then it was the broken GT PSP integration, etc. etc.
Now again, I constantly go back to it because the racing is fun, but at this point I feel that its transition from a hardcore racing sim that you have to spend hours upon hours at, into almost a casual title. I play it for 30-40 minutes here and there. With no real endurance racing series and individual racing series that take mere hours to beat it really begs the question of re-playability. I mean was it really that hard to add a few more racing tiers and levels into the game? Need for Speed Shift had the same issue where you got to max level and got all the best cars before finishing half the game, so why bother with the other races. In GT5 you can't get to the really good damage modeling until you get to a high level but you'll have long finished all the races in the game and wont even by at level 20 out of 40, so why bother getting to max level? Other then a mad desire to own nice cars from history, cars I already own in GT3 and GT4.
The real point of this was to talk about my biggest pain point of individual races and racing series in GT5. Mainly the rewards. Now the experience earned seems to scale based on your car in comparison to the A.I. cars, which is fine, that actually in a rare instance makes sense. No the problem is the money reward. Once you get to the Extreme Series you'll notice that almost every race requires a 20 million dollar car, and features 5 races at around 25 laps each, with a 40-50 thousand dollar reward. Now that would mean you would have to do those races something like 400 times to pay back for the initial investment on the car, and then you would have to do that 9 times over. That's something like 3600 races to win 9 series events. But to put a point on that there is the NASCAR series which requires a 500,000 dollar car, and features 5, 5 lap races with 70 thousand dollar rewards....so thats kinda fucked up. I mean is everyone at Polyphony just caught up on Yamaguchi's mad desires for more paint colors and shinier wheels that they forgot to even look at the basic math behind things? Maybe I am missing the point, maybe the driving is supposed to be so good that you don't mind doing 3600 races, maybe Clive Barker's Jericho isn't a terrible game...no wait none of that's true, and even if its the intent it's so glorious misplaced that I actually feel sorry for who came up with it.
As it is GT5 remains the best driving simulator wrapped in the worst menu structure, and still not a very good racing game. They can continue to patch, but the priority seems to be making new features while the core game goes untouched despite being flawed in so many ways. I doubt this will ever be the game that I wanted it to be, but I'll keep plugging away while waiting for my dinner to finish so I can play a real video game.
Peace, TheShape108.
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