Were the GT5 reviews generally unfair?

[nickweir198125]

I'm not really into cars or car games, but I decided to trade Crap Ops for GT5 yesterday since I like to invest in all big PS3 exclusives. I'm completely blown away by it in every respect and glad I made the purchase. After checking a lot of reviews for it online I was a little confused by the lukewarm response it got in general. Yea, it got some good reviews, but it was mostly getting 7/10 with reviewers attacking all kinds of elements within the game.

The amount of content and attention to detail in the game is staggering, but 7/10?? I mean most generic kids games that last 5 hours usually get 7/10

Now think about it, if this game wasn't the well-known Gran Turismo everyone had been waiting for for 6 years, ie it was a largely unknown title that came out of nowhere with that much content, attention to detail and playability, would it have got such a lukewarm response? Probably not.

I get the feeling if this game had been an Xbox exclusive the ratings would have been much higher.

What are the overall thoughts of the game here at the forum?

[Rocky.]

i like the game although i ain't played much of it. plenty replay value. if you love cars. tuning cars and stuff like that then it's a great game. a must for racing fan.

[Radiosity]

A lot of the problems stem from the fact they've taken things that were great in GT4 and removed or broken them, made the game massively tedious when you starting hitting higher levels (and the xp system itself of course, it's a RACING game not an RPG), the overall lack of events, the pisspoor AI, the fact it was rushed out the door too early just to try and sell some more consoles on the runup to Christmas, the 800 low poly standard cars that look kinda crappy compared to the 200 premiums that all the cars should've looked like..... I could go on but you probably get the idea. It was released broken and remains broken to this day, though they have at least adjusted a few things in patches to make it marginally better.

Don't get me wrong though, I've poured a lot of time into the game and enjoyed most of it until I ran out of events. At that point it's a boring grind (literally having to grind 24 hour endurance races to get enough XP to levelup at higher levels, if you can be bothered) to get the last few trophies and there's not much else to do really. Do bear in mind that as you've just got the game (and I assume patched it?) you're seeing it rather better than when we first got it on release, plus you have access to Seasonal Events that weren't in the game originally that do add a little bit of needed variety.

All in all though I think most of the reviews are probably fair, it should've been the king of racing games but thanks to monumentally bad design decisions and a rushed release they've effectively screwed it up badly, angering a lot of fans of the series in the process.

[Sephiroth]

Wow Radiosity interesting review you make the game sound kinda bad :L and saying its rushed after all that development time. :(

[Radiosity]

lol well considered by itself it's ok-ish, still very broken in a lot of ways though. And the whole standard cars deal was just ridiculous, I honestly can't understand how they could only have modelled 200 cars in HD quality after 5-6 years of development. The 800 standard cars were essentially just imported from GT4 and tweaked a little bit which is why they look so bad compared to the premiums.

On the other hand though, when considered as the next title in the series the game falls flat. Things like B-Spec that in GT4 were integrated brilliantly so you could race then hand off to the AI for a while and back again have been destroyed in GT5. Now you have to do all the same identical races again in B-Spec that you just did in A-Spec yourself, except this time with an AI driver who seems to have a fetish for crashing into things. Honestly it wouldn't have been so bad if the B-Spec events were actually different rather than the same as A-Spec.

Endurance races in 4 were great because you could race for a few hours, hand off to your B-Spec driver for a few hours, then retake the driver seat yourself again, making 24 hour races bearable. Now it's separate that means you have to do them TWICE, once for B-Spec (with 3-4 drivers I might add), then again yourself in A-Spec.... except you have to do that entire 24 hour race yourself. With no ability to save when you pit in, so you're in for the long hall basically.

There were other things too, like not being able to adjust gear ratios at all beyond a basic Top Speed setting that adjusted all of the ratios at once. They eventually got around to adding fully custom ratios after about 4 months of the game being out. Even simple little things like restarting a race to grind for cash (more on this in a moment), there was no restart button so you had to load back to the menus and reload the entire race. They patched this to add a restart button in the first patch a month or so after release, but it should've been there from the start.

And finally for now, grinding. In GT4 you could re-race championships and special events to get the prize cars again and sell them for cash. You never really felt like you needed to grind the same races over and again for hours to get money because there were certain decent cars (like the Ford rally car from the second special stage event) that were worth a reasonable amount of money. Events were also worth a decent bit of dosh. Now, events are worth barely anything and you can only win prize cars once. Add to this the frankly stupid decision by polyphony to disallow the selling of any car worth more than about 1million credits and getting money is one helluva tedious grind.

So yeah, I fully stand by my assertion that the game was rushed out just to keep Sony happy at Christmas :)

edit: One other thing I don't understand is the decision to model one of the most important cars of the last century (Bugatti Veyron) in standard detail instead of Premium. Most of the premium stuff was new licenses like the Ferraris and Lambos and so on, as well as new cars that weren't in GT4, so why did the Veyron get such bad treatment? :(

[nickweir198125]

Nice posts Radiosity.
Like I say, I've never played a GT game and I'm a car game noob, so I've less faults to pick with it at this stage.
My original point still stands though; people's general reaction to the game (including reviewers) were based on certain expectations from formulas and standards set in previous GT's, as well as the long wait and hype that was heaped on the game. People feel let down, and the scores reflect that.

From my few hours playing the game, it's pretty obvious there are glaring inconsistencies with some of the visuals. The trees in some of the greener tracks look blocky and pixelated like it's ripped from a PS1 game. Some of the environments in tracks look below par and barely next gen, but some look amazing. It appears they've spent 5 years tweaking and masturbating over the premium cars and thrown together some of the backgrounds at the last minute lol. It hasn't really ruined MY experience of the game though.

The only other thing I dislike about the game at this stage is the horrible menu layouts and also how the game has clearly been marketed towards middle-class yuppies (like the Top Gear crowd). That bloody elevator music can piss off TOO. And WTF is going on with that intro? LOL

Nevermind. I'm having a lot of fun with the game right now. I'll report back in a few weeks if I change my mind. :)

[Navvy7]

I agree with most of the posts here. I have found the game to be enjoyable but it really hasn't moved on as much as I would have hoped. It's still a solid title but now I'm down to grinding xp i'm quickly losing interest and thats a shame. Also I know I'll need a wheel to plat it eventually and I think thats a joke

[nickweir198125]

Is that right? Is the general opinion that the game can't be platted with a controller?

I haven't played this on my main acc yet because I don't want to open it up in there until I know if it's plat worthy. There's no way I'm buying a wheel for it.

[Navvy7]

Is that right? Is the general opinion that the game can't be platted with a controller?

I haven't played this on my main acc yet because I don't want to open it up in there until I know if it's plat worthy. There's no way I'm buying a wheel for it.

My thoughts exactly. I suppose it is technically possible to plat it without the wheel but try and get gold in some of the licences without it, its just plain impossible without a very precise way of steering. It is generally recognized that the wheel is a virtual must-have in order to plat this. Although i'm sure someone has the plat without it I bet they spent a hell of a lot longer getting it for not having a wheel.

Erm, wheel. Didn't say it enough in the post, wheel wheel wheel, rack and pinion power assisted steering device. Nyer.

[Radiosity]

Licenses aren't the problem really, they're all doable with a pad with enough patience. The problem is the Vettel challenge, doing that with a pad and getting golds is essentially impossible.