Gran Turismo 6 has 434 cars

[fw190a8]

So I did a bit of analysis on the car list, and came up with 434 as the number of unique types of car in GT6. I wrote a fairly detailed post explaining my thinking on this. Feedback is welcome on this as well, because I'm very much of the opinion that the number of cars doesn't matter as much as the quality of the gameplay.

 

[GTPorsche]

Except some of the cars you've counted as being duplicates aren't duplicates.

 

[Tornado]

You consolidated it too much. The duplicate number in GT5 sat in the 150 range, excluding most race cars. While that number has gone up quite a bit with the GT6 list, it's still not anywhere near 800 duplicates.

 

[Not_A_Guest]

I don't care how many times I see a Skyline... The game looks great. It's not just about the cars.

 

[Dmarc_Atl]

Well that was a thoroughly typed out complaint with a bit of questionable accuracy regarding the standards and dupes... or in whole, your entire article.But the title definitely grabbed attention how ever you failed to explain why every car from gt4 ( and psp you forgot to mention) isn't actually a car.Or was the lie that they weren't updated at all suppose to suffice?

 

[Bigbazz]

As for the duplicates, you have a point that PD go for quantity over quality and they do miss out on a lot of relevant cars while boasting their numbers that is largely made up of the same car. At the same time though there is satisfaction to be had knowing you can get the exact year/model of car that you may own in real life, or perhaps your dad owned it. I'm sure Kaz sees it as more of a catalogue or library of cars, he's interested in the complete history of certain cars being available and I'm sure if he had the time/money/licences to do it then he would do it with every car. I'm very disapointed we got no Mclaren P1 or LaFerrari. Concerning those I'm also disapointed there is no Mclaren MP4-12c GT3 car, just as I'm disapointed in no Ferrari 355 or F50.


You mention in your blog relating to other quality racing games that"Graphically those games tend to be a lot weaker"

Rfactor 2 - Since the graphical update is leaps and bounds ahead of GT5/6, go see for yourself.
iRacing - Again if you set aside the car modelling the rest of the graphics in the game are leagues ahead of GT5
Project CARS - You mention this but the game is still in development, but graphically once released it will be the highest quality racing game graphically ever released, though infact it already is.

GT5/6 has great car modelling, and looks good in the pre-rendered promotional shots released but gameplay graphics do not compare with those above examples. If you ran them side by side the clarity in resolution alone makes the GT/Forza games look like blurry jaggy messes. You could say (especially with RF2/iRacing) that the reason these games are superior is directly as a result of being on PC, but that doesn't change the fact, I think PD could have made so much of a better game if they released on PS4.

 

[TheeFrogmanlego]

As for the duplicates, you have a point that PD go for quantity over quality and they do miss out on a lot of relevant cars while boasting their numbers that is largely made up of the same car. At the same time though there is satisfaction to be had knowing you can get the exact year/model of car that you may own in real life, or perhaps your dad owned it. I'm sure Kaz sees it as more of a catalogue or library of cars, he's interested in the complete history of certain cars being available and I'm sure if he had the time/money/licences to do it then he would do it with every car. I'm very disapointed we got no Mclaren P1 or LaFerrari. Concerning those I'm also disapointed there is no Mclaren MP4-12c GT3 car, just as I'm disapointed in no Ferrari 355 or F50.


You mention in your blog relating to other quality racing games that"Graphically those games tend to be a lot weaker"

Rfactor 2 - Since the graphical update is leaps and bounds ahead of GT5/6, go see for yourself.
iRacing - Again if you set aside the car modelling the rest of the graphics in the game are leagues ahead of GT5
Project CARS - You mention this but the game is still in development, but graphically once released it will be the highest quality racing game graphically ever released, though infact it already is.

GT5/6 has great car modelling, and looks good in the pre-rendered promotional shots released but gameplay graphics do not compare with those above examples. If you ran them side by side the clarity in resolution alone makes the GT/Forza games look like blurry jaggy messes. You could say (especially with RF2/iRacing) that the reason these games are superior is directly as a result of being on PC, but that doesn't change the fact, I think PD could have made so much of a better game if they released on PS4.

