Well after reading through a ton of posts i decided finally to make one myself...The reason is that i feel very disappointed about the direction i see GT5 going to...Before everyone unleashing the dogs of war on me just hear what i have to say...
I am a long time gamer and simmer since the pioneering days of car and driver,nascar,indycar and yes..even the original nfs(The first and last open road sim).Then i moved in the glory days of Gpl,viper racing and sports car gt...
At that time around in 1998 gt1 came out and well the "sim" console world was never the same.Gt 1 was very rough and limited compared to its pc rivals.Grand prix legends at that time had incredible physics even by today's standards,FF support,great fully animated cockpits,Full blown damage(Tires puncture,wheels went off,suspensions broke,engine got overheated,oil pressure got lost,engines could blow,transmissions broke,cars rolled and even sometimes caught on fire...And it had online play too !! Oh and i forgot it had the ring since then...
Yet i loved the premice of gt.Drive real normal cars in tracks/city tracks.The fact you could modify them made the game even more appealing.As the fact that i owned or at least driven many of the cars in the game in real life.That made me see past the shortcommings,past the line following ai,past the no damage,no collition detection,bumper car driving and i actually enjoyed the game.I finished 100 % of Gt1 and when Gt2 came (althrough it was basically the same with more content and some better physics and a bit of mechanical damage) i fall in love of its premise again and i played it to death to complete it.
When Gt3 came i bought a ps2 with a ps only wheel just to play it..Yet it felt like a improved graphically version of the first game.I didn't bothered so much that the game had less cars(through the cars i loved the most -the old cars found in the used sections -were missing) but i was shocked that the game physics were almost the same with cars still being unable to roll,no collition physics and this time even the mechanical damage was removed.....With the abysmal ai it felt like it was a step back instead of a step forward.In any way i played it for some time and then didn't think of gt until gt4 came.I bought it as also a ps only ff wheel to play it.At that time the gtr series had started,as well as the s2 version of lfs.And for those that are also pc simmers do you remember racer ?Anyway back on gt4.It had a huge amount of content,even better main physics and decent ff,it even had a shaking/blur effect whenever a collition took place....But the fact was that it had exactly the same shortcommings of the first game without any real improvements...I probably didn't even get to 1/4 of the game when i stopped.
Since then i moved to the latest gtr evo/on games and eventually after some truly amazing tracks/cars were released for rfactor i moved on rfactor...
I do have a ps 3 and i bought prologue.I played it with a g25 and at some things its incredible like the cockpits and the car models.I even found sound quite decent (maybe because i had a surround plugged in).The major physics were decent but the fact you can not turn everything off is mind boggling...(well you can but you have to get in race and pause the game to remove that remaining 1/10 of driving aids).I know prologue is a preview of things to come so i was optimistic about the final game.I even tried the time trial and it did featured a lot of small improvements especially on physics and collition detection.
But the fact of this very very long rant is that gt 5 has stack in old times were people just wanted to race with some pretty looking cars.This simply does not cut it anymore.People that love sim games exept from a sim to be just that...a realistic sim.If its going to have a gazillion tracks and cars well even better.But the core act of simply driving is what makes people interested in simulators in the first place and gt 5 on that aspect is...well abysmal....
While driving with the slower cars on empty tracks the main physics are good enough for a nice race.But when you drive something fast and having a full grid what should have been driving nirvana somehow gets to become hell.All ai cars taking the perfect racing line at 100% is ridiculus....They rarely if even will let you pass or try to cut you-unless it has to do with the line were they always follow and will crash on you so they can follow the line...
This is simply basic pathfinding not ai for a game of this caliber...From what we have seen so far collition detection is still off and damage even for the "premium" cars is at it best laughable.If the game at least has some good mechanical damage the lame visual effects could be forgiven but we still don't no anything about mechanical damage..And what's the deal of premium only cars ? I would prefer 400,scratch that even 300 cars that looked great and had cockpits and at least that laughable damage instead of just 170 and 830 without cockpits,looking like last gen and having just some small dents(at least i guess they are real time).I can live without the eye candy like the car models but having no cockpits means i cannot use the only driving view i use in most games.And the sterile "dead" tracks do not help either.The game does look incredible as i said earlier but with the exeptions of some "cardboard" barriers there are no skidmarks,paint on side walls,crumpled side barriers,grass tire marks,decent smoke,dust etc...Everything looking shiny for 1-2 laps is ok but when having a 5 or 10 lap race you would expect some more "life" from the track.
The above is my personal opinion on the game.I hope i am mistaken and gt 5 gets to be "The real driving simulator" heheh
But at this development phase it simply is to far to recode a lot of things and there is simply not enough time to improve them.Maybe if they push the release date to early 2011 the may find the time to perfect the game but the game has already been pushed twice back so PD has no choice but to release it in november...
