Gran Turismo 5 (Prologue) UPDATE HAS FAILED
 

Discuss the upcoming games "Gran Turismo 5" and "Gran Turismo 5 Prologue" a.k.a. the largest demo in the world a.k.a. the best ripoff in videogame history

Hey did you know that GT5:Prologue was already available in Europe? :p It's okay, I like the 60plus cars, but uhh, six tracks, hello?? The soundtrack also sounds as if it was produced in some nursing home basement.

Actually, considering the price of the thing is less than that of a normal new game, it's certainly not the largest ripoff in history. Hell, I can think of full priced racing games from a generation ago that had less content than this and still charged full price.

A demo would have been, y'know, GT Concept HD. If they went through with the plan to charge money for that, there might be reason to get up in arms, but this is not so bad. Prologue has a lot more content than the free Concept HD has too, so it's at least more than a super basic sampler.

I'd be willing to drop 40 dollars for the chance to play the next GT game before 2153 anyway. At this point, I just want to play it. I'm sick of the waiting.

Apparently the NA version has a couple of extra cars (from Peugeot) and a new Tuner (RE Amemiya), so that means 3 new stock cars and two new tuned ones. Dunno which. *shrug* Also, 10 more crap licensed tracks from the likes of The Mars Volta and Weezer. Those will, undoubtedly, suck.

If the game uses the same source audio as the released soundtrack, I don't understand the problem you're having with it, it sounds fine. Or is this a case of the disc not sounding anything like the audio in the game? (Hellllllllllo Halo 3.)

Real question: Do people here even LIKE racing games? There's rarely (read: never), threads on these things. And if there are, the reply count is so low. It's too bad.

We could just play Forza 2 some more. Other than its terrible {terrible} interface, it was just as enjoyable as GT4.


Only a few people here seem to even play racing games, and I really doubt more than three or four people on the board would have any interest in discussing car tunings. And of those three or four, I would probably be the only one interested in discussing car tuning within the context of self-handicapping your car as we did in Forza 2 when we only raced S rank cars. S rank only. No collisions. Maple Valley.

I likes racing games. Given I recently worked my way through PGR4 and Burnout Paradise, have Sega Rally to return to and have picked up GT5:Prologue. Perhaps racing appeals more to Europeans, who knows.

I've picked this up because it was dirt cheap - I got it for £15, whereas a normal full PS3 title will go for £40-£50 at launch - and because I want to give it a go. It looks like it'll look pretty and with online play and what-not, well why the devil not. And it's so much more than a demo. A cut-down version of a packed title doesn't equate to a demo version of a game.

This is an interesting statement.

What constitutes a "demo version", then?

Unless you equate demo with "short" or "not a lot of content", there's no real way to describe GT5p as anything OTHER than a demo, albeit a large one.

It's still, well, a demonstration of what the full game will offer, lacks all the content of it's eventual big brother, and is merely a sampling of what we'll be seeing in the full game.

Don't fool yourself, we ARE buying an expensive demo. Wether or not that's of personal value to the buyer is the only thing that should be considered when one is looking at buying the thing.

Don't be such a pedantic fool. I could equally ask what constitutes a "full game"? It's only the existing knowledge that a 'full' title is upcoming that leads you to the conclusion that this is a demonstration for that game. And well this is an endless argument I have no great interest in.

You are correct though, it's the worth to the buyer that matters, but that, again, goes for all games that require payment for.

it's sad how a "demo" of the full GT5 has more content than some games (motorstorm). i'll probably get this game because the wait for the full GT5 is probably 2-3 years away. what bugs me is that when you buy the disc version, you have to install more than the psn download, about 5 gigs as opposed to the 2gigs from the psn, and you still have to insert the disc(i think).

Yeah, that's sort of exactly it. If this was released as any other game, it would look like it had a decent amount of content for a full fledged title.

But that whole "Prologue" subtitle, along with the knowledge that the full game is coming, sort of proves my point.

It's not like I find the release objectionable or anything, but consider how this thing is marketed, named, and labelled. It's not like I don't think there's value to the release. I most certainly do, and most certainly will be picking it up, so.

So you're saying that if they'd just released the game as GT5 you'd be happy? Are you saying that it's the knowledge of the future 'full' game that makes it a demo? Therefore I wonder what the reaction would have been if you didn't know about plans for a 'full' version.

Given the amount of content in the previous GT games, and therefore the expectation for any GT5, I would guess people would still be bitching and moaning. But it has to make you wonder, what if they had launched Prologue as 'Gran Turismo 5'? At the same price-point it currently is, mind.

My point is, that calling it a "demo" is a cheap-shot, and lazy.

Edit: What does piss me off, however, is the whole installation bollocks. If I wanted the hassle, and time-waste, of installation I'd still be in the PC gaming scene. I want a console to be a console. I also don't want my harddrive filled with bullshit.

People would be right in questioning the game if this is how much they got after these many years of waiting and the constant delays. If this was the end result of this many years of waiting, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that people would be disappointed, considering the standards set by the other titles for car and track counts. (I could make a crack here about including only one Skyline would make GT4 have a car count similar to this one, but I won't.)

It IS the knowledge of the final product coming down the pipe that makes a cheap, lighter featured version palatable when it comes to this particular brand name. This isn't rocket science here, OP.

Using the term demo is not derogatory. I do not understand why you're assuming it means as much. Amount of content notwithstanding, that doesn't change what it is when you compare it to the final product, y'know.

I do not, personally, believe 'demo' to be a derogatory term, but context is important.

The general intention of those labeling Prologue a demo appears to be to discredit, and use the term to substantiate their negative view of the release. I'm not saying you, or all people, but having read a fair number of comments about the game those branding it a 'demo' are doing so in a negative way. I'm happy to be proven wrong on that point.

Maybe no one makes threads on racing games because it always devolves into bullshit arguing. Or maybe it is just a Gran Turismo thing.

Civil discourse on the nature of a release isn't the same as idiotic trolling, russ. You of all people should know this.

And some of you people are the same folks who wonder why all topics in here are dead. Well, here you go.

I love the Gran Turismo games and in fact racing games in general (Although I prefer it when they're either pure sim or pure arcade rather than some bastard child of both like PGR). Grant Turismo 5 is probably what will sell me a PS3, just as GT3 pretty much sold me a PS2. I also bought GT3 Concept which a similar setup to this, a few cars, a few tracks, just showing off the physics model and graphics. It was also the first game to feature the Bugatti Vaeron under the guise of the VW W12 (And in bright orange!).

As people have said, it's dirt cheap and you get more content than in some full price games. I got several hours of enjoyment out of GT3C, certainly more than my money's worth so if I owned a PS3 I'd jump right on this.

I do hope they jog on all those stupid muscle cars though, they're just not fun to drive. I think I won all the muscle car races in the last game using a Mitsubishi Lancer...

I feel the same.

I thought it was a pretty ok price for a demo/prologue. But for my needs, I could probably live with this version long term and give the full release a miss. If it is out in PAL land (I was totally unaware), I might have a look for it in the shops when I'm out later.

Wow lol you guys act as if you got this game for free. I had to pay 40€ for it, which is something like 60$, I guess, so I refuse to speak of a game "cheap as hell".

There's no need to discuss the awesome graphics, but I think after the ten hours you need to complete all the events, it gets extremely boring to repeat Daytona Speed Course fifty times in a row in order to get all the credits you need to buy a shiny red Ferrari F1 car.

€40 does sound a bit much, though clearly you were happy to pay it though, otherwise you wouldn't have. Ultimately comparisons to US prices are pointless as Europe will never pay comparable prices, not in the current economic climate, and I imagine not ever. Since we can afford to pay more, we will always pay more. Though, yes, it pisses me off every time.

US/Europe price comparisons aside, I feel the £15 I paid is a suitable price, and I would happily have paid the £20 RRP if I hadn't had a money off code. £15 for a current-gen game is dirt cheap to me and I've picked up many titles for more than that (and consider them cheap). It's a matter of personal opinion then as to whether or not you consider this title cheap.

There are a couple of muscle cars I always enjoy driving, like the '69 Camaro, but my main problem with them is that they are rarely competitive outside of the muscle car competitions. Or maybe I should say that they are not as competitive as the lightweight Jap cars, as you implied. Yeah, they can keep most of those muscle cars, if I wanted to drive something that handled like a pontoon boat, I would go to the river.

I'd like to see the Carbon R Skyline from GT4 make an appearance on this game {or on GT5} though. That was easily my favorite tuner car from that game and was really one of the most fun and most competitive non-racing Jap cars from that game. I'm also hoping that they do not include nitrous boost this time around. That turned races into jokes more often than not.

OK, so having installed the bloody game, I decided I'd try giving it a go and an update is available - one that 'could' result in the loss of save or replay data (er, what?) - so I've got to sit and wait for this to fucking download and install.

CAN I PLAY THE GAME ALREADY, FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

Edit: Oh god, it's taken about 5 minutes and the download bar is at about 5%. Someone shoot me already. Time to go play Xbox then.

Additional Spam:
"An error occurred during download... download failed"

FUCK YOU THEN PROLOGUE, FUCK YOU SIDEWAYS.

Choose UPnP Mode 2. It worked for me that way.

Finally got the update to install and finally had a quick race. Bought me a red Mazda RX-8 as my starting car. First impression would be: hot damn it's a good looking game.

Hm, it's looks pretty phenomenal, but after watching the intro I swear I was bored within half an hour. I haven't played a Gran Turismo since A-Spec, so maybe I was hoping for something more engaging. But no, I’m just not clicking with this franchise like I used to. I feel like all the time and effort that went into the tuning and handling of the cars is wasted on me. :gonk:

I'm not sure if it's the same as what you meant, but I just can't play this series anymore either. I could only play it to a limited extent anyway... because I don't really find the tuning part to be interesting. I like the driving, but you need to tune and modify your car to win. If it were a bit less complex, I'd be cool with that... but they would lose their core fanbase.

I wasn't 100% I'd enjoy the Gran Turismo series still, but I'm finding that I'm rather liking Prologue. Firstly, the graphics are ridiculously good, but there's also a lot of incidental detail that makes the tracks feel alive when you're racing around them.

I'm loving the addition of the in-car view. I like the feel of racing from an in-car view, and not only do the ones I've seen so far look brilliant, but they also work well (some recent titles, such as DiRT, have had far too cluttered interiors that made it next to impossible to see the track from).

One noticeable improvement I'd point at is the opposition AI. There's still an element of them sticking towards the racing line, but not if they want to overtake, they actually seem to jostle for position now. And with up to 16 cars on track as well, there's often a bit more of that going on.

I've given online play a go too and was impressed by the lack of lag, and how quickly it found races. However, they've included collisions, which makes sense, but the problem is that people just cheat. I spent an entire lap avoiding hitting anyone, overtaking properly and got into 2nd position, then got rammed on a corner, which made me spin out. It's an issue with all current racing games, and one that seriously puts me off online modes of racing games.

I've never had that 'alive' feeling with Gran Turismo, or probably any driving sim actually. For all the detail that goes into it visually, it's still felt like a dead and uninteresting surrounding to be in. No real sense of excitement or life, and the AI in the past didn't really do anything significant to make themselves known either. From what I've played of Prologue thus far, it doesn''t feel like much has changed.

I should clarify, incidental detail that makes the newer tracks feel more alive, since the old tracks feel more or less the same. OK, so there's not masses of life to the tracks on the whole, but they feel more alive in Prologue than they have previously. But hey, that's just my opinion.

Out of interest aesop, what racing games do you consider to have good AI? From what I've seen, and I've only just started on the B-class events, Prologue's AI seems a lot better than GT's previous efforts.

I’m not sure, truly. I mean the racing games I’d play most often (Wipeout, Ridge Racer, Gran Turismo), they’re all at different corners of the table, and I wouldn’t say any of them have particularly good AI. In this case maybe I’m just expecting too much from the simulator.

Haha, that reminds me of another thing: If you restart a race, don't expect your opponents to drive differently. Like IGN said "Also, when grinding an event, as necessitated by the game's archaic structure, you can't help but feel a serious sense of déjà vu overcoming you, as the same Nissan Skyline spins off on the same corner and obstructs the same piece of tarmac.". So after all, we still have a somewhat redundant AI of opposition drivers.

How don't you 'get' the tuning element in a racing game? Think of the currency you win from races as though it were experience points from a battle in a RPG. You just go and pick your stats boosts (Car upgrades) to make your characters stronger (Cars faster). I'm sure some people don't care for level building in a jap RPG, but I really enjoy the element of strengthening my characters.

Speaking as someone who enjoys racing games, I found the fiddling and tweaking element to be very entertaining. There is something so cool about taking a production car that drives like one, and modifying it until it turns into a full fledged race car. As you modify the vehicle, the changes that are made are discernible in the way the vehicle handles, and I find that to be a really rewarding / interesting element of the gameplay. It is also really cool how different vehicles all behave differently on the racetrack, so when you drive a Porche, you feel like you are actually driving a Porche, not just a car that happens to look like one.

By comparison, I have always found that the arcade style racer lacks the dept that a racing sim has. I find just driving a few courses to be boring since the experience becomes stagnant very fast. With a sim, the fact that you've driving a match three times on the same course doesn't nearly matter as much because it can be a different experience each time depending on what car you decide to pull out of your garage for that particular event. I guess for me, the whole experience is as much about owning and modifying vehicles as it is about driving them.

Sadly, the more I play this game, the more obvious the cracks become (the AI seems better at first, but on repeated plays it's like watching replays), and the more true this statement becomes:
[ source ]

I'm still against people calling it a demo as some sort of attack, but yes, it does boil down to being a demo, plain and simple. There's a lot of work for them to do before Gran Turismo 5 and I seriously hope they take on board any feedback coming back from players.

Skills will cite the UI as an area of weakness, and with good reason. It's a bare-bones affair, which I have nothing against, but some elements are just plain counter-intuitive. In order to see the events you have to buy your first car, but then you see the events and realise a lot of them require specific cars, or types of cars, so you'll be blocked from most races from the off. I'm still not sure why you can't tune cars from the off either.

It shows glimmers of promise and hints at what could make it into the full game. Unfortunately I think too many other games have come along and overtaken the Gran Turismo series in so many aspects that it starts to feel somewhat dated. There's very little excitement to the races, and very little feeling of competing in a race event. It remains an exceptionally pretty game and a good showcase of the PS3's capabilities on the graphical front. Would be a lot more impressive if there were damage.

However, the biggest disappointment so far has to be the complete inability to set up an online race with friends. You can't do it. It's just not possible, which is completely rubbish. It's not terrible, and split-screen could be quite good fun, but I can't help but feel more disappointed the more I play.

I wouldn't worry too much about the anything other than the physics model being indicitave of the full version of GT5. Did you ever play GT:Concept? There was fuck all in the way of menus or options, no tuning at all and not even any other cars on the track. It was just you driving round and round the beautifully rendered tracks in a bunch of concept cars. The one thing it did have though was the updated physics model which at the time had been significantly altered from the previous games and took a little getting used to.

I won't argue with you that GT isn't the most white-knuckle thrill ride of a racing game but I don't think it's ever tried to be. For me at any rate, GT has always been about improving your lap times rather than beating other racers. The tuning system lends itself to tweaking, adjustments that gain you a fraction of a second a lap rather than winning you races. The AI cars are there to provide the occasional challenge of getting off-line and passing, rather than to jostle and bump in a battle for position and for me the lack of damage has never been an issue because if you're hitting things, you're playing it wrong. The game pertains to be a driving simulator more than anything else and in high-spec sports cars, if you hit anything, even a nudge on another car it generally spells race over. Obviously in a racing game this would just be annoying and nobody would want to play it but the introduction of time penalties for crashes has added another reason not to drive into things and any race where I crash heavily into something isn't one I'd want to watch the replay of.

I have great faith in Polyphony to produce an amazing game in GT5, less faith in them managing to do so before 2011 (GT4 was supposed to be a launch title on the PSP, lol). Gran Turismo will never be an exciting racing game but then it never has been. It panders to people who love cars and want to compare the driving characteristics of cars they'll never get to drive in real life and appeals to people who get more enjoyment out of breaking their personal best lap record than from smashing a bunch of other cars out the way and winning by half a length. There are numerous other games that do that very well and I suspect that the GT team aren't really too bothered about trying to compete with them.

the problem with the way crashing handles and contact between vehicles in general is really an issue for GT(at least in GT4 it was). Remember all those "overtake during this turn" missions or something? that you have to take certain line and pass an AI opponent? you can just win all of those by crashing the AI from behind while it is braking, it will go flying outside of the track and get stuck there and you can just get back into the track and finish the mission with no effort whatsoever. Sure if you crash into something you are not driving the best you can... but if it can reward you like that it really needs fixing.

That's true enough but just because you can win a race like that, doesn't mean you should. Also, on the harder setting races, bumping into the back of someone knocked you down to 50mph for ten seconds which can pretty much fuck your race.

The only thing I'm not really liking about GT5: Prologue is the lack of any real tuning options and parts. Sure GT5 will have it, but the lack of those parts means the only way to win a tough race is to buy a faster car. I had to step up from the Lancer X to the Viper! Almost twice the horsepower because I couldn't upgrade anything, and then I had to learn how a new car drove all over again.

That's really been the only frustrating thing I've come to since I bought it.