I want PD to go back to focus on driving cars more than racing cars. If you want to be really serious about racing online, the car becomes a tool for your craft more than something you lust after. Shaving .01 of a second off a sector in a track you have lapped 200 times is what gets you going, not taking photos of your car in a barn. Telemetry becomes your car porn. Next is your racing rig, if you get serious about racing online, your rig quickly follows suit and starts to push the limits of your budget. I love racing, but racing is not what a GT game should revolve around. Driving..the driving experience is what has always captivated me in GT games. Walking into my virtual garage of hundreds of cars , picking the one that suits my mood and then taking for a drive. Normal stock cars, like ones you could go to any dealer right now and buy, on normal stock tires are where GT has always shined. Racing cars are about precision tuning, fine tolerances, millimeters, milligrams and milliseconds. It is a much more clinical approach to the automobile. Sportscars, roadsters, gran tours... a vehicle that feels familiar but exhilarates when you get to push them harder than you ever dared in real life. I want that in my GT games.
I think they should double down on the GPS course maker and get that working the way we all hoped it would. PD should be the first racing sim to have procedural generated roads too. Tour a region or country, stopping off at local race tracks for a track day in your favorite car. Have always online areas a-la destiny where you are driving a back country road winding through a hillside where you are going for a nice drive, getting the tires to bark a little bit on the windy bits when all of a sudden a car zips past you..fuck that sunday drive is over, its on, and you down shift a gear, plant it and the chase is on...and right as you are about to pass him on a diving double left hander, three on coming cars out having their own fun in the hills.. you swerve at the last second and trash your car into a woods. Your car is badly damaged, towed back to your virtual garage where you see it sitting in its crumpled heap. Yep, all damage, wear and tear are persistent in this world. The engine needs work, but you don't want to ditch it. You have a lot of history with this engine, 25,000 miles on it, across 4 continents. You want to keep that original engine so you pay more to fix that and loads of body work. Maybe you leave some less important bits unrepaired, gives your car a little character. Change up the paint job while you are at it and install some upgrades. There are many like it, but this one is yours. The more you drive the car, the more it wears, original parts gaining a little more rattle, a little less HP, but a hell of a lot more character. Eventually you buy a faster, better car, but you get to keep this one parked front and center in your virtual garage to admire every time you enter it to hop into your new ride. Maybe some sunday down the road you hop back in it and head to those hills again to reclaim your lost glory.
That is some shit I want in GT!
I think everyone would love that game, but just hearing the idea told in words without playing it, it sounds a bit like Truck Simulator (or 50% Truck simulator, 20% The Crew and 30% GT). I do agree that "motorsport" is not necessarily what GT was about for me,
but it could be their Forza Horizon if Sony could assemble another team they share assets with.
It was more like what GHG said before about a Touristenfahrt on the Nordschleife with 100 other normal ass road cars (I want the animation of ticketing in on the gate), the feeling to be able to take these "normal" cars you might actually buy one day buy (maybe even from the "used market
and drive to work with it, on a famous real world track, buy better tires, dial in some camber, do some ECU tuning to get better the next time. Maybe get better, get a cheap ass local sponsor, get license and a new car to enter in a low race class, level up. It was a bit like making your own background story in this huge construction kit of a game. I never did that, but it felt a bit like I did.
I also want 15 year old kids to find out about old cars and car-tech history, but all the cars we've seen so far are so new. Seems more like car porn, which I associate more with Forza, but even they have a really good historical line up in FM6 now.
When GT Short gets released and manages to sell less than GT6 (and it will as soon as word comes out that it's a online game mostly), maybe, just maybe, things will change.
No, you will buy it and I will buy it, maybe not day 1, but sooner or later we're all gonna buy it. In your heart you know it.
The Scape photoshots will be on twitter and facebook and casual gamers who buy fifa and cod every year and need little other gamers, will want the new GT game. It won't sell like GT5, but it will sell more than GT6 and more importantly not just $20 bargain-bin copies. PS4 gamers are deprived of non-hardcore racing games with sim qualities. If a game like Driveclub that had low review scores, a bad first month and most people assumed to be getting 70% of the content free with PS+ anyway... if a game like that sells over 2 million copies on PS4, GT Sport will sell more than 5 million copies, even with low review scores and no good word of mouth.
But yes, they need this restructuring. They need to focus on what made GT great in the PS2 era and innovate the way Doom did, back to the roots, fuck conventions ("active reload" is the modern thing, but fuck that, we're doing NO reloading with our guns like in the original doom) and do what's fun and fans love about your previous games at their core that you maybe even never thought about. At the same time their racing core needs to be spot on in terms of car tech (if the car in the game can't be made to feel like the car in real life, because its tech can't be simulated (computer assisted suspension systems, active center differentials, slip-angle controlling damping systems, complex hybrid powertrains and so on, maybe don't put the car in your game) and simulation know-how (tires!), for which they probably need to hire new guys. Build per-corner and car controller tweaks onto that sim foundation so everybody can drive it while still letting every car feel truly unique. Talk with tech experts and tech future analysts to really get your 3D models future proof this time (adaptive tesselation was a great idea) and then outsource stuff like laserscanning tracks, making 3D models of track-side objects, laserscanning cars and getting sound impressions... get industrial about your content generation and
spin up the machine, while you work on the actual game and live and breath your core ideas. Kaz should be the head of a division, but probably not head of the whole project.
