Virtual racing fans, get ready for an epic holiday season: Sony has just released the sixth installment of the Gran Turismo video game series in time for the title’s 15th birthday. Once again, the game is available only for PlayStation, but Xbox users can rejoice in a new Forza Motorsport release. (Couple these two titles with Grand Theft Auto V, and it’s looking like we’ll be contentedly holed up for the winter in front of our tubes.) We spent the past few days cramming in some digital seat time in GT6 to bring you our impressions. But first, the big picture: Unlike Gran Turismo 5, GT6 doesn’t represent as big of a jump over its predecessor—but it also didn’t take forever to create. Whereas the chasm of time between the release of GT4 and GT5 made our heads hurt, GT6 is here barely three years after GT5 first hit shelves in 2010. Here’s what Sony’s quick turnaround hath wrought:
Cars, at launch:
1207
Track locations, at launch:
37
Tracks based on real-life circuits:
17
Nissan Skyline variations:
28
Toyota Prius models:
3
Toyota Prius models GT6 could do without:
3
Lunar Rovers:
1
Hours spent playing:
12.37
Girlfriends lost while playing:
0
Original Gran Turismo release date (Japan):
December 23, 1997
Gran Turismo 6 release date:
December 6, 2013
More of More
Gran Turismo has, classically, offered what some might consider too many cars—if that’s even possible. When the fifth installment of the series launched in 2010, it hit the scene with a little more than 1000 cars before downloadable content packs added to that total. GT6 ups that figure to more than 1200, and although some are cool additions—see the DeltaWing, the C7 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, and the Pagani Huayra—there a lot of key omissions. Factory Porsches are still not a part of the GT experience, there is no McLaren P1 (it’s in Forza Motorsport 5), and SRT’s latest Viper is missing in action, as well. There are still a silly number of variations of oddball Japanese economy cars, as well as an excessive number of minute trim levels of that nation’s sports cars. We get it that the GT series is largely furnished by the Land of the Rising Sun, but a little balance would be nice.
The big news is that unlike GT5, in which only a fraction of the cars were rendered in full-bore “Premium” detail, all the metal in GT6 is rendered to the same level. That excludes full interiors, though, which are still segregated among the more interesting offerings. Gran Turismo’s list of tracks has expanded, and notable additions include Willow Springs, Silverstone, the Goodwood Hillclimb, and Spain’s Ascari circuit. The game’s basic structure carries over unchanged, but the main menu items are now assembled in a tiled app-like fashion that’s far less cluttered than GT5’s cluster of a menu screen. Arcade, Career, and Online modes carry over, and the main menu is also home to the game’s virtual dealership where you can buy cars. GT5’s discounted “used-car” dealership is gone, however, although players can now tune and modify every car in the game, which is a plus. Everything in the game still runs off of credits, which are earned by winning races or can be purchased online.
Bust Out Those Calculators, It’s Physics Time!
Because GT6 is optimized for PlayStation 3—and not the new, more powerful PlayStation 4 console—we didn’t detect an uptick in the game’s graphic qualities. Sure, it’s nice that all the cars are now rendered to the same exacting detail, but don’t expect to be blown away by otherworldly visual realism, and crashing still has no tangible effect on vehicle appearance. (Full-throttle, top-speed hits add dents, which mostly look like dirt smudges; hit a lot of stuff, and your car will look dirty, but that’s it.) You can expect to be impressed by GT6’s retooled physics engine, which takes the game from an already competent simulator to an even higher level.
Sony managed to work a variety of new vehicle-altering parameters into GT6, including realistic tire physics; vehicle-dependent aerodynamics that can take into account the car’s orientation and direction of travel; and suspensions tuned based on what Sony calls “actual vehicle analysis.” We’ll spare you the boring run-down of GT6’s fresh lines of code and skip to the part that matters: Cars are now more sensitive to weight transfer both side to side and fore and aft, and the tire dynamics transform the way cars in the game respond to inputs. Whether you use a controller or a good steering wheel (like the Logitech unit we tested GT6 with), the sensation of grip—and when it lets go—is more tangible than before.
This also means, for you easy-going gamers out there, that GT6 is appreciably more difficult. We found that using the controller alleviated most of this, but if you’re a wheel-and-pedal-dependent player, get ready for a challenge. The realistic dynamics reward snappy transient responses with pirouettes, and putting a tire into the dirt while on power will quickly send a car awry. The game’s realism remains a selling point, but it’s no longer the only reason for casual gamers to pass up GT6. That responsibility falls to the game’s awful Arcade mode, which, out of the box, only lets players drive a handful of pre-selected cars. We assume that the more cars you unlock while progressing through the game’s Career mode, the more will be available in Arcade, but there are still woefully few choices—a step backward from GT5.
Armchair Racing, (Nearly) Perfected
As for Career mode, where most hard-core driving-simulator guys will spend their time, there are still multiple racing classes and still the odd license tests to ascend to higher levels. This is where GT6 shines, because it will take players a while to move through the game, and the incrementally higher difficulty presented by each new level will keep you hooked. We breezed through the Novice level in about an hour, but upon reaching the next step