With the recent news of Gran Turismo 6 hitting the Playstation 3, I had a terrible itch to play some Gran Turismo 5. So after spending half an hour patching the game and close to an hour installing data, I proceeded to play for pretty much a full day. There’s a few things I want to see in GT6 coming off a long play session with GT5. (EDITORS NOTE: Things like not having to wait an hour and a half before being able to play the game would be a nice start.)
- Scaled Career Races — In the beginning, difficulty isn’t necessarily a big deal. I buy my starter car, win a few races, tune up said-car, rinse and repeat. Sadly, as my car got more powerful, the opponents never scaled with me so I would just continue to stomp all over them. The game doesn’t reward me for staying within a certain power/weight bracket along with the opponents either. So I buy a specific car for a specific series, max it out, win the race easily, move forward.In Gran Turismo 6, Polyphony should include a difficulty slider that scales the opponents to my car. For an even race, I’d leave the slider at zero. For a more difficult challenge, increase the slider (also increasing the reward) and if I just want to blow through a series I don’t particularly care for, decrease the slider (also decreasing my reward).
- Better Records — Since the events don’t really scale to me, I tend to do races over and over to 1) win credits and 2) see if I can beat my time. The problem with this is I have to memorize the times because unless you are playing a time trial (which earns you zero credits), the “Best Time” resets. There is an easy fix for this. At the top of the screen, they can add two “Best Time” lines; one for that specific car and one for your best time in general. Of course, ideally they’d keep the best lap time for the current race as well. This would make grinding through races more fun because half the fun of Gran Turismo is shaving seconds off your lap times.
- More Racing Modifications — I remember Gran Turismo 2 quite well. A ton of those cars had the ability to be equipped with a racing modification, which essentially revamped the whole car. All of them got a racing-stylized skin and a serious increase in speed one way or another. It was glorious! Fast forward to GT5 and a very small handful of cars could be modded this way. It sucks. Fix it Polyphony!
- More Drifting Opportunites — Yes, yes, I know they added those online drift events. I’d like to see some serious “career” drifting. They had NASCAR events last time, for crying out loud. There are professional drift organizations they could team up with, too.
- Dealership Events, or Just More Events — Another item that was missing in GT5. For those unaware, there used to be events at dealerships with car/class-specific restrictions. I loved dropping into the Honda dealership and taking a Type-R branded car into a series of races against nothing but other Type-R’s.More events in general would be nice, though. I recall playing through a ton of the events in GT5 more quickly than I should have. At that point, I was disappointed with what was left. A few months later, they started the seasonal events though, which made up for some of it. Some generic race events would be nice, which randomize the tracks but keep the same rule set intact. Of course, you have to be rewarded for these races, otherwise it’d be the same as a Quick Race and let’s be honest, who does those?
Holiday 2013 will be an exciting time for me regardless. Gran Turismo is one of my favorite franchises, and while I was slightly disappointed with GT5, I still love the game quite a bit. People are calling Gran Turismo 6 “GT 5.5”, which could very well be true. But I don’t care. If GT6 was GT6-proper, it would take years to come out. Building on the foundation set by the previous game gives fans of the series like myself something to tide us over with until the first Gran Turismo on Playstation 4.
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