Until the dang earth quake, I was expecting that an announcement would come that somehow they accidentally released an early alpha version. Bought the thing 2 months ago together with a PS3 and I cannot shake the feeling of being on the receiving end of a very nasty practical joke. Being a professional programmer since 1994, it is blatantly obvious to see that GT5 is definitely not the work of 3 or more years. Except for the premium cars and some graphical gimmicks, you can nail all that stuff together with the help of an ill-behaved office temp within a year. Granturismo has always been a hardware seller. Many people (including me) baught all 3 PS generations solely to play Granturismo on it, but GT5 could well turn into an X-Box seller.
It has always been touted that Kaz is a bit of a perfectionist, so I refuse to believe that he would have released that without appearing on the official launch with a paper bag over his head - if it wasn't for some major mishap at the office. Seriously, I'm starting to believe that at some point they lost most of what they had done so far, because many things are so obviously hurriedly nailed together. I'm surprized the CD didn't come with the CVS dotfiles on it. (EA managed that once on a 2001 game)
Take the licenses for example. The target times were obviously determined using dice and a spinning bottle. Many of the tests are so ridiculously easy to gold, it makes silvering the GT4 licenses look like an enormous achievement. And they didn't even have the time to do the example videos properly. They used to show, how to actually gold the test - in GT5 some don't even beat the silver time.
Then there's the insulting B-Spec mode. What they did was copy/pasting the A-Spec events, take out all the code that took input from the controller and added an AI chauffeur. Sweeeet - doubled the content in two days. So now we're getting to stare at the screen for hours, watching the game play itself. And it sucks at it, too. It's definitely less fun than drowning. What was wrong with B-Spec in GT4? Why fix something that works perfectly? They just didn't have the time to do it properly.
The there's the woefully ill-designed A-Spec mode. First of all, the number of available races is not even half of what we had in GT4. You have 1000 cars in the game, but for many of them, there isn't even a usefull race you can use them in (2CV, VW Bug, Nazi-K?bel, Subaru 360 just to name a few). What was wrong with GT4's manufacturer races? And what they have is often so badly planned, you can't help, but facepalm. Take the american muscle car race. There's 5 american tracks in GT5, but the whole event is a 3 lap race at Monza. W.T.F.?
Each and every thing in GT5 is unbalanced. It begins with the range of difficulty in the licenses and special events. Many are ridiculously easy and wouldn't challenge someone, who's hopelessly plastered. I know that, because I golded some licenses, while completely drunk. Others however are barely this side of theoretically possible. It continues with the leveling system. You get sod all in terms of XP and cr in the races, but but most cars are ridiculously expensive and you need mindboggling heaps of XP to advance in the higher levels. So everything north of level 25 becomes a mindnumbingly tedious grind, unless you have a highspeed internet connection and can race online, and even that was bolted on later. The initial version didn't even dish out XP and cr in online races.
The list of WTF moments goes on and on, like:
- what's that ridiculous paint chip thing for. I need to buy a red car so I can paint another one red?
- why did you waste time on things like the museum cards?
- does the programmer, who's responsible for the AI, by any chance save his code updates on /dev/null ?
The whole thing is saved a bit if you can race online. For offline gamers the whole game is about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest. You can still have some fun, but you're just not going to make the cut. My only hope is that Kaz at one point comes out and says "Sorry guys, this and that happened and we had to release a rush-job. Please give us a few months and we'll release a proper GT5."
It's only an optimistic hope of course, but PD better be working day and night on the next, properly made version, because GT5 isn't a proper GranTurismo