G4TV released a new Gran Turismo 5 preview yesterday and aside from more car porn, a few interesting tidbits pertaining to NASCAR could be seen for a few seconds. We spotted five items worth noting in the screenshot below;
1. While we’ve seen a lot of NASCAR footage in GT5 previews, and we’ve heard a lot as well, it appears we’ll only get to race 8 cars per race. While the game can run “up to” 16 cars a race, that doesn’t appear to apply to NASCAR.
2. The attention to detail. We know Polyphony Digital are perfectionists, but this is some insane stuff. Here you see the Target decals on the pillar, exactly where it is in real life. We can’t wait to get this game in-house and have a full look around the cockpit.
3. Mirrors are an interesting feature in racing games. You’re essentially rendering the game from a different perspective in real-time while the player races. Here we see both the main rear-view mirror and the side mirror many drivers rely on due to the constraints of their racing seats. And of course everything in the mirrors is rather detailed.
4. It may be hard to see but it appears to be the right hand of the driver. Now, drivers are nothing new in Gran Turismo but it’s the small things that add up to make a great experience. Last we checked, however, all drivers in-game will be GT branded.
5. We’re not sure how old the G4TV preview build was but it appears Polyphony Digital still has a bit of tweaking to do if they want to get it absolutely right. Here you can see the lap time is a 47:700, which is about 1.675 seconds faster than the pole speed set by Juan Pablo Montoya at Indy a few weeks ago. Granted, the game still has a few months before it ships, but it’ll be interesting to see if PD fixes this or not.
That all said, and we don’t mean to throw EA under the bus here, but this could very well be the best NASCAR game to come along for fans in years, and that’s saying a lot considering this isn’t a full-fledged NASCAR game. While 8 cars on track seems a bit low, we’ve also been promised heavy damaging to these cars so it would make sense that the developers needed to limited what was on screen. Whether these are the final numbers, only PD know, so we’ll have to wait until November 2nd to find out.
. And of course, Kotaku doing his best with any PS3 exclusive....
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