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"Gran Turismo Future"

I've been Playing a lot of Gran Turismo 3 recently. This is strange, because I've had this game since it was released back in July last year, 9 months ago. I rarely find a game that i can reignite my interest in for longer than about 20 minutes at a time once the initial novelty has worn off. But somehow i still get absorbed by GT3 like an african explorer in quick sand. I can't tear myself away! My renewed interest in GT3 A-Spec has gotten me thinking though.

There seems to be a lot of speculation as to what the next installment of the GT series will contain. Some talk of a GT3 B-Spec with broadband internet capability, and maybe a few extra cars. Some think that the next GT will be a new installment designed from scratch. I know i'm looking forward to finding out.

The thing that bugs me is; Releasing a version of GT that simply builds in a Internet network multiplayer mode seems a little modest by Kazunori Yamauchi and Polyphony Digital's standards. Surely they must have much more up their sleeves besides? Compared to what we'd seen in the past, The original GT was massive beyond our wildest dreams when it was released. But when they moved to GT2, The Number of cars that they packed in was truly incredible. They also added a Rally mode, almost infinate amounts of races to enter, and an improved handling model. An Amazing amount of new features!

GT3 didn't add new features in the way GT2 did. This was initially disappointing, but it soon became clear that the reason that this happened was because Polyphony Digital had put so much work into optimizing GT3 to harness the full capabilities of PS2. And you can see this easily. Despite being an early PS2 title, it still has by far and away the best graphics on any PS2 racer, and is one of the best looking games on the market right now. The car handling has also progressed massively, making full use of the high resolution Dual Shock 2 pad. And the Rally mode was now fun to play!

With all of this developement under their belt now, I think that GT4 will make a jump similar in size to that between GT1 and GT2! There are a myriad of possibilities as to what thy might do next.

Broadband internet multiplay is the obvious one. no matter how good it gets, AI is never as thrilling to play against as another human being, but split screen has it's limitations on a game like GT as it seems a lot harder to play when your view is half the size. And lugging six TV's round to a mates house is a hassle, even if you can find five mates that have a PS2! Internet play will eliminate this problem and add masses of lifespan onto the game.

The limitation on the number of cars in GT3 was the time it took to model them in such a high resolution. 2 Weeks in comparison to 2 days for GT2. It make sense that most of the cars in GT3 can be pretty much carried straight to the next installment, so i think we could well see double the number of cars in the next installment (though this may require two discs). So maybe we'll see that Lamborghini we've been lusting after! The existance of Gran Turismo Next and the Toyota-only GT3 version show that Polyphony are modelling new cars as we speak.

Car Damage is a hot subject, that has been discussed on these here forums before. It would be great to see it, but many manufacturers refuse to allow it. The Question is, Would you trade off the number of cars available in exchange for Car Damage? Some have suggested that Polyphony should use fantasy cars so they can include car damage, but i don't like that idea and don't think it's ever likely to happen, as a massive part of the realism in GT3 stems from the amount of cars present that you also see on the road in real life, or even drive yourself.

GT3 saw the addition of Wet weather. This was a fantastic idea, but sadly it was very poorly implemented. I hope that GT4 extends the idea of variable weather conditions. Rain on all the tracks would be good, as would actual falling rain rather than just a wet track. Changeable weather during the race would also make the endurance races alot more exciting, adding an extra strategy element to help keep you interested over the hour long races (Let's face it, they're pretty dull at the moment!).

There are other little improvements that i'd like to see. For example, The original GT gave a summary of the Hp of your opponent cars before a race, and I'd like to see this brought back so that you could tune your car so it's specs match that of the opponents. This would help the experts get close races. It's dissapointing when you enter a race and blow everyone away purely because your car is better tuned. I also think that the rally courses are a bit wide. It would be cool if the tracks were narrower to closer resemble those of real rally events.

Well those are my thoughts on the Future of Gran Turismo! what do you think? What would you like to see on the next installment? Have you heard any interesting news? post your GT thoughts here!

Thanks for reading.

I think that sadly the online aspect of GT will probably not feature damage. It would be the easy way out for Sony, as an online system where cars can be damaged, especially irrepairably, would be hard to implement so that the true "petrol heads" can easily find a good competitive race to join in to.

More likely countless morons would populate a large number of the races, treating it like bumpercars! Not a good thing really.

Maybe a league table could be created so that racers of a like skill can access a "division" of GT online comparable to their skill level, perhep determined by best lap times? Then the idiots bashing about into each other can do this with like minded individuals!

Sorry about sounding such a misery on this topic, but I think making any Playstation 2 online only would be a very big mistake. Online gaming is okay but there are some problems.

