Great work on the interview to the staff from GTP, I'm gonna have a little rant at some of the BS Kaz says though.
Online only single player is still daft and Kaz provides no good reasons why it should be so.
“One reason is to avoid people from modifying and cheating with the save data for the game,” Yamauchi explained.
Nope, it's single player. If people want to mod or cheat they're not hurting anyone but themselves. I see no reason why it's desirable to prevent people from modding or cheating an entirely single player portion of the game in the first place, and no reason why you would hamper the experience for anyone who might have a net outage for the sake of sticking it to a few people who want to mess around with the game that they paid money for and are playing all by themselves.
“Another aspect is for the liveries. Livery data is downloaded from the servers even when you’re playing offline. So, an online connection is something that is needed pretty much throughout the game.
Right, because I'm sure that the single player is unplayable without up to date livery downloads from the server. Just have a base set of liveries that comes with the game that is the default if an online connection isn't available.
One part of the game that doesn’t require any online connection is the Arcade Mode, because there’s no interaction with the save data and there are no liveries involved, so it doesn’t require a network connection to do that.”
Look at Mr. Generosity here, you can play Arcade mode that doesn't save. If you wanted to play the single player, tough.
Yamauchi did note, however, that these dynamic environmental features will not be available on all tracks in the game.
Oh good, we have premium and standard tracks again. Polyphony - if you're going to include a feature then include it properly. You have the resources and money, we know you do.
“The Performance Point calculation that we have in GT7 is totally different from what we had in the past. Before it was calculated by a sort of magic formula, but in Gran Turismo 7, the system is simulation-based. If the user tweaks a certain setting in a certain way, internally the system will actually run your car with those settings on an imaginary track to produce the real Performance Point value. It will be much more exact than what we had in the past,” he explained.
Lol that Kaz doesn't understand that what he's describing is a glorified magic formula.
“This rendition of Gran Turismo isn’t just about winning a race, getting the credits, winning another race, and so on. In GT7 the collection of cars is actually one of the big objectives. Of course, it’s still important to win races, but collecting some of these cars is one of the important elements in the game’s design,” said Yamauchi.
This concerns me. The collection aspect of Gran Turismo has always been fun, but it's not exactly gameplay in and of itself. It's a nice little self-directed goal for those who enjoy that sort of thing. If collecting cars becomes an explicit objective, I think that actually takes away from some of the natural pleasure of collecting.
To be clear, I like the car museum and history aspects, but I'm not sure I like forcing collecting as a gameplay mode. I hope I'm wrong and they do something with it that's really engaging, but I fear that it will be something silly like locking you out of parts of the career until you've collected X amount of cars.
In the previous titles of Gran Turismo, you could probably purchase 10 cars and complete the game with them.
Has Kaz like, played his own games? This is an insane thing to say. I'm not sure if you can complete GT1 with only 10 cars. You can probably get away with only purchasing 10 cars and using those plus whatever prize cars you get, but that's a lot more than 10 cars you're experiencing then.
Having said all of that, Yamauchi acknowledged how that might come across to franchise’s long-term, hard-core fans, and directly acknowledged recent criticisms. “Some of the core users of Gran Turismo might feel a lot of this stuff that’s appearing in the game to be kind of redundant and explaining too much. There will be characters appearing in car dealerships, in the tuning shops, and at the races, explaining all these different things to them, and I’m sure some of them will be like ‘Oh, just skip all this, we don’t need this’.
“But I want them to kind of remember the feeling they had when they first started playing these games, when they first discovered all of these things for themselves, and imagine how this will get across to the new generation.”
So he recognises that there's a potential issue for long time supporters of his games, but instead of using good design to address this in some way his solution is "hey, just put up with it and think about the people who
are enjoying this piece of the game that frustrates you"? Dude, that's not how you have respect for your players.
www.gtplanet.net
