Theory: Even Numbered GT Titles Are The Best

[SidsCycleShop]

So, here's a theory I've personally held for a long time: the even-numbered iterations of the GT series are the best.

I'll admit some bias, as I bought a PS1 to play GT2, and then went back to Gran Turismo. I think for a lot of us old timers, GT was a revelation compared to so many previous racing games, and then GT2 just blew everything else away. More cars, more tracks, more tuning options, and for the times, the physics and graphics were pretty good. I've heard that GT2 maxxed out the capabilities of the console.

Yes, GT3 was shiny. But then, GT4 - even shinier! And once again, more cars more tracks more races more more more.
Rumor has it GT4 was the limit of what you could do with that platform. I'll confess, I loved playing GT4 every bit as much as I loved GT2 - but there was so much content I never quite finished exploring all of it.

Then, GT5 was another big step on a new gen console. Finally, online capabilities! Maybe GT6 wasn't as big an improvement as GT2 or GT4 but still solid in MVHO. Maybe it was the return of the Shelby Daytona Coupe that makes me personally rank it as one of the better releases. And again, so many great cars, so many great tracks, so many pixels. Yes, it made you buy a stupid first car, but for those of us who had bought the 15th Anniversary pre-release, that really didn't matter.

We've all got some gripes with GT7. But I posit that GT8 will be better. It has to be better, right? If nothing else, I want to see the next Gran Turismo go as far as any game can on the PS5, because that's what Polyphony seems to do with the even numbers. It's tradition.


Oh, and please bring back the RS200.

 

[jergto]

GT6 was worse than GT7. For me 6 is dead last, 2nd to dead last being GT7. For a game to incrementally get better through updates and then those updates take several steps back? OOOF

Games like this that took so long to make with decades of experience only to give us mediocre product and fanboys saying it will get better with updates is really insane to me.

I'm glad there is a lot of voicing our opinions on how ****** this game is. Hopefully PD wakes TF up.. After 7 iterations, not sure they ever will until Kaz retires or has a consultant role.

 

[Nebuc72]

I agree with the above. 6 is leagues behind any other game to me.

What it has in quantity it falls far far behind in quality. I've never played such an easy and mindnumbingly dull game. The AI slows down to let you win to the extent they'll drop tens of seconds a lap so you can catch up, and are too stupid to be able to overtake you once the slowdown disengages. I've won events against hypercars in things like a stock RCZ. License tests are the same level of easy, and can all be beaten by seconds first try if you've ever played a racing game before. Hugely disappointing.

It offers you all of these cars, missions and events and yet they're all pointless to play because not a single one of them offers you an actual challenge, you just lap against AI that is rigged to let you pass them and cross the line in first. GT7 eclipses that simply with its handful of events and missions that are willing to offer you a challenge.

Without exaggeration, I have gotten more replay value out of the Maggiore 1 Hour event than I have the entirety of GT6's career.

2>1 and 4>3 I don't think is a controversial opinion though. Amazing memories with all of these games. 3 as well, which was an absolute marvel of its time, but at least in my house was safely replaced by 4 when it came around.

 

[Imari]

On the face of it this isn't really that controversial or unexpected given that for a long time there was two releases per console generation. The second one on a given set of hardware really should be better.

But while 2>1 and 4>3 is fairly accepted, I don't think it's as well accepted that 6 was better than 5.

And as far as GT7... are you basing this on whatever arbitrary number happens to be in the title, or that every second release is best? Because GTS was the 7th mainline GT game released, and GT7 is the 8th. If you're going with the arbitrary number theory, where does the letter "S" fit? If you're not, then GT7 is an even numbered release and is supposedly the "good" one.

 

[SnakeOfBacon]

GT6 and GT7 both have very short career modes that I finished in 6 days each, which is definitely a major detraction. I still continued to play GT6 regularly for three years because of its strengths as a sandbox, online time and drift trials, and tremendous library of cars and tracks.
For driving, it had all of the content of GT5 (besides Ferrari F1 cars and TGTT) plus a great deal more, with better suspension physics, and BATHURST.
And Goodwood Hill Climb.
And the moon. That was fun.