They would be releasing another gt3... they need to rectify the mess they made with five so the fan base can take the brunt of a smaller track list and car list. by the time we see seven on the ps4 I'm expecting 500 cars. premiums are future proof.. nothing higher res textures cant do..

 

[Bigbazz]

They would be releasing another gt3... they need to rectify the mes they made with fivem so teh fan base can take teh brunt of a smaller track list and car list. by the time we see seven on the ps4 I'm expecting 500 cars. premiums are future proof.. nothing higher res textures cant do..

The cars/tracks from GT5 (the new additions/premiums) aswell as the new tracks/cars in GT6 are all modelled with more then enough quality to be put on the PS4. GT5 used a couple of touched up GT4 track conversions aswell as the massive list of standards... I agree that the standards cause an issue, but the rest is fine on the PS4. Since GT5 released pretty much the general idea was "damn imagine if this had been released on PC, how good it would look".

GT6 could easily be put to the PS4 and look amazing because of it, quality of the modelling is awesome, it's just being held back by being on PS3.

 

[RandomCarGuy17]

You consolidated it too much. The duplicate number in GT5 sat in the 150 range, excluding most race cars. While that number has gone up quite a bit with the GT6 list, it's still not anywhere near 800 duplicates.

Agreed.

 

[jlb]

I truly think the reason there so many crapy Japanese road cloggers is b/c they ok boys we need to get the # of cars up so they went outside and started modeling cars in the parking lot it dont bother me my complaint is if 1995 skyline is a premium car y can't the 96,94,95 vspec... I bet in real life they all have the same interior

 

[LeGeNd-1]

I did something similar when GT5 came out and did get a number close to 400 unique models, so 500 would probably be about right for GT6. Still gives the same message though.

What PD could do with these duplicates is to add them as an accessory option when you buy the vehicles. So for example you buy a base 1st gen Miata, you could choose the engine type, body colour, rims, roof colour, steering wheel position and interior colour combinations based on the different trim models. With race cars you have the base model with no livery, and the other liveries can be selected as colour choices, not separate models. This way the car count is not artificially bloated, the dealerships look much neater and the car buying process feels more immersive because you finally have the 'customization' aspect everyone been asking for.

I should go to Japan and be Kaz's advisor lol.

 

[Sage Ages]

Technically, the only duplicates are the region vehicles and the specially optioned/colored vehicles. If you do try multiple variants of a certain car, you will noticed some differences (especially against another variant of that model).

 

[SlipZtrEm]

You consolidated it too much. The duplicate number in GT5 sat in the 150 range, excluding most race cars. While that number has gone up quite a bit with the GT6 list, it's still not anywhere near 800 duplicates.

What T said. While the amount of dupes (or made-up cars, or pretty-much identicals, or standards with Premo equivalents) in GT6 is higher than most games' entire car lists, this number smells off too much eagerness to cut. I'm a critic of the number-padding as well, and did an Excel chart back around GT5's release of what I thought was an acceptable "rationalized" list, and it was probably hovering around 650-700. GT6 wouldn't add much more to that (probably under 100), but that's still nearly double what you got.

Very in-depth reasoning, though!

 

[Wardez]

This is why they should rather say GT6 has 1,200 (or whatever the final number is) car variants, and whatever amount of root car models. I think everyone can reach a compromise and be happy with that.

All it takes is tweaking the presentation. Instead of just listing out every model Miata trim as a separate car, just list them by generation. So you'll have Miata MX-5 NA, NB, then NC in the main menu, then, by selecting each one, it'll bring you into a sub-menu where you can select from various types or trims. Make it more like building a new car online rather than some huge wharehouse dealership of cars of every single type just laid out.

This is important because it'll make people feel like PD isn't trying to "get away with it," as much.

