With Gran Turismo 5 round the corner (hopefully) some lucky people have managed to somehow bag themselves a copy early and have been dripping details onto the Internet like a badly serviced tap. Still, luckily for everyone involved TheSixthAxis have collated them and below is a summary of their findings. All in all, it’s looking quite handy.
The game’s install takes about 40 minutes. You’re warned that it might be closer to 50, but Amar’s installation was done in ten minutes less than that, so it presumably depends a little on your model of PS3 and the hard drive you’ve got installed. The space taken is actually about 6.4GB, but that space gradually unpacks as you’re playing to be closer to the previously mentioned 10GB. In short, better make some room before the game’s release next week.
Steering wheels that feature a clutch do work. Apparently it’s the same process as Gran Turismo 5: Prologue – you have to press triangle before a race, but clutch support is in.
The dashboard view is configurable. Anyone moaning that the steering wheel and dash take up too much screen real-estate when playing from the in-car view will rejoice in the news that you can tweak the ‘interior view angle’ in the game’s ‘Quick Options’ from Standard to Narrow and Narrower, pushing the field of view inwards so that more of the windscreen is visible and less of the dash. Perfect. The HUD map size can also be adjusted.
Tyre and fuel depletion is in. Before a race you can opt for whether you’d like GT5 to simulate the wear and tear of the tyres and whether or not fuel depletion should be a factor in the game. Indeed, revving hard and driving to the limit will use up more fuel just like in real life.
The distinction between Professional and Standard physics has been removed. There’s a new option – Skid Recovery – which helps to simplify some of the physics but there’s no longer a toggle between the two options. Amar says that the physics lay somewhere between Prologue and the GT Academy demo, they’re better and more complex than GT5P and yet more realistic than they were in Academy; they’re the best the series has ever had. Skid Recovery is locked ‘on’ for the early License Tests, too.
The sound is much improved. There’s a clear difference between GT5?s sound and that in previous versions, and the engines sound the best when heard from the roof-mounted camera. There’s no hood-cam, though, which might be disappointing to some. Bumping into other cars now sounds much better, and in 5.1 there’s a distinct doppler effect, especially in replays, that has to be heard to be believed.
Each car you can buy has a ‘demo’ mode. When in the dealership you can watch the car being auto driven on a test track with the car’s description and story scrolling past. The cars go all over the track, up and down, and the engine note is reflected appropriately.
Standard cars look fine. There’s been some internet chatter about the difference between the Standard (pulled from GT4) and the Premium (new to GT5) cars, but Amar says that the Standard ones, whilst obviously not up the level of the super detailed Premium ones, are absolutely fine.
Winning races doesn’t always unlock new cars. Indeed, cars are unlocked as ‘tickets’ which can be redeemed yourself or gifted to others (which is a nice touch) but you can also expect to win paint colours and new horns, both of which are collectable.
Other things of note: there’s 189 songs in the game’s soundtrack; 16 car races feature in the License Tests; the replays (which feature two internal views pointed at the driver, too) are amazing, with incredible lighting effects and the GUI, which we didn’t think that much of in the still shots, is genre leading.
Source: TheSixthAxis
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