GT7 is quite similar to GT6 in that its career is made for the statistical mode, a casually interested user who turns on their console every three weeks, and will only play GT7 for 7 hours.
The only enthusiasts the game will please are the car collectors and test drivers, and even then, the monotony of moneymaking and the missing features (time and weather in Time Trial mode, data logger, drift trials, top speed testing, GT4-style Arcade Car Collection etc) bog the experience down.

 

[CarreraGT]

Except I think GT3 was probably the best game for its time (other than the original that is).

I think GT5 was the only "bad" Gran Turismo

 

[Grimm6Jack]

GT2 was better than GT1, although to be honest, GT1 at the time was astonishing as well, but GT2 managed to one-up it with just the sheer number of unique cars and a better career mode thanks to that.
GT4 was better than GT3 by pretty much the same reason now that I think about it, but GT3 was also a pretty amazing game. Only complaint I had with it was the low number of cars, but how detailed at the time they were, made up for it.

I can't really say GT6 was better than GT5... And both these games for me were pretty mediocre... GT5 for me was the start of the downfall of this franchise.

In terms of actual disappointment though, GT7 is on top of the list by far, but technically speaking, it is better than GT5 and GT6. But nowhere even close to GT4...

 

[05XR8]

That’s how I feel about GT1. Of course, for those of us that got to experience it on debut, there was nothing like it. The franchise could have ended there. 3 & 4 are on the same hardware, but I’d say 3 looks better than 4. However, 4 is wowsers for the car count and tracks.
GT5P, GT5 & GT6 are a blip on the radar to me. I’d rate them as equals. Equally bad and good.

Just from what I’m seeing in this six months, GT7 probably isn’t fair to compare with GTS. “More” is supposedly coming. As far as this gtp community are concerned, for the solo player that doesn’t venture in Sport Mode, there are about three camps: photographers, livery creators and tuners.
Obviously, any player looking for Sport Mode, know which GT they are playing.

 

[Mariangello]

GT6 and GT7 both have very short career modes that I finished in 6 days each, which is definitely a major detraction. I still continued to play GT6 regularly for three years because of its strengths as a sandbox, online time and drift trials, and tremendous library of cars and tracks.
For driving, it had all of the content of GT5 (besides Ferrari F1 cars and TGTT) plus a great deal more, with better suspension physics, and BATHURST.
And Goodwood Hill Climb.
And the moon. That was fun.

GT7 is quite similar to GT6 in that its career is made for the statistical mode, a casually interested user who turns on their console every three weeks, and will only play GT7 for 7 hours.
The only enthusiasts the game will please are the car collectors and test drivers, and even then, the monotony of moneymaking and the missing features (time and weather in Time Trial mode, data logger, drift trials, top speed testing, GT4-style Arcade Car Collection etc) bog the experience down.

I don't know if the Café can be called a career at all, it's more like a side activity that was supposed to fill the space between a "real career" and completing license tests. So, one should rather ask why there is no career at all or why they refused to create it?

 

[RobertHammer]

So far i know , you need to play Café in order to unlock stuff , so yeah it is a "career" technically

 

[Mariangello]

So far i know , you need to play Café in order to unlock stuff , so yeah it is a "career" technically

But you don't even need to play Café to unlock them, just buy those cars and you'll complete the menu.

 

[timekiller001]

Of the main numbered GT games, GT7 is the worst to me in terms of the career, because it's almost nonexistent. Followed by GT6, which was badly planned in general (barely any improvements to it, bad timing) but had a forgettable career.
GT5 was okay for the time, but unlike GT1-4 it's not something you do a 2nd time.

GT2, 3 and 4 are pretty equal to me personally and top of the list, whereas I haven't played GT1 as much to be able to rank it

 

[Scaff]

So far i know , you need to play Café in order to unlock stuff , so yeah it is a "career" technically

Do this to PD/Sony...

...and they will quite happily let you bypass the 'career'.

 

[watto79]

For what it's worth, 20 of the 44 café menus can be bypassed by buying cars. The other 24 menus require you to to "something", be it complete a license test or mission, tune a car, do races and finish on the podium or the same for a championship etc.