 

[ironman44321]

That is...awful logic...

 

[SlipZtrEm]

This is why they should rather say GT6 has 1,200 car variants, and whatever amount of root car models. I think everyone can reach a compromise and be happy with that.

All it takes is tweaking the presentation. Instead of just listing out every model Miata trim as a separate car, just list them by generation. So you'll have Miata MX-5 NA, NB, then NA in the main menu, then, by selecting each one, it'll bring you into a sub-menu where you can select from various types or trims. Make it more like building a new car online rather than some huge wharehouse dealership of cars of every single type just laid out.

I can't wait for the day any of the big games take this approach. Let us build the car just as we would from the company's website configurator; it'll be an awesome experience.

 

[fw190a8]

Thanks for the feedback. Some interesting responses. Firstly, the title of the forum post was slightly provocative on purpose to promote some discussion, and secondly, this forum was likely to produce the harshest critics!

What I find interesting about the responses I've read above is that lots of people say "you have consolidated/cut down the list too much" or "it doesn't feel right to have lost that many cars", I can't see that anybody has pointed out any specific examples of over-consolidation. Something like "your entire article is of questionable accuracy" only becomes useful when a "because" is added!

So I justified this with "434 distinct individual cars that are not just re-skins of the same car, or the same car with a slight difference (1.5-litre instead of 1.3-litre)." I was careful not to say duplicates, so it's interesting people have interpreted it that way.

I like Bigbazz's point about having such a huge "library" of cars so that you're more likely to find the specific car your dad might have owned while growing up. Unfortunately, because there's a 2-in-3 chance it'll be low-poly, low-quality in GT6, I think it might ruin my memories, rather than make them fonder! (Although this might not be the same for everybody).

Also Bigbazz touched upon rFactor 2 actually looking better than GT5 these days. I suppose I didn't think I could justify the space in the article, but with rFactor 2, it might well be that the "official" cars and tracks look pretty good, but the user-made ones are generally pretty poor in my experience, so the "overall quality" in my mind is a conglomeration of the official and fan-made, which might not be objective enough.

One final point I left out of the article because I didn't have the data to justify it: how many of the 1197 vehicles have close to realistic physics? It seems hard to imagine that it's possible to accurately model the differences in handling and response between a 2005 Suzuki Swift and a 2007 model. Was each model dismantled in order to determine things like chassis rigidity, or driven hard to measure things like torque steer? Genuine questions, as I don't know!

Do those two cars just handle in the same way, and look the same? If that's the case, then are they really two cars, or would it be better, like Wardez suggests, to just have a "Suzuki Swift" and then you can pick the year. But then if they are exactly the same, why not put in Suzuki Swifts from 2004, 2006, 2008, etc since these are all the same platform with minimal differences?

Also would anyone seriously consider buying a game that contained only 81 Skylines, if there was an equivalent game right next to it on the shelf that had 81 cars, all from various manufacturers?

 

[Tornado]

What I find interesting about the responses I've read above is that lots of people say "you have consolidated/cut down the list too much" or "it doesn't feel right to have lost that many cars", I can't see that anybody has pointed out any specific examples of over-consolidation.

Okay then:

Again, we’re left with 26 Nissan Skyline R34s. That’s 26 cars that are pretty much identical to one another, except for minor variations in year, engine size, and insignificant other details.

You took every R34 Skyline and claimed they are identical enough to not count separately for the purposes of your list; meaning everything from this (an actual duplicate):

To this:

This:

All the way to this:

Don't count as separate because they are all R34 Skylines. Hundreds of horsepower separate the first two examples alone (though the fact that PD made up the second does complicate the matter), but that still makes them pretty much identical?