Firstly, its 2am in the morning and you want a quick blst around a few tracks, do you really want to have to connect up, find opponenets e.t.c ? Nope, you just want to race ! A lot of people simply cannot be bothered with online gaming and racing games are not the best genre for online play, usually, if theres 8 people, 2 pull away and spend the race swopping #1 and #2, whilst two fall miles back and ram each other constantly, and the rest all play catchup but can't hope to win. The credits idea thats been suggested is anoter good idea in theory, but it would be too easy to just register multiple aliases, trash the opposition and then load up your own profile safe in the knowledge you've crippled other players - if Sony make adecent job of online play though then this could be avoided !

I think for online gaming people should have to register a username/password with Sony - by the website or phone, and that they'd have to say their PS2 serial number and some other unique data to stop people abusing it like the PC online games.

Pro Evo's right, they should definately have a sliding scale of damage levels, so that you don't have to play with "race ending" damage until you are a clued up racer.

And as i said earlier, the AI really has to be more realistic, so if you break earlier than another driver, they will brake too, or swerve to avoid you. and if you pass them and then cut in on to their line, they try to avoid an accident rather than holding their line religiously.

Allowances have to be made by the computer AI, because in a racing sim you don't have the full sensory perception that you would have in a real race, eg, you cannot see cars that are along side you. (this could be solved with a Daytona USA style car radar showing the relative locations of other vehicles)

thanks for all the discussion/feedback by the way!

I think the best way to get around it would to have it online only. If you had to pay for damage/insurance out of your credits u earned on winning then it would peruade people to drive carfully. If u get a player with loads of credits that tries to purposely wreck your car then there could be proper moderators set up that watches races and decides whether the person who delibrately tried to wreck your car would have to pay a fine for the damage. Leagues could be set up to race against others. You could buy/trade sell to other users your cars and parts. You could do any thing just like the real world of racing. it would be great.

What about being given the ability to pick from certain levels of damage like some other games have tried to use. Say three different levels, No damage, Light damage that would not effect your car all that much and then Heavy Damage that could put you out of the race.

If you have the ability to change them and have the one that suits you, it also means that you can switch between them, rather like the difficulty levels you can pick on other games.

Damage isn't really all it's cracked up to be (no pun intended), for many of the reasons that nh has already given.

I've been playing Project Gotham on the Xbox quite a bit, which features damage. Okay, the body deforms, lights break etc., but the handling of the car doesn't change at all - it just slows you down a bit.

So, at the end of the day, is the visible damage really important? I personally don't think so.

As nh said, it can easily ruin a game. If you slide into a barrier and your engine falls out, fine - it's your mistake. But more often than not, after practicing, when I hit a barrier it's usually because some daft AI driver has shoved me into it.

"Real" damage (i.e. race-ending damage) should only be implemented once they have achieved reasonable driver AI, where they won't actually try to pass you by deliberately ramming you into a barrier.

Damage is all well and good but the big thing is as has been pointed out - how much interest would you have if you had absolutely no chance of competing in the race due to puncture or blowing enigine etc. The restart feature would end up being used rather a lot.

The idea of gravel etc that would spill onto the track and affect the handling when you came around next time would be cool as it makes the circuits less predicatable.

Another one on the subject of weather would be rain etc that fell either during the race or just on part of the circuit so again the track is not so predictable.

Tracks which run alongside the seas edge (cant remember the name at the mo) could have an area where the waves crash against the side and water washes over the road again making the handling more unpredicatble.

And lastly why dont they add a couple of whinging, arguing kids in the back of the car to put you off while you were driving - Just imagine cruising into a corner at 150 in your Skyline when a kids cuddly toy flashes across the windscreen in front of you - Hey you wanted realism !!!!
(Though for me it's more like 40 in a Renault Scenic - bah!)

Belldandy wrote:
Damage, which could
> end races before they've been coimpleted, could soon become frustrating.

I do agree with this to an extent. The introduction of damage to GT in it's current state would really need to be coupled with a big improvement in opponent AI. At the moment they rarely try to avoid you, even if you are in front. Putting a damage feature into GT3 at the moment would see you getting serious damage in most races, although it would rarely be your fault!

I would hope that if they included damage, it would be something that could be turned off, as new gamers will need to bump into stuff whilst they're learning!

Damagewould be great, but I can see one problem. Gran Turismo alienated a lot of its buyers when it was discovered as being a "proper" driving game. For many like myself it became a herculean task to get past even the first three tracks. The official magazine in issue 18 have admitted that their rating only really stood for "petrolehads( Their words not mine !). Damage, which could end races before they've been coimpleted, could soon become frustrating.

All the TOCA games are great, but when a computer car rams you, send you into a barrier and you spend the next 10 laps doing 20mph because you've got black smoke pouring from the bonnet the fun disappears, along with the game in the cd tray.

Kind of like an extension of what the cones and distance markers do already that would be good. Real-time gravel pits that move about as you drive through them would be cool too. They could do some excellent desert-esque rally stages too if they sorted that out!