 

[hyperspeed980]

GT6>GT5 is debatable to me. Both of those games have enough pros and cons to them to balance each other out.

 

[RobertHammer]

But you don't even need to play Café to unlock them, just buy those cars and you'll complete the menu.

Completing menus you have to use Café thus unlocking new tracks and other parts of the game ...

Do this to PD/Sony...

...and they will quite happily let you bypass the 'career'.

You would like that don't you? , pay to skip Café - that will show them!

 

[pedrocor]

The question of the odd or even numbers has much to do with the platforms. Apart from GT7, every odd numbered title was the first on that gen hardware. So GT2, GT4 (and so GT6 should) pushed every drop of juice of the hardware, evolving from the odd numbered editions.
The GT6 is a very special case, as GT5 wasn't really the title testing the waters on PS3, as there was the GT HD concept and GT5 prologue before, so GT5 was a more solid title from the blocks than GT1 or GT3. Also the PS3 platform benefited of the possibility of updates. But GT6 should still be a better package than GT5, but for various reasons it isn't. I believe, first of all, precisely because we were expecting a noticeable better product than the GT5, which it wasn't. GT5 had better content, although less overall car count and GT6 didn't make a considerable jump on multiplayer, the worst part of GT6 feels like a of GT5.1. Not worst than GT5 but not better, just some plus and minus.
GT7, being and odd release, had GT Sport before in the same platform, should be a solid odd, like GT5, just it isn't...

 

[Scaff]

You would like that don't you? , pay to skip Café - that will show them!

How will using a mechanism they built into the game 'show them'?

Doesn't matter how you try and white knight it, PD/Sony built a mechanic into GT7 that allows you to bypass the vast majority of the Cafe by spending real money.

 

[RobertHammer]

Doesn't matter how you try and white knight it, PD/Sony built a mechanic into GT7 that allows you to bypass the vast majority of the Cafe by spending real money.

It was a joke , but if you like to spend money to bypass Cafe , sure go ahead - i am not even defending Cafe

 

[Famine]

GT3 is best GT (GT4 is great, but was step one of incredibloat and all those gags about 50 Skylines and 30 MX-5s [it was 11, it became 34 when GT5 smooshed the regional variants together]), GT5 is worst.

I mean, GT5 locked your ability to buy cars you could afford behind a level system and then put some that you needed to progress into a two-billion-day long, non-repeating cycle upon which you started at a semi-random point, so you might end up never (functionally) getting the car and doing the race. It had to be fixed with a special Online Car Dealership to keep the cars available - but of course that no longer exists because the servers are off.

Whatever else GT6 did wrong (and there's not a short list here), level-locked quasi-randomly available cars was the single worst move in the entire history of the series - literally "game-breaking", as it stopped progression and without the fix available the game has reverted to that state.

We're yet to see what will happen with Sport and 7's "always online" requirement when they reach end of life, but if they completely drop all functionality because of no server communication, that will beat it; imagine v1.07, but forever...

 

[Eggstor]

The question of the odd or even numbers has much to do with the platforms. Apart from GT7, every odd numbered title was the first on that gen hardware. So GT2, GT4 (and so GT6 should) pushed every drop of juice of the hardware, evolving from the odd numbered editions.
The GT6 is a very special case, as GT5 wasn't really the title testing the waters on PS3, as there was the GT HD concept and GT5 prologue before, so GT5 was a more solid title from the blocks than GT1 or GT3. Also the PS3 platform benefited of the possibility of updates. But GT6 should still be a better package than GT5, but for various reasons it isn't. I believe, first of all, precisely because we were expecting a noticeable better product than the GT5, which it wasn't. GT5 had better content, although less overall car count and GT6 didn't make a considerable jump on multiplayer, the worst part of GT6 feels like a of GT5.1. Not worst than GT5 but not better, just some plus and minus.
GT7, being and odd release, had GT Sport before in the same platform, should be a solid odd, like GT5, just it isn't...

GT7 was originally built for the PS5, and probably because of the general unavailability of the PS5, was ported back to the PS4, with less-than-stellar results.

