GT7 to be announced at E3? ... standard cars return! (Poll)

Better... quality? The lack of the burden of having to decide how to continue selling their standard assets. Just a thought.

I think anyone with standards would be laughing, especially when it's placed alongside its competitors like AC or pCARS.

I would think that at least Kaz would be embarrassed by it, seeing as how he's the one who built up the hype regarding GT5's beautiful graphics that would push the PS3 beyond its capabilities, and yet has the audacity to place PS2 assets in a PS3 game.

 

....Waaaay too many.

 

Gran Turismo 4 - Latest Impressions

Now Google isn't being friendly on this point, but the reason the "vehicle encyclopedia or virtual museum" was mentioned is because in the many months we waited for GT4 to arrive, this is how Kaz spoke of what he envisioned for the game. He talked at length of how he wanted GT4 to have sections of car history like a museum that we strolled through to open different areas up with associated events. I was so captivated with all the articles and interviews that when I fired it up for the first time - after driving like a maniac to the GameStop to get a box with a disc inside it! - I stared at the GT Mode menu screen for quite some time, wondering just what my experience was going to be. It ended up way short of how he wanted GT4 to be, but I still get a thrill when I think of those early days in the game.

If you say so, but supposedly this was going to be GT5's fate. And yet, it's the second highest selling racing game on Amazon US's Top 100 PS3 games, beaten only by GT6. So the top two PS3 racing games on Amazon are both Gran Turismos, go figure. Or were, as I noticed that today, the latest Midnight Club finally surpassed GT5 XL to the 70th spot, GT5 dropping to 93.

And keep in mind that America is responsible for about one third of Gran Turismo's total sales, most of them going to Europe, so this "laughing stock" game may well have topped 11 million sales by now. And is obviously still selling for whatever reason. Maybe the Course Maker.

As opposed to me... what? Saying I think people who want Preemium cars are wrong? Care to review what I'm actually saying?

Secondly, you mean "us," don't you? In case it's escaped your notice, better than one-third of those participating in the poll want those Standard cars in GT7. Tracks too. I'm also not the only one in this thread stating they want them to return, even though I seem to be the GT Planet lightning rod for a number of controversies. I guess it's fun being me.

 

I mean exactly what HD means: Rendered at 1920x1080 resolution.

 

I don't think that the presence of standards are much of a burden, nor do I think Kaz has any reason to be embarrased by them. They're a bit ugly in comparison to the Premium cars, but that's because they're old. Saying he ought to be embarrased by them is like saying he ought to be embarrased by GT1/2 because of how horrible they look compared to modern graphics.

Ultimately, I feel that drastically minimizing the visibility of standard cars to where they only show up if a player actively chooses for them to is an acceptable compromise and would give everybody what they want. And if we don't see eye to eye on that, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

And now I'd like to know what you mean by "rendered." Where/how did you see a PS1 game running in 1080p?

It's nothing like saying that, actually. GT1 and GT2 released when they did on the system they released on. They didn't release in 2015 as a flagship PS3/PS4 game.

 

By "rendered" I mean that the frames of the game were rendered at 1080p then displayed at 1080p without any upscaling. All made possible with emulators.

And a 2015 flagship though it may be, that doesn't make them 2015 assets. If standard cars were the product of Polyphony creating all-new models for their PS3 iterations, then yeah... they'd be one hell of an embarassment. But they're old assets, they're nothing to be embarrased about. They could've just as easily opted to leave them out to avoid any controversy, but instead they're PROUD of their old PS2 assets... enough that they decided it was worth including them anyway.

 

Oh. So you're aware of what one of the better looking PSX games (R4, GT2, TOCA World Touring Cars) looks like when rendered at a substantially higher resolution, but are simply stating incorrect information regardless?

You're being pretty transparent in how you're moving the goalposts here. The date the actual game is released is the important part, which is why your argument isn't comparable. GT1 was released in 1997. GT2 was released in 1999. That makes them perfectly normal to look like a PSX title.

A handful of them were. In fact, even going into GT6, some of the Standard cars they upgraded they made substantial modifications to (possibly to the extent of completely remodeling them) but still ended up with something nowhere near the things like the Ruf models.

 

What information am I stating that's incorrect? That PS1 games don't benefit nearly as much from increased resolution as PS2 games do? I'm sorry, but that is NOT incorrect.

