With the GT Academy now available for PS3 owners to download, we finally have our first proper impressions of the upcoming Gran Turismo 6. People have their own opinions on what we’ve seen so far, and opinion is massively mixed already, but we’ve got our own ideas of what we’d like to see in GT6. With both offline and online thoughts, we’ve no idea if any of this will be included, but it’d be nice to see at least some of them…
Friend-based Leaderboard Tournaments
One thing that I’ve enjoyed with GT5 is teaming up with a few friends to do a Time Trial tournament. GT is at its best when you’re shaving fractions off your lap times, but there’s very little to help you compare your tiles against friends. There are no online leaderboards, no “view friends’ times” options… we’d love to see an option where you can set up mini-competitions with your friends. Pick a track, a specific car and give an expiry time and you’ve got your own personal time trial tournament.
Any Kind of Livery Editor
The limits to existing Gran Turismo paint jobs are slightly frustrating. Even Grid outshines GT5 with its range of designs, colour options and sponsors. Simply changing the colour of the paint on your race-ready Ferrari isn’t really going to make you grow to love it, so some more design options would be great. Even if we don’t get the levels of customisation found on Forza, something akin to Grid 2 would be marvelous.
Aggressive and Adaptive AI
A strong criticism of Gran Turismo is the mindset of the AI drivers. Only dipping away from the racing line in extreme cases, there’s very little in terms of moving across to block your overtaking and not much by way of adapting their racing line to fight back. How cool would it be if you were fighting to preserve your lead, only for the AI driver to take a wider line into a corner to to accelerate sooner and cut beneath you on the following section of track. It’s so rare we see AI like this it would make the world of differemce to GT6, and the racing genre as a whole.
Online Seasons
We’ve covered individual tournaments, but what about an online season? Decide on a set of races, give boundaries for the vehicles accepted and arrange times to show up and race against each other. Why not go all the way and create a mobile app to help you administer and track the tournaments you’re part of? If consoles are going to become more social in the coming years, why not start now? And just think how cool it would be when coupled with…
Improved Track Creator
The track creator tool was nice in GT5, but there wasn’t much you could do with it. Aside from a few sliders you were in the hands of the PS3’s random generator, and even then it was a bit awkward to share your track with people. It’d be a logistical nightmare, and there’s bound to be some technical issues why it’s not possible, but a realistic version of the system used in Modnation or LBP Karting would open up the opportunity for the more creative players in the GT world to come up with realistic versions of their favourite tracks. We could have a full BTCC season, recreate the American Indycar circuits or have some street races through favourite country lanes. All of which sound pretty awesome to us…
A-Synchronous Multiplayer Racing
Not everyone can guarantee getting online at a set time to race against friends. EA found a way round this with their mobile game Real Racing 3, combining your friends’ race times with an AI opponent carrying the same sort of speed needed to get round in the same time. It meant you could play against your friends in your own time instead of having to team up. It wouldn’t replace real online racing, but it’d be a very handy alternative.
More Standing Starts
The start of a race is often the most exciting. Struggling for grip off the line, accelerating hard and diving into the first corner while braking late… you don’t get the same excitement with rolling starts, and while GT5 upped the number of standing starts on offer there were still huge amounts of rolling starts. Racers want that thrill of waiting for the lights, getting as fast a start as possible without jumping the start. For that, you need a proper grid lineup. And imagine if you could do that in combination with the next idea:
Qualifying Sessions
Never mind all this random grid stuff, let’s have a proper race weekend. A qualifying session with a set time limit where players can head onto the track and battle for pole. Why not add more options as well to limit the number of laps? Knowing you’ve got a single lap to get to the front of the grid could add heaps of tension. GT5 had a similar idea, but it was masked in the ability to drive around the track while others were choosing cars and suchlike and was never touted as a qualifying session. It’s all more stuff to make the races feel like actual races instead of one-off trips round a track for no real reason.
Well that’s our racey Christmas list… What would you like to see in GT6?
well i am a hardcore GT fan.
but i must idmit that when i have been racing alot in gt 5, i feel that i really aint getting the opposition that i would like. when seasonal events came i tought of it as brilliant.
but when you get further you kina just get the feeling ure rushing to gain the lead its not hard just add SS racing tiers and ure good too go.
there are no fun in that altough, and when i play GT5 whit my friends i am the only one able to cover that lead. my friends are not at all poor drivers. its just that when ure starting a 5 lap race 25 sec behind some1 as fast as you and all the other AI in between are slower there are reallt not much help in trying too use slipstreams.
what i would like is like i experienced once i were driving and i had a very “grippy” car i caught up whit the Cerbera speed 12, and after the corner he just said bye bye baby too me and took of like a friggin bullet. altough i caught back up and passed him in the next corner waaay to easy i just really felt at that moment that i was working to gain the lead.
i want more of that
more PP limits more grid starts and most of all harder AI and all the cars should be close to eachother racing in packs are so much more exiting. please contact me if you want more specific details. i got tons!