 

[Destroy321]

my opinion is the opposite
I haven't played 1 and 2 so I don't know, but I like 3 better than 4 and 5 better than 6.

 

[Keroyon]

Interesting thread

For me best GT has to be 3 or 4
I prefer the car and track list from GT4 but at the same time I end up often playing GT3 because I do prefer the way it plays and the way it looks.

My worst GT experience so far was 5 (version 1), its stupid level grinding system got me out of the franchise for the first time (bought myself a 360 and forza 3 right away and that was a blast)

Went back to GT when my gf bought me a PS4 and GTS 2 years ago, so the game was quite finished by then and I did like its "carreer" mode.

Now GT7, so far this game is a genuine disapointment for me, it just does not feel like the game I was waiting for, or the game it was advertised should I say.

Maybe, by the end of its life cycle this game will be the best Gran Turismo experience to date but I am not sure if I will still be around to see that.

But maybe I would not have been disapointed if this game was called GT7 prologue, who knows

 

[rkwld]

I'd order them from best to worst: 4-3-2-1-5--------------6/7

 

[Scaff]

It was a joke , but if you like to spend money to bypass Cafe , sure go ahead - i am not even defending Cafe

I'm not saying I did or would, I'm saying you can!

As such it's not a career mode that requires playing to unlock anything, you don't 'need' to do it, you can simply bypass it by paying.

 

[MonoTonouS]

6 Really screwed the pooch by removing the option to have one make races .. You introduce bare skin race cars and then remove the feature to have spec races with them. Removed all of the GT5 photomode spots ( granted they added great ones) and witheld the course maker almost two years .
GT6 really did feel like a spec 3 with the rest of gt5 removed.

 

[Grimm6Jack]

GT3 is best GT (GT4 is great, but was step one of incredibloat and all those gags about 50 Skylines and 30 MX-5s [it was 11, it became 34 when GT5 smooshed the regional variants together])

Other than the big amount of duplicates... GT4 has GT3 beat in pretty every other major aspect. The campaign structure, the car physics, the fact we got Nurburgring, Suzuka and Le Mans in it, the amount of unique cars that even without counting the duplicates, was easily over 2x that of GT3, the B-Spec mode that would make your life easier in the endurance races and the grinding, the introduction of photo mode...

Unless you just liked the way the cars handled more in GT3, there's just no way to justify it as being better than GT4. Let's also not forget how ridiculous the rubberband AI was in GT3.
It was still a spectacular game when it came out, among the best GTs in that department, but GT4 smashed it... One thing GT3 was better at than GT4 though, was Rally... The Rally physics in GT4 were really bad.

GT5 is worst.
I mean, GT5 locked your ability to buy cars you could afford behind a level system and then put some that you needed to progress into a two-billion-day long, non-repeating cycle upon which you started at a semi-random point, so you might end up never (functionally) getting the car and doing the race. It had to be fixed with a special Online Car Dealership to keep the cars available - but of course that no longer exists because the servers are off.

Whatever else GT6 did wrong (and there's not a short list here), level-locked quasi-randomly available cars was the single worst move in the entire history of the series - literally "game-breaking", as it stopped progression and without the fix available the game has reverted to that state.

We're yet to see what will happen with Sport and 7's "always online" requirement when they reach end of life, but if they completely drop all functionality because of no server communication, that will beat it; imagine v1.07, but forever...

Can't disagree. While GT7 is definitely the most disappointing game given the massive hype, GT5 did some outrageous things. And the game itself also had some hype going for it since it was GT4's successor and a new title on the PS3.

The mashup of PS2 graphic cars, was a huge turn-off for me as well. Having to race with premium cars looking up-to-date alongside those substandard cars made a gigantic contrast during gameplay/replays, it was just hard not to notice the differences. I had prior to GT5 collected all the cars in all previous GT games, I even remember I needed a 2nd memory card for GT2, but in GT5 (and GT6 which followed suit with those low-tier cars) I just focused on getting the Premium Cars and have those on my garage. Such was the turn-off. I literally didn't care whatsoever about the used car dealership in that game just because of that...
Only two cars I had to bother in the used dealership, because they were absolutely necessary to beat some events, were the FGT and the Chaparral 2J, but they never were in the dealership (or in the times they were, I just missed them or didn't have the credits, IIRC the FGT was like 4 million and the Chaparral was like 14 million or something)... I had to wait for the updated online dealership which I don't know how many months later was it, to finally buy them and do the FGT championship and the B-Spec Monaco race of the Historic Car Cup which was driving me insane with any other car.