A similar thing happens when you looked at the Miatas, since even though there are really only 6 distinct Miatas out of the 34, you still ended up choosing two examples to compare that actually are distinct from each other (if not all the others) to show how they are all close enough to the same. There almost certainly are duplicates in the Skyline list aside from the two Midnight Purple R34s. When I put my list together (which is outdated because it is missing some Miatas), I didn't include nearly any of them because I didn't know (even though I assumed they weren't because I see no justification) if any of the various year to year Skylines were warranted when people swear up and down their are apparently differences. You list throws out cars on the basis of their name and leaves it at that.

If you want the tl;dr version, you made this list by looking at car names and prejudging them on that rather than actually taking the time to determine what actually constitutes a unique car. That is why your list is so heavily flawed.

So I justified this with "434 distinct individual cars that are not just re-skins of the same car, or the same car with a slight difference (1.5-litre instead of 1.3-litre)." I was careful not to say duplicates, so it's interesting people have interpreted it that way.

You said unique. If it's not unique, then it is a duplicate of something else already in the game; and clear performance differences would make a car unique even though for the purposes of your chart you didn't count it as such.

 

[fw190a8]

You raise a good point that the road-going R34s are different enough to drive from the race spec versions that they shouldn't be grouped in that way. That's a pretty clear-cut example but not all of them are so I suppose you would need to know a lot about the way each individual vehicle handles before you could say for sure, which is information I won't have.

Perhaps it might be nice to work on refining the list a little bit then. What would you suggest using to determine whether a car is sufficiently different from another car though, especially in the grey areas?

Can you elaborate on the Miata situation? They're all MX-5s, from what I can tell. Is one MX-5 set up differently enough from another MX-5 that they will provide a significantly different feel to drive? iRacing, for example, provides two variants on the MX-5. One is a 6-speed cup model and the other is a 5-speed roadster, but to drive, they respond and feel so similar that there's virtually no difference at all.

I think perhaps "unique" was the wrong word to use in my first post here. I was more careful selecting words in my article. It does just come down to semantics though. People took "unique types" to mean something different, whereas I was proposing "so similar that there is no significant difference in driving experience". A Suzuki Swift 2005 is not a duplicate of a Suzuki Swift 2007: one was made in 2005 and one was made in 2007. For the purposes of the discussion in the article though, if they look the same, drive the same, and their physics is handled the game by the game underneath, they're not unique types (or whatever words you'd care to choose).

 

[eran0004]

Look, there is a difference between car, make, model, version and generation.
When you talk about cars you actually mean models. The 2005 and 2007 Swift are the same model, but not the same version. They're definitely not the same car.

The Mazda MX-5's are the same model, but different versions. There are also different generations (3 if I remember correctly). Not the same car.

There are not 1200 models in GT6, but certainly 1200 cars*.

* Well, 1196 or whatever the current count is at

 

[Streeto]

Haha...

 

[avens]

Whichever method used to trim the list down, what's great is the fact people are (finally) releasing PD artificially increases the car count. That's proper consumer advice.

I think the best method to use is the one used in other games, so all of the same genre can be compared. From what I understand PD is the only company that for each skyline it numbers several dozens with little to no differences, while the rest calls that car to be only 1 for each generation.

Also, if I were to make the list I would simply not count all standard cars. 2004 content in a 2013 game simply doesn't count. That trims the list down quite a bit, for example GT5 lists about 30 S2000s and with that change it would be just one, like all other games do with that car, or at most three with the two modified versions. Of the latter it is debatable if they count or not, since it isn't a whole different car by any means (lets say a Veyron) and certainly the job didn't include modelling the car from scratch (this probably is the reason why in GT5 there are cars that use the exact same sound samples as others).

 

[fw190a8]

The 2005 and 2007 Swift are the same model, but not the same version. They're definitely not the same car.

Question here is this: if I give you a go in one of these cars, and don't tell you which, and put you in nose cam, could you tell the two apart from the way that they drive? I don't believe it's possible. The car physics, if at all different, would be so similar as to make them virtually identical in all but name.

So yes, there are two individual cars there in name, but one is a copy of the other. If I buy a Kit Kat today, and one tomorrow, then I have two chocolate bars. I don't have two unique types of chocolate bar, even though they are different bars.

