Yeah, the part about us being right about Criterion
Even if you don't like the game those guys deserve respect, the amount of free DLC they gave out for Burnout Paradise was way beyond the generosity of other developers.
There are many things wrong with the new hot pursuit (I just finished it yesterday), which I will not get into on a gt thread, needless to say that it felt like a pretty bad port with plenty of annoyances and flaws.
On topic: the reason those little flaws (shadows dissapearing, shimmer and pixelation, screen tear , extremely ugly in car shadows etc) dissapoint me is that GT was always the most polished game in the frigging universe.
Gt3 for example : sure some functions were gone from gt2, there were less cars too(though the 'important' cars from gt2 were mostly still there).
But everything that was there was polished to perfection.
The shadows on the tracks were baked into the textures, so they looked silky smooth , the cars looked really great and very consistent in their quality, there were NO graphical glitches or bugs, the shine on the wet tracks in the night stages were of the same consistent polish.
My point is: the game FELT complete, and everything that was there was amazing and the quality was consistent, making it feel like a triple A game.
Kaz's mantra used to be 'if you can't do something right then don't do it at all' (he used to say that about the car damage and rollovers for example).
And while I admire their enthousiasm and ambition to try and add countless new features and details (cockpit views, the shadows in the cockpit, the high quality smoke they were going for, the rain effects, the amount of cars, track editor) , alot of end ended up looking like 'the little engine that just quite couldn't' instead of the little engine that could.
Compromise hangs over the games' presentation like a dark cloud, and it's not something I'm used to seeing from a GT game.
I'm going to use the gt3 shadows example again, sure there were no dynamic shadows cast by the environment but they looked amazing and silky smooth regardless because they were baked, the car shadows were much simpler but also smooth.
Compare that to gt5, you get dynamic shadows, with jaggy edges (sometimes only a little, other times horrible) that pop in and out of view sometimes in replays and during gameplay, distant cars and objects that don't cast shadows at all.
What use are dynamic shadows if they often look worse than their ps2 static counterpart.
Atleast in gt3 they looked consistent and didn't glitch , sawpattern or dissapear to remind you that they are fake.
example :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmoTrOS3Yco&feature=player_embedded#at=17
15-22 seconds in , look at the dashboard and steering wheel shadows.
Who at PD saw that, and said : that looks great lets put that in the game.
Usually you don't get a shadow cast by the wheel at all, and it looks better (apart from the fugly jaggies in this car probably because of the where meshes meet).
Leave the stupid wheel and dashboard shadows out at all then, noone would miss them.
There is a reason why for example a game like ff7 on psx used low poly, stick men like designs for their characters rather than trying to model seperate fingers and stuff only to have their clumsy attempt point out how fake it looks.
So many people here are keen to bash forza's fake-ass damage system where if you hit something your entire car gets scratched up on all sides unrealistically.
These gt5 glitches are no different from that.
Tldr: I miss the consistency and polish from the ps2 games, and would rather not have a feature at all than it having to be half arsed. That is not the gran turismo way.
lol
