Well, tiger, first you say this,
And I've been to Japan 25+ times for work and fun and seen how fanatical perfection and devotion can be a hindrance to creativity and originality. I've worked side-by-side with multiple Japanese corporate and government institutions on major engineering programs and seen their inefficiencies and aversion to risk. Some of the strengths of the Japanese culture are also their weaknesses (same can be said for any culture).
Then you say this.
Sorry to break it to you, but even corporate Japan has one thing in mind - bottom line profit. They aren't in the business to lose money. That's left for the Japanese government, which by the way is an excellent example for the US in terms of what a high debt to GDP ratio can do for you...
So I have to disagree with you about profit being the "one thing in mind." While you can accuse a number of western companies of just thinking of the dollar, Hollywood and Microsoft come to mind, even in the west there are quite a few who don't. Thank God some western game companies like Insomniac, Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog don't.
Maybe SONY promoted Kaz in order to be able to leverage more pressure on the poor guy. I hope not. Since the PS2 came along, SONY Computer Entertainment has had flashes of being an actual fun game company like Nintendo and SEGA used to be. I hope this continues, but with the world seeming to try and come unglued, Thank you China, Iran and N Korea, we all have to start praying more.
Again, people do that because Kaz ran his mouth saying we'll have 'track days' in GT5, Where is it? I bet a freaking patch, or they pulled it without telling us, like Youtube uploading.
You should know about YouTube uploading by now, and unfortunately SONY doesn't have a solid online structure in place yet to handle GT5. Have you forgotten that on release, we were told to pull our network cables if we were having issues? MS has been laying the foundation for an online service since the 90s. It's going to take a while yet for SONY to give us all gigabit bandwidth, which gaming at that level really needs.
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While I disagree emphatically, that the Standard cars are definitely
not worthless, the rest I do. Having day time transition is something many of us wanted, and I thought
shoouuuld be doable, but loading on 3D on top of that has apparently wrecked the shader processing, making them in many cases a really ugly, flickery mess. Maybe just making variable point lighting is too much, but the 3D engine sure isn't helping.
GT5 being what it is because of Kaz is one thing. Because SONY elbowed their way in and started making decisions they shouldn't have, that's another. And I agree, I think this is where the problem lies.
Because of this, I really doubt GT6 could be made without 3D and time of day transition, so this game really needs to be held off for PS4. Keep improving GT5 and adding content and features, and that should make us all more than happy.
This game bug testing stopped in March (original japanese release date)
Where the heck do you get this??
It should have left the Course Designer alone (let the pros do it and sell DLC). So much was left unfinished to add these features that DO NOT WORK.
No, the Course Designer is cool. NASCAR isn't a big deal as far as wrecking GT5. The reason GT5 is wonky is because of SONY. GTPSP, 3D... it seems like there was more I was thinking of, but those two are the big culprits that messed up GT5. Oh yeah, the online server shortfall is another, but SONY isn't M$, made of money, and they can't wave magic wands to produce a massive online system, as much as they can pretend they can. We'll just have to wait on that.
I hope some of those will be fixed with patches and DLC, but I don't really count on it, as history has proven that games are rarely dramatically improved by patching.
If you haven't bought Prologue, this is the game which breaks the rule. It was patched to double the car count and added a new track seamlessly to the game, so even in single player offline, the game incorporated it as if it had been there all along. Prologue was done to test out many things for GT5, and I have no doubt that part of that was making it buildable through patching.
As for "blindly" buying GT6, I suppose you could accuse me of that.

If I had known about the weirdness which GT5 is afflicted with, I still would have plunked down for the Collector's addition. A lot of really hard work was done to lay a foundation for not just GT5, but 6, so for the sequel, they can focus much more on content and features. And proper shadows.