Polygons are 3D vector graphics. Vector graphics are resolution-independent, which means they are smooth even if you increase the resolution. But that applies to the edges of the polygons... 3D models will still look blocky if they're low-poly, they'll just be blocks with super-crisp edges. And how blocky/polygonal a model looks is determined by how many polygons are used and how large it's being rendered (i.e. how close to the camera it is & how big the display physically is), so since PS2 models have many times more polygons, they can get closer to the camera than PS1 models can without revealing their individual polys.

Basically, you render a pentagon at 1080p and try to pass it off as round... it won't work nearly as well as tridecagon would. It's only logical that the more polygons your models have, the more they benefit overall from the fact that polygons are resolution-independent.

I've played GT2 at 1080p. It looked sharper, sure, but there was no additional detail being made apparent by the increased resolution. SD was sufficient for the level of detail on display. But then you take a PS2 game like Final Fantasy XII, and all of a sudden you're seeing intricate details of things in HD that were previously only indistinct blobs of pixels in SD.

I'm not moving goalposts. I think that whether the quality of an asset is embarrasing or not is based on the time the asset was created. If Standards were called "Retro" models and had to be explicity enabled in an options menu via an "Enable Retro Graphics" checkbox, would their presence on the PS3 still be embarrassing? What if the retro models weren't even on the disc, but were either on a separate disc (a la Forza) or available as an optional download? What if there were no standard or "Retro" models, but a fully playable version of GT4 was hidden in GT5/6 as an unlockable, would that be embarrassing? Where do you draw the line?

 

Sorry I'm not buying it (yet), seeing as Kaz himself never actually said anything in this particular article about his game being a car encyclopedia or anything to that effect. All mentions about an encyclopedia/car museum were made by the author.

Now to be fair, I was still a dumb little kid during the days of GT4, so I can't judge whether Kaz did suggest that in other articles/interviews and the lot. But okay, I'll grant you that. Let's say that PD's goal is indeed to create a car encyclopedia above all. What's wrong with an encyclopedia full of Premium cars only? Last I checked the Premium car list is quite extensive on its own, and certainly doesn't give off the same copy and pasted (and erred) impression as the Standard car list. How will their goal of a car encyclopedia fit in with Kaz's constant bragging about how beautiful his game is when most of their encyclopedia is filled with PS2 assets? Certainly, good graphics in GT has been a goal for PD.

Given that the vast majority of GT5's advertising (save for the one ad that I'm aware of) diverted attention away or completely veiled the existence of the Standard cars in the game, I'd say that GT5's sales figures are rather irrelevant for determining people's views on Standard cars. This thread, on the other hand, while not a gauge of whether they think a PS4 GT with Standard cars would be a laughing stock or not, is quite telling of people's satisfaction with such an idea. Bearing in mind that this was polled in a GT centric website too.

The fact that you describe those arguing against Standards cars as people who "carry on as if people wanting Standards are wrong, and the Standard haters are right" only leads me to think that you are someone who is just as intolerant to opposing views as the people you are describing.

 

I voted no because GT should be a showcase of what the console can do, instead of the ps3 versions, which were hugely inconsistent and full of problems. Surely Sony should be pushing PD to focus on delivering a solid, high quality title, and not an inconsistent mess of content from 3 generations of console.

 

I'd be happy with all cars and tracks rendered in Lego (1/18th scale).

Would rather PD spent time on things like improved AI, improved sounds, course creation, car creator, open world play etc. It would be much faster to implement with Lego.



Gameplay > graphics

 

AI and sound improvements are a must for obvious reasons. Like I said, they should be making a solid, high quality game so Sony can push it in everyone's faces and say "Look what the PS4 can do!", isn't that the point of first party devs?

IMO GT5 and 6 failed to have this affect because there were far too many inconsistencies and bugs. People would just say "but most of the cars are rubbish looking ps2 cars" and "The sound and AI is total ****". Some of the cars were very pretty for a ps3 game, but then most were far below par. The way they started from scratch with GT3 is the best direction IMO. GT3 really felt like a world class, standard setting game. The jump from 2 to 3 was enormous in physics and graphics, and really made you feel like you were playing a 'next gen' game.

PD really need to produce a solid and consistent game that shows what the ps4 is capable of. That is the point of their whole existence to Sony.

 

We could start here:

All along that thing on the door that said "FDHGSDFHSA" and "FGDFHS" actually said "MAZDASPEED" and "Castrol"




ASGSWERWHSFD
GDSFHGSDFH

or

INTERSTATE
BATTERIES

And NFL.
And Wards.
And MBNA.

Those are both just upping the internal resolution. No faked hi-res texture filtering.



Then we can move onto this:

SD maybe was sufficient for the level of detail on display, but PSX games very rarely actually ran at SD. Even before the PS2 launched, Bleemcast! showed how much better the handful of games that were officially shown for it looked at a higher resolution with texture smoothing. That was pretty much half the selling point, since it did a much better job at improving PSX titles' graphically than the PS2 did with its smoothing option that seemed to essentially be applying bilinear filtering on the game at the same resolution it originally had.


And here:

You mean like the logo textures obscured into big bags of random pixels above? PD and EA and Codemasters and Namco put an awful lot of detail into their textures and models for late generation PSX games that still all ran at 240p through S-Video at best.

How many Standard cars have details in GT5 that you couldn't see in GT4 Photo Travel, by the way? How will they benefit even more in a PS4 game, when the graphical standards will be even higher than they were when the Standards arrived on the scene 5 years ago but the actual resolution of the game will be only slightly higher?


Going back to this one:

GT1 and GT2 cars ported to GT3, on the GT3 game engine (with it's lighting and effects and higher resolution), still would have looked quite a bit better than almost any PS2 racing game released up to that point. The examples above are just a hackish resolution scale on a PSX emulator, and already the cars have more details visible than if they were played on a PSX/PS2/PS3. If those cars were actually running on a game engine designed for a higher resolution on a system more powerful than the PSX, they would look better still. That's also assuming that the PSX assets as they appeared in the game were the maximum quality that they had been designed at. And still the only PS2 game I can think of that would have been definitely better looking than a GT3 loaded up with GT2 assets would have been Xtreme Racer Zero, which barely counts because it was port of a game originally designed for the Dreamcast.

In fact, that's essentially what GT2000 was (nevermind all of the early PS2 titles that actually released in that state, like RC Revenge Pro), if you look closely at the screenshots and videos of the cars in it (albeit looking like it switched to normal texture rendering instead of the sprite hybrid thing GT1/GT2 used); and that was basically treated like some sort of graphics messiah all the way up to when it was dropped and GT3 proper was announced. So clearly the option was on the table, and had they gone through with it the results wouldn't have been as extreme as they were with the PS2 -> PS3 jump.
So where's the part about the later years PSX graphical assets being unsuitable for usage in future generations that is so obvious? If it's so obvious why PSX assets PD made never survived past the PSX, why does the logic also not apply to the PS2-quality Standard cars that are even further away graphically at this point than the PSX ones at their equivalent time? Because the simple fact that they didn't do it then but seem to want to do it in perpetuity now isn't really proof of anything other than PD's changing priorities.

Yes you are. You're bringing up games that were released in 1997/1999, using graphical assets that were fairly close to top of the heap at the time they released, as a comparison point to a theoretical game being released in the next couple years over a decade and a half after some of the graphical assets in it were designed. Kaz has no reason to be embarrassed by the games he made that were released in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2004 because they were all top of the heap, graphically elite titles that perfectly matched all of the statements that he made about them being so graphically elite compared to their contemporaries.
GT5 wasn't, but was constantly paraded around as if it was. GT6 wasn't. GT7, if it includes Standard cars by any measure other than maybe "They are all Premiums except they don't have interiors", won't be. But Kaz will most certainly talk about the game as if it is anyway.

 

Okay, maybe I should've been clearer. I was pretty much strictly referring to polygonal detail. I'm not concerned about textures, nor should you since textures are the easiest upgrade that could be made to make standard cars look better. It's the polygonal detail that we're worried about, no?

And the "doesn't do them any favors" was obviously a hyperbole, meaning that it doesn't do them much favors. Some PS1 era games arguably look worse when the polys are sharper than they were intended to be, FF7 comes to mind... super sharp polys on top of pixellated pre-rendered back drops is visually inconsistent and jarring enough, plus it also draws extra attention to just how ugly the models are in that game.

If I weren't in the middle of the ocean, I'd make and post some comparison pics to show you what I mean. The difference between a high-detail PS2 game like FFXII running in native vs running in HD is far bigger than a high-detail PS1 game like GT2 running in native vs running in HD.