A very good article came out on IGN regarding GT5:
"The 2011 Tokyo Game Show has come and gone with nary a solitary whisper regarding Gran Turismo 5. No matter, you say, there are plenty of games that are released and subsequently never mentioned by their publishers again. But Gran Turismo 5 isn't just any game; it's one of the biggest feathers in Sony's cap. And it's completely fallen off the radar.
Don't misinterpret this; GT5 has received an admirable amount of post-release support. After 10 months of tweaking, GT5 today is a significantly more evolved beast than it was when it launched. Bug fixes, feature updates, seasonal events; the team at Polyphony Digital have been tinkering for almost a year.
What they're not doing, however, is releasing any show stopping new content. The game's been out for almost a year and we're yet to see any DLC. What they're not doing, specifically, is anything at all to spit in Turn 10's cereal.
We're currently around three weeks from the launch of Forza Motorsport 4. The GT and Forza series are unique to different consoles but they sing the same tune to the same audience: car enthusiasts. Sony is being surprisingly complacent here. The door is wide open for Microsoft and Turn 10 to corner revheads with the seriously promising Forza Motorsport 4, and all without a whisper of a GT5 counterattack.
Polyphony Digital boss Kazunori Yamauchi, a frequent poster on Twitter, mentioned late last month that new features and content for GT5 would be arriving in September and October. Just how minor or significant this proposed new content may be remains to be seen as there have been no further announcements. It's a far cry from Turn 10's regular and consistent DLC support for the Forza series. Forza 3 had a year's worth of monthly DLC. Forza 4 will have monthly DLC too.
GT5's most glaring oversights were nothing that a steady stream of DLC couldn't have redressed. Unfortunately, no such DLC ever materialised. But what is Forza 4 promising to get right that GT5 didn't? Plenty, it turns out.
I visited Polyphony Digital way back in 2009, during the Tokyo Game Show, over a year before the eventual release of GT5. It's an engaging place, particularly if you've got a fondness for the series. My penchant for the GT series dates back to its debut on the original PlayStation.
There is absolutely no doubt that Polyphony Digital worked hard on GT5. The team have dedicated magnetic icons they place next to their names when they're sleeping under their desks. It's doubtful Polyphony could've worked harder, but they probably could've worked smarter.
GT5 may feature 1000 cars but it's really a victory for quantity over quality. There are some true gems hidden within the bowels of Polyphony's mega racer but there's no getting around the fact that, while there are over 20 different MX-5s and around 40 Skylines, it lacks so many of the world's most interesting new cars from the past two or three years. In fact, counting each 2010 NASCAR car as one model, GT5 featured just over a dozen 2010 models. That is a hypnotically small amount of new cars for a game that came out in December 2010.
Dedicating valuable development time to building premium versions of not one but two WWII era German military vehicles was madness too. Experimenting with oddball vehicles is part of GT's charm but GT5's premium models took so long to build it was only possible to make 200 of them in five years. With that in mind novelty cars like these should've been struck from the list immediately. Forza 4's Warthog Easter Egg is the obvious comparison but at least every car in Forza 4 has a cabin view.
Looking at Forza 4's car list, the bulk of which has been revealed, it's clear Microsoft's racer is a more global game. That is, more things to more people. It may feature half the cars but you won't find 135 Nissans and only 12 Ferraris in Forza 4. There's a better representation of cars from around the globe, yet without a disproportionally large focus on vehicles from just one country. Even with fewer cars Forza 4 manages to feel more comprehensive.
It's a more current game too; there are nearly 50 2011 cars in Forza 4, going by the roster revealed to date (and that's counting the 10 Australian Holden and Ford V8 Supercars as just one of each). The result is a game that feels fresh and up-to-date while boasting even more older classics than ever.
The Top Gear Test Track was a great inclusion in GT5 but ultimately the game's affiliation with the hugely-popular show was staggeringly undercooked. Covering the track with cones was one thing but the lack of a standing start option remains unforgivable, and being unable to utilise the full runway was a major disappointment.
The Top Gear tie-in simply did not feel like something that had been gestating for three or so years. It was comically underused. After presumably months and months of time and resources spent impeccably crafting the track the Top Gear component of the game itself resulted in a measly three events – and only one of them featured an actual sports car. Not only did the game eschew the time-trial format the track is famous for in favour of bog standard one-make races against a large field of opponents, Polyphony ensured your first experience of the track – a track famous for putting the world's most desirable supercars through their paces – was a VW SambaBus race, a van barely capable of hitting 80 kilometres per hour. Every time you do this race The Stig throws up in his mouth a little bit.
Things improved slightly for the second event (featuring the 2004 Lotus Elise) but immediately plummeted into lunacy again for the final event: a Volkswagen Kubelwagen race. That nobody at Polyphony thought perhaps battles against the clock (featuring the kinds of supercars featured on every episode of the TV show) would've been a better idea than a race featuring a Nazi troop carrier is baffling.
GT5 didn't even feature any of the show's reasonably priced cars. In fact, bizarrely enough, out of the top 10 fastest cars around the track in reality (at the time of the game's release) only ONE appeared in the game. World-beating supercars like the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, Gumpert Apollo, Ascari A10, Koenigsegg CCX, Noble M600, Pagani Zonda Roadster F, Caterham Seven R500, Pagani Zonda F and Maserati MC12 were absent, despite their Top Gear-related significance. The solitary top 10 car that made the cut? The regular Bugatti Veyron – and it's not even one of the game's premium models.
Polyphony squandered the Top Gear affiliation. Forza 4's Top Gear partnership exceeds GT5's in every way. Sure, the track is featured, in circuit and drag form, but it goes beyond that. Jeremy Clarkson is on hand to introduce the game itself and talk you through selected car models in Autovista mode. Additional modes like car soccer, inspired by the show, also feature. Unlike GT5, Forza 4 includes the Kia Cee'd, so you can actually drive the car from the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment. Current supercars, the show's bread and butter, are also far better represented in Forza 4. The Power Board has changed slightly since this time last year but Forza 4 still has a better strike rate. Koenigsegg, Gumpert and Noble are just some of the manufacturers present in Forza 4 but absent from GT5.
The sum of GT5's missteps has left Forza 4 in an enviable position to capitalise. To be honest this shouldn't be especially troubling – to us, at least. As gamers (and as usual) we win either way; we're able to embrace quality from whatever angle it approaches. Games aren't sports teams you can only support one of. The tribal notion that you have to choose one side or the other is as entirely unsuitable for video games as it would be for films. Action film fans don't have to choose between Stallone or Schwarzenegger.
But this silence around GT5 on the eve of Forza 4's launch? It's as if either Sony doesn't want to compete with Forza 4, or it feels it doesn't have to.
There are key areas GT5 still has Forza 4 trumped, namely night racing and weather effects, but if Sony thinks a little darkness and rain can offset Forza 4's better car roster and better Top Gear tie-in content, plus its superior community features and customisation options, the House that PlayStation Built has considerably underestimated Forza 4."
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