The prize cars were also whack! That same FGT championship, which was basically 6 mini-endurance races, at the highest level using Formula cars, and even the AI, surprisingly, was very fast using them... I got a frickin standart low-quality Catterham Fireblade for winning that championship. ... What a slap in the face that was.

The level thing for buying cars didn't affect me that much because I always decide to do everything I can do before the actual races, so I always did the Licenses and some of the special challenges which gave me enough prize cars to also complete a ton of the racing events and level up in the process, without even needing to waste credits at all. By the time I needed to buy cars such as Ferraris or Lambos for their respective cups, I was way past the level needed to buy them.
Reaching level 20 was pretty much a breeze, and truth be told, you only need up til level 24 to buy every car in the game, which again, I don't disagree that annoyed players, but it wasn't so bad (bad, but not that extreme)...

The need of leveling up however for unlocking the Endurance races was just ... ........... Possibly the biggest grind I've ever done in my gaming life. If any of you guys still have the Level 50 from GT Sport fresh in your minds, I'll gladly remind you that reaching Level 40 A-Spec in GT5 was even worse... And this is with the 200% log-in bonus, which no longer exists in the game. The amount of races I had to grind to unlock anything after level 25 was just ridiculous, and after level 30, I was basically forced to grind endurance races over and over... I don't even want to imagine someone right now grinding to level 40 A-Spec in GT5.

And worth also mentioning here, the economy in GT5, as it stands right now, is actually worse than GT7. If you just want the premium cars, then it's not that big of a deal, since there's a few of the multi-million dollar premium cars that are given as prize cars, and there's only like less than 300 premium cars, but if you want to get literally all of the cars, including the PS2 quality ones, it's a worse grind than GT7 without the online features it had back in the day (seasonal events and log-in bonus).

Oh... and the trophy to get 1.000 cars in your garage... Where I literally had to stay HOURS across a few days just pressing buttons and buying Go Karts. I had like 240+ cars on my garage when I decided to go for this trophy, so yeah, that was real pain.

GT6 is better than GT5 in the way that it's basically an improved version of GT5, where it felt more like a GT5 2.0 than an actual new exciting game. The hype for it wasn't that large either so it's why people overlook how mediocre it is, and in some ways it was worse than GT5.

 

[Destroy321]

Other than the big amount of duplicates... GT4 has GT3 beat in pretty every other major aspect. The campaign structure, the car physics, the fact we got Nurburgring, Suzuka and Le Mans in it, the amount of unique cars that even without counting the duplicates, was easily over 2x that of GT3, the B-Spec mode that would make your life easier in the endurance races and the grinding, the introduction of photo mode...

Unless you just liked the way the cars handled more in GT3, there's just no way to justify it as being better than GT4. Let's also not forget how ridiculous the rubberband AI was in GT3.
It was still a spectacular game when it came out, among the best GTs in that department, but GT4 smashed it... One thing GT3 was better at than GT4 though, was Rally... The Rally physics in GT4 were really bad.

I also feel that GT3 was better than GT4 in terms of graphics and sound.
Everything feels cheap in GT4.

 

[Grimm6Jack]

I also feel that GT3 was better than GT4 in terms of graphics and sound.
Everything feels cheap in GT4.

Sounds were both garbage... Not anywhere even close to their real-life siblings aside from a very few specific cars (the R34 GT-R for example).
In terms of graphics, GT4 is actually better... But on some tracks, GT3 has more details (Trial Mountain is very noticeable). The lighting I also won't say it's better, just different, but it does make GT3 seem more alive than GT4.

 

[Destroy321]

but it does make GT3 seem more alive than GT4.

Yeah, that is a very important part. For me, everything in GT4 was static and didn't feel alive.