Having played the shit out of GT2 and 4, a fair bit of 3, and had a go at in-store displays of GT5... some tips for GT5 Extra Stage or whatever.
1. TURN ON FULLSCREEN ANTI ALIASING FOR PITYS SAKE. Jaggies, in 2011? Piss off.
2. Learn how people actually use the clutch when driving manual transmissions quickly. I swear the developers think it works like the one in a scooter but with some kind of bias that means it will eventually bite enough to stall the engine if you're in too high a gear.
3. Stop making hilarious levels of traction control, spin control and ABS the norm. You want it to be a driving sim and something of a challenge, stop making the cars handle like micro machines. Besides, the AI players don't seem to have that stuff on and they can corner faster...
(yes I know they can be turned off - I take umbrage at having to cock about going through looking where to do it (for EACH AND EVERY BLOODY CAR) or to reduce it to the minimum "stop it going totally gaga but allow me some drifting" level for the wilder beasts, down from the "I want to be swaddled in cotton wool and never allowed to spin out even though this is a simulation not real life" default. If I'm CRAP at the game, THEN I should be having to go through finding the setting marked "I don't know how to drive with any finesse even though the controls are totally analogue these days, stop the car from losing control thanks". It seems to assume godly skills in all other areas after all, e.g. the license tests)
4. A little bit of mercy when balancing the AI drivers against the player would be nice as well. Instead of picking a field of ex-F1 pros all of whom are in cars with 50% more horsepower (or more) than you.
(OK, hopefully that one's been fixed from what I've seen, but it's been a complete nightmare in previous ones where you'd have an otherwise perfectly good car, suitable for the class of competition you're in - or doing one of the "free entry" races where it's supposed to give you evenly matched opponents - and you suddenly find you haven't a snowball's chance of getting out of last place)
5. Please can we have the usefully detailed dyno chart and transmission data screens back from GT2? Something that has axes labelled "1000rpm ----- 7000rpm" and "0HP ---- 300HP" with a chunky as hell low-detail curve on it, and totally a totally unlabelled gear range line graph where the line for one gear only starts at the revlimiter of the next, is damn near useless. I've taken digital photos of the screen before and loaded them into paintshop in order to fill in the missing gridlines and get half an idea of where a good shift point would be.
Or heck, have a mode where the game calculates it itself (no magic to it: you change up at the point where the lower gear is no longer making more power than the higher one - and when setting up the transmission, try to get the gears as close together and evenly-spaced as possible without making 1st too high or top too low) and shows a shift light, like in a real racing car.
(thus far they've had shift lights, but of the painfully useless kind which just flashes when you hit the redline. only of value if a/ you've somehow set it up to have a shiftlight but no tacho (you can't do that) and b/ your gears are all nicely balanced so that redline is the best place for it in all gears (usually they're not; particularly if it's still got the road transmission it's too low at first then too high)
6. Stop using the same engine noise sample over multiple vehicles even when they have totally different engines in... apparently they've actually sampled every single car individually this time. I'll believe it when I hear the old Fiat 500 giving out a different sound to the old Ford Ka, but the two new ones making the same as each other (and still different from the first 2). (That's an aircooled 2-pot boxer, watercooled 4-pot pushrod, and ... I think 3-pot? 16v DOHC ... which quite easily would have made the same dreadful noise before).
7. Revlimiters act on this simple principle: Measure the time in between crankshaft rotation sensor pulses. Does it work out to a value which puts the engine speed within the permissable range? If yes, allow cylinder to fire. If not, don't. Not "if the ill-defined revlimit is reached, kill power entirely until rpms drop out of the red zone, regardless of how large it is". I've lost races because of this bullcrap before.
8. Cornering, braking or accelerating a little hard does not automatically lead to ten seconds of ear-bending tyre screech. I HAVE done it some times before, but not even sure I can remember recently dragging a genuine hollywood "errrrrkkk!!!" out of my tyres even when hurling my car about quite enthusiastically. Some scuffing noises and a whole lot of axle tramp up front, yes, but screeching is a sign that either a/ you're in a car park with that horrible slippery concrete-esque stuff, b/ you're REALLY hammering it, to the point of nearly losing control and crashing. Yes, that on-the-limit handling is an intrinsic part of racing, but it's a bit much to be bombarded with that noise taking a gently sweeping corner at full throttle ... in 4th gear ... in a starter car.
9. Please let us drive with non-dirt or snow tyres on the special surface tracks. I bet it'd be well funny. Particularly if the new damage system means you can stuff the car arse-first into a snowbank.
10. Run a single, lo-fi sim of the first lap in the machine's memory before allowing the race to start. If no more than one of the cars complete the lap, or it appears impossible for the player's car to do so - even with tacking or going up in reverse - throw an error.
(Yes, this happens with some of the lower power-to-weight vehicles on the steeper courses, unless you specifically equip them with mountaineer transmissions or employ fancy tricks)
11. Sanity check the engine-vehicle-transmission combos before releasing game to market. If you've a sporty model easily revving out at the origin country's speedlimit or less, or it appears impossible to maintain forward motion in one or more of the upper gears (and first is really tall, and there are huuuuge gaps between), someone's cocked up.
12. Introduce some kind of character or soul to the whole thing, and maybe some kind of well defined overall goal. I still find it an entertaining challenge, and certainly a cool toy to play with, but it's very clinical ... it doesn't really feel like a "game", yknow?
(This may have been fixed with the introduction of the extra playmodes...)
14. Lose the 83 million variations of japanese family saloon (what the hell is the difference in a racing game between a honda camry GL, GLS, GLX, wierdlynamedspecialedition, available in five different impossible-to-tell-apart engine specs?) and use the space on including a few more interesting, unique and also really rather common and notable-by-their-absence models from other regions. If hideki masamoto, 43, insurance agent for amagatchi mutual fund, father of 3, can get to drive the exact end-of-line model he owned twelve years ago, right down to the indicators being clear rather than tinted, I'd quite like to be able to have a truck about in something that sort-of LOOKS like the 10-yr-old million-selling vehicle I'm currently driving in real life, instead of having to plump for the coupe version of the generation that came after - and not even finding anything CLOSE to the (similarly wildly popular... in europe/africa/south america/australia but not japan/USA) two cars I had before it.
Ugh ... I think I'm done there. Maybe.
Oh yeah ...
15. User-suggestible DLC. If the car I was looking for above wasn't available, I'd pay a few pounds for the ability to load it in as an add-on, subject to enough other players also registering interest for it to be worth the studio's while tracking down an example model, 3D modelling it, recording the sound, running it on a dyno and testing the handling.
(Note that at the current price, you're paying maybe a few pennies for each of the ready-included vehicles, so adding a further 1000 on top at even £1 per individual download may be quite lucrative even if each one is nowhere near as popular...)
Heck even let us have a go at making our own with some kind of tool, and submitting them for tweaking..
.... hahahah... aaaaahahahahaha hahahah .... phew... ahem. Sorry, what am I saying. This is Sony for heaven's sake. But we can dream.
(Some of these points, like the jaggies et al, experienced whilst playing the in-store version, are why I won't be shelling for GT5 until it's on platinum, and even then I may either wait and see if an extended version or GT6 is in the works, or go for a rival series instead like PGR... or even NFS... I used to play that and the latest one looks right good fun)
