Gran Turismo 5 - Drop the 5?

I wrote a proper blog post about this around a week ago, but I forgot to save it before I moved onto something else…so it got lost.

The short version was that I started playing Gran Turismo 5, and despite really enjoying it, there’s a few things that I thought would have been interesting to introduce/change.

Horrible, HORRIBLE UI aside, the biggest thing I’d liked to have seen would have been to drop the ‘5’ from the name…yep, that’s it. Why? Well, with all the delays, announcements, removal of features, half-assed-ness of implementation of others…if Sony and Polyphony had been ‘smart’ about managing these decisions, they could have justified them a little better, and eased the ‘pain’ of those feeling like 6 years still wasn’t enough time…. because there’s no doubt about it, GT5 in 12 months time will be a very different game, in terms of content, than it is now.

Dropping the 5 from the name would have allowed the latest instalment in the Gran Turismo series be seen as a completely new start…pretty much offering it as a platform, rather than a disc release that is traditionally seen as a ‘fire and forget’ release on consoles. PC games have been doing it for years…and it’s worked pretty well, especially for MMOs…and yes, I know that a LOT of console gamers aren’t connected, or don’t have the ability to download massive patches, but if there is a game that would actually be able to achieve this method of content delivery post-release, then Gran Turismo could have been the one. There are already people who are pissed off that the latest updated brought in a load of new features and improvements, and dropping the 5 from the name wouldn’t have made them any happier, but at least they would have known what they were getting themselves into, non?