Since Gran Turismo 5's release late last month, Polyphony Digital president Kazunori Yamauchi has been briefing us on update plans via his Twitter. In this week's Famitsu, Yamauchi appears in a more formal space to give some hints as to what car fans can expect in the near future.
December 7 saw the game's third update. As previously mentioned by Yamauchi via Twitter, the game will see another update later this month. Yamauchi believes it would be good to have one update every month, although he didn't go so far as to actually set this schedule in stone.
The late December update will be a major one, said Yamauchi. He listed a few region specific additions. America-based players can look forward to the start of GT Academy (detailed here) beginning with online time trial rankings. Europe-base players can look forward to an online tournament called SLS Challenge where the winner will receive an actual Mercedes SLS AMG (yikes!).
Famitsu asked Yamauchi is we can expect new cars, courses and photo mode locations as download content. Cars and courses are difficult to make, explained Yamauchi, and thus can't be added in the same amount of time it takes to do a bug fix or event update. "They may be added as expansion content, or we may leave it until the next title."
The same holds true for course maker locations. "We'd like to add these, however, I'm not sure at present if this will come as an update or as content for the next title."
One thing Yamauchi would say with conviction is that Gran Turismo 5 will have online races for B Spec mode. He wouldn't give an exact time frame, but said that this is something he's personally wanted to do.
Yamauchi mentioned "next title" in his comments, prompting Famitsu to ask him if he has a framework in mind for the next entry in the series. "No, no... it's the future, so I still don't know. If this were ten years back, it was relatively easy to predict what things would be like in three years, but now it's pretty much impossible to predict three years into the future. Even if I were to say 'The next title will be like this,' three years later it would end up being completely different.
Famitsu's interview with Yamauchi provided a full look at all areas of the game, touching on things Yamauchi regrets and his thoughts on the game's initial sales. Along the way, Yamauchi provided some additional hints about some of the updates we can expect in the future.
He said that they'd like to make it so that you'll be able to use the courses you made in the game's course maker mode in online races. This is something that he hopes to implement soon.
Famitsu also asked if plans are in place to redo the game's low fidelity "standard car" models as higher quality "premium car" models. Yamauchi responded in the affirmative. "Among the standard cars are some historical classics, and we plan on remaking them as premium cars. There are currently some cars that have both standard and premium versions. Those are cases where the cars were remade."
Yamauchi did not share a time frame for the changes. Unfortunately, Famitsu failed to ask the magic question: are we going to have to pay for the extra polygons?
Famitsu will be posting an expanded version of the Yamauchi at Famitsu.com shortly, so car fans should get their (translation) engines ready.
