A recent interview with Polyphony Digital president Kazunori Yamauchi hosted by Sony Computer Entertainment's PS World Japanese website reveals a few new bits of information regarding Gran Turismo 4 and Gran Turismo 4 Mobile.
First up, the state of GT4. When asked about the development status of GT4, Yamauchi responds that the basic essentials of the game are finished, and from now the team has to work on the "makeup" for the areas that your eyes will see.
When asked about the state of the game's courses and cars, Yamauchi responds that Polyphony plans on continuing to unveil new courses for the game, finishing up work on the courses as they announce them. The same holds true for the game's cars. The team plans to include as many cards as possible given their scheduling limitations. Yamauchi makes mention of the quality of the cars and rival AI as areas that players shouldn't worry too much about.
When asked to give a direct percentage for the game's completion level, Yamauchi states, after a bit of explanation about how difficult it is to give a completion percentage, that 75% is a good number. "As a driving simulator, [the game] is already done," Yamauchi states. "Now, we are doing work on how to make it into a game... entertainment." Yamauchi states that the release will take place this year.
Moving onto the PSP entry in the series, Yamauchi states with a smile, "There are still some things that can't be spoken about." He continues (perhaps without a smile), "Currently, we're at a test point where we're seeing what we can do with the PSP, and what is best added or removed to achieve GT4 on the PSP. Because of this, I cannot yet speak concretely." He does offer some areas of assurance for PSP owners, though. "As far as volume is concerned, because we're using the GT4 name, we're of course envisioning the same level of volume as the PS2 GT4."
Going on to suggest that the PSP and PS2 versions of the game may end up being very close to one another, Yamauchi states, "The PSP is a portable game machine, so many think that it can be used to play simple games. Say whatever you will, it's a new generation of portable hardware, with performance that lines up with the PS2. Therefore, software development takes quite a bit of work. If you don't give it your all when making games, producing something good is difficult. Because of that, given that we're already making the GT4 systems on the PS2 hardware, we'll likely end up [making GT4 Moblie] by porting those systems to the PSP."
We hope to get a chance to see more of GT4 and GT4 Mobile at the coming Tokyo Game Show, set to kick off at the end of September in Japan.
Hmm, I wonder what Kaz means by make up. Does he mean, the look of the game will be tweaked until released? And what does Kaz mean by, it's already a driving sim, but it needs to become a game?
Thankyou for schooling me. I should have remembered or at least tried to look it up first, oh well looks good.