As a side note I'd be genuinely interested if anyone can point me to anything to demonstrate that these two cars have been modelled differently to the point where you can feel the difference while driving them!

 

[CAMAROBOY69]

If GT allowed drivetrain swaps and vinyl editors, they would not need all the duplicate cars. Not trying to be a jerk about it, but its honestly the truth. There are indeed a LOT of duplicate cars that could have been consolidated into a couple cars with purchasable upgrades. But if that happened then there wouldn't be the bragging rights of 1,200+ cars.

 

[Spektru]

GT6 does not have 434 cars, it has over 1200 cars.

 

[lazywolfe]

I wouldn't even mind if 434~ or 850~ was the real advertised number, as long as the car selection was decent.
I think they do better by highlighting the car makes in the game, rather than the outright number.

 

[snowgt]

For me, there's 2 definition of "duplicates" in GT5. Whichever definition you prefer, each has a point.

1) Cars have identical specs (power, weight, torque, downforce, etc.), behaviour and exterior.
2) Cars do not have identical looks, but are completely the same internally.

You can find lots of examples for 1). There's even different model years that seem to be identical like the Civic SiR's from '92-'95.

An example of slightly different cars from their exterior only are the three Hyundais from '01. They are actually identical performance-wise, but they have different rear wings as they were sold in their regions. Another example would be the Ferrari SP1. It's a F430 inside and behaves like identical to one. Should it be counted? You be the judge.

An example of seemingly identical cars, which are not the same is the myriad of Honda NSX's. The ever-so-slight changes over the years actually do make tiny differences in performance. Different power-curves, different gearing, it's very subtle and hard to notice. (To be fair, there's 2 or 3 identical ones between them though)

Also, the two Suzuki Swifts are actually different. Of course you might not feel the difference when driving them without knowing which one you're in, but the fact remains that the older one is actually a fraction faster. However, that does not mean it makes sense to include them both in a game like this and counting them as two separate cars. I totally agree with you on that.

Another question would be, if you should count the same car from different manufacturers (which are really the same).
Nissan = Infiniti, Lexus = Toyota = Scion, Opel = Vauxhall, Honda = Acura. As long as the cars are actually different as per definition 1), I don't have a problem with it, but if it's just the badge that's different...

It all comes down to mixing the three available regional variations (JP, EU, US) together for the PSP version. Most of the duplicates were created then and there and unfortunately carried over ever since.

 

[goukipau]

So I did a bit of analysis on the car list, and came up with 434 as the number of unique types of car in GT6. I wrote a fairly detailed post explaining my thinking on this. Feedback is welcome on this as well, because I'm very much of the opinion that the number of cars doesn't matter as much as the quality of the gameplay.

I like this article, merely because of the pointing to the game creator, that they don't have a number of 1000+ cars in this game, but way too many duplicates. Maybe not all cars you described are duplicates, but overal Good job.

 

[GTPorsche]

Let me point out that he's counted all the R8s as being duplicates to each other. That includes the street car, the R8 LMS race car, and the car that only shares it's name with them, the R8 LMP.

Name does not equal duplicate.

 

[eran0004]

Question here is this: if I give you a go in one of these cars, and don't tell you which, and put you in nose cam, could you tell the two apart from the way that they drive? I don't believe it's possible. The car physics, if at all different, would be so similar as to make them virtually identical in all but name.

So yes, there are two individual cars there in name, but one is a copy of the other. If I buy a Kit Kat today, and one tomorrow, then I have two chocolate bars. I don't have two unique types of chocolate bar, even though they are different bars.

As a side note I'd be genuinely interested if anyone can point me to anything to demonstrate that these two cars have been modelled differently to the point where you can feel the difference while driving them!

That just tells you that the cars are identical in handling, not that they are the same car.

And even if we were to go by your standards, what is your opinion about the rear wheel drive R32 Skyline? Is it a duplicate of the 4WD R32 Skylines?