Online Features

Amongst all the positive impressions coming from the GT Sport demo, there has been an unfortunate revelation. If you want to save progress during a GT Sport play session, you must be connected to PlayStation Network.

If you have patchy internet and were looking forward to GT Sport’s offline modes, look away now.

When Gran Turismo 6 was first announced, one of the most exciting announcements for the GTPlanet community was the addition and expansion of the game’s online racing features.

The web-based portion of Gran Turismo 5’s social networking features revealed at TGS 2010 have been quietly launched on Polyphony Digital’s official Japanese and Hong Kong websites. Fortunately, the Hong Kong site is entirely in English and is fully compatible with all PSN accounts from around the world – sign in here to give it a try.

Kazunori Yamauchi has been fielding questions from fans on Twitter over the past few hours. The tweets are in Japanese, but with a little help from Google and medhi_san, we can get a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about. Here’s the highlights:

As was quickly reported here in our forums, the latest 1.02 update for Gran Turismo 5 has just made available for download. 1.02 allows the game to take advantage of Polyphony Digital’s upgraded server infrastructure while enabling maximum power and weight restrictions for online races.

First, the good news:  Yamauchi announced at yesterday’s press Q&A session that many updates and patches will be issued at the “first of December” (though it wasn’t entirely clear to me if that literally meant December 1st or early within the month). Polyphony Digital has also posted this notice on their website to reassure us that the game’s online services will continue to be optimized and upgraded to handle the additional load generated by players around the world.

The first downloadable update for Gran Turismo 5, version “1.01” (133MB in size), has already been issued in preparation for Wednesday’s worldwide release. Although a complete summary of the changes 1.01 brings have not been published by Polyphony Digital, many players have already started to notice small tweaks in our forums.

Sony hosted a Gran Turismo 5 press event in Taiwan (presumably scheduled before the delay) where a few more new details and screenshots were revealed. Most notably:

At the Sony TGS 2010 press conference, Yamauchi gave a brief overview of some of the new online functionality in GT5 – including web-based account management known as “Gran Turismo Anywhere”. Here’s a quick overview of what he said, via 1UP’s live blog. I’ll provide more specific details when they’re available.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB1UyZAV1Vo

New (though minor) details about Gran Turismo 5’s online community features have apparently been discussed in the latest issue of “PlayStation: The Official Magazine”. Via SystemLink:

Polyphony Digital have conveniently published their own independent and specific confirmation of the features we’ve been learning about via media outlets over the past two days, thanks to one big update to their official site. In addition to what was already discussed here and here, this is what’s new:

EuroGamer has shared their detailed hands-on impressions with the latest E3 2010 GT5 demo, and it’s full of quite a few interesting and revealing tidbits of information. While I have covered the main points below, the full article contains more detail and is very well written, so head on over there for more.