When Kazunori Yamauchi’s latest entry in the Gran Turismo lineage finally arrived last November, it was greeted with muted fanfare by press and players alike. After an exorbitant development period, the widespread expectation was that it would deliver both a format flagship for Sony and a genre leader for racing fans - the finished product was almost doomed to fail in both regards.
But now, with nearly a year of continued patching, updates and content additions under its belt, it’s safe to say that Kazunori’s most exhaustive love letter to the automobile has matured into a much more modern game than you'd expect.
That is, with a lack of the overtly quantised and pressurised socialisation that frames contemporary racing games. In other games, preserving player retention through friend-based competition and comparison is becoming something of design benchmark. In its launch form, Gran Turismo 5 featured 16-player online racing (which, plagued with downtime and traffic issues, had a shaky start) and an embryonic social aspect, with players offered adequate, although rudimentary, options for creating their own online profiles and friend-based communities. Every win, purchase and car change is logged, visible to anyone within the player’s own group and any owned car could be traded or gifted with minimal fuss.
One of the simplified interiors for the 800+ standard cars included in the game
‘Could’ being the significant word here, as wily traders soon realised that abusing the save backup function of the PS3 allowed cars to be duplicated and then sold in-game to accrue huge piles of credits. Although Polyphony issued regular updates in the month following release, they were mostly to tweak and stabilise online multiplayer, and this exploit wasn’t closed until January 2011, when a one-million-credit limit was set for car transactions between players.
December, however, saw a curiously festive gift arrive in the form of ‘Seasonal Events’, which formed part of an update that launched just five days before Christmas. Comprising races, time trials and drift trials, Seasonal Events originally started as temporary challenges with large credit rewards. Initially running for just a month before being taken down, events in 2011 would mutate into an entirely new game mode for singleplayer, with new events added weekly and never expiring after PSN returned from its catastrophic hack.
In tandem with the weekly new events came the Online Collector’s Dealership (OCD - yes, really), a variant of the game’s Used Car Dealership (UCD). After each race, practice or licence test, the UCD semi-randomly shuffled through the game’s colossal 800-odd database of cars not available from the manufacturer dealerships to present a small line-up as available for purchase. Even though this was taken from the entire set of ‘standard’ car models (as in, those imported from PS2 and PSP predecessors), it represented a hunting ground for Gran Turismo’s greatest exotica, though discovering vintage specials and 1980s Le Mans prototypes within in the oft-observed “sea of Mazdas and Skylines” was a tortuous wild goose chase resulting more often in disappointment and indifference than glee and excitement.