Standard Cars

Kazunori Yamauchi, who was present at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed where a number of new Vision GT cars were unveiled, spoke with Eurogamer about work being underway for Gran Turismo 7.

At the “15 Years of Gran Turismo” event which saw the announcement of Gran Turismo 6, GTPlanet joined a small group of other U.S. journalists to be among the first to ask Kazunori Yamauchi questions about Polyphony Digital’s new game.

In a substantial update, Polyphony Digital has brought a wide range of tweaks, changes, and new features to GT5 with update v2.02. It’s available as a free download for all versions of the game, weighing in at 246MB.

At the 2011 SEMA Show last week, I had the very special opportunity to – for the first time – personally interview the master himself: Kazunori Yamauchi. We had a great chat, and I am happy to report that Kazunori seemed happy, relaxed, and in good spirits.

In the latest issue of Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu (via AndriaSang), Kazunori Yamauchi has revealed that [at least some of] GT5’s “standard” cars will be upgraded to “premium” models in future updates to the game. This is good news for many fans who may have initially been disappointed their favorite car didn’t get the “premium” treatment (with a more detailed 3D model and interior view), though we still don’t know, of course, which or how many models will actually be upgraded:

A stream of interesting tidbits have been trickling into our Gran Turismo 5 forum today via several new magazine articles. First up is the December 2010 issue of PSM3 magazine, which provides a few details as highlighted by our own Dessy182:

Remember the “GT5 Car Index” we learned about a few days ago? At the time, only two small photographs of the PlayView tech demo were available, but now – thanks to good detective work by our own Marry_Me_GT – we get a much closer look that reveals more cars in the game than ever before! Check out the HD videos below and see what you can find…

The first batch of Kazunori Yamauchi interviews are finally getting published from last week’s Tokyo Game Show 2010! Here’s a translated transcript of GameBlog’s video interview above, kindly provided by our own RoadRunner99:

Before my Inbox completely melts down, I will reluctantly share this news. A blog called “iGameReport” claims to have emailed Polyphony Digital SCEA in an attempt to clarify the notion that Gran Turismo 5’s “standard cars” will not have interior view. Here’s a portion of what they say Polyphony’s SCEA’s response contained:

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: