With over 75 million copies sold the Gran Turismo franchise remains the highest-selling series in Sony’s stable, and yet its presence at E3 this year was relatively understated. Gran Turismo Sport occupied a moderate slice of floorspace at Sony’s booth but it only snared a few seconds of airtime during Sony’s highly-praised press conference.
Nudged from Sony’s own spotlight, and facing more competition than ever before, GT Sport represents an extremely important game for the idiosyncratic series. According to franchise overlord Kazunori Yamauchi, GT Sport offers a level of innovation not seen since the original Gran Turismo, and it has reportedly been stripped and rebuilt from scratch for its PS4 debut.
But while that may well be the case, it certainly feels for now as if it’s all been put back together in largely the same way.
Of course, that means impeccably lavish car models and clean, elegant menus, and it means incredibly nuanced driving dynamics (the sense of weight, and the way vehicles squirrel around anxiously under threshold braking, has probably never been better in the series).
GT Sport succeeds in making something look more realistic by making it less perfect.
Unfortunately, it also appears to mean several of the same flaws, repackaged for a new generation. Although damage is supposedly set to be a part of the finished game it remains totally absent in the E3 build so (for now, at least) the racing still feels sterile compared to the intense and ferocious doorhandle-to-doorhandle stuff of something like Project CARS. The audio has actually improved – it’s slightly more layered and nuanced – but it still lacks the bark and bite that, say, Evolution achieved with Driveclub.
GT Sport, as such, has left me with very mixed impressions. For every part of the E3 build that had me thoroughly impressed there seemed to be something else that left me hesitant. For instance, in a subtle but extremely welcome touch I noted that one of GT Sport’s included Audi LMP cars is so immaculately recreated that even the battle scars of many long stints of endurance racing have been included on the in-game model. If there’s one thing that games often get wrong about race cars is that, close up, they don’t look like they’ve just rolled out of a showroom. GT Sport succeeds in making something look more realistic by making it less perfect.
Gran Turismo Sport is at once instantly recognisable as a GT game but it still seems to be wanting in familiar areas.
That said, however, I didn’t note the effect on any other race vehicle in the E3 demo line-up, and I’m a little concerned about the car roster overall. GT Sport’s quality over quantity approach has been a long time coming (GT Sport will feature around 140 cars; a fraction of GT6’s garage) but I haven’t spotted a single car built before 2009 yet. This leaves me worried about the sort of breadth and variety we should expect, especially compared to the deep and eclectic garage featured in Microsoft’s latest Gran Turismo-inspired car collectathon Forza Motorsport 6, plus the decades of racing machines available within independent racing sim competitors Project CARS and Assetto Corsa.
The PS4 versions of real-world tracks Willow Springs, Brands Hatch, and the Nürburgring Nordschleife look amazing in the E3 build and are truly wonderfully lit, but I didn’t really warm much to the two new fantasy courses – a half-mile oval and a Tokyo street circuit. The latter is narrow and filled with elevation changes, but it’s also a little bland-looking compared to great past GT fantasy tracks like Deep Forest, or Apricot Hill.
Gran Turismo Sport is at once instantly recognisable as a GT game but it still seems to be wanting in familiar areas, and its hefty focus on eSports is a very big shift for the stalwart series. It’s tough for me to gauge what long-time GT veterans will feel about it, to be honest, and I don’t quite know what to make of it myself at this stage.
For a full overview of GT Sport's previously discussed eSport aspirations head here.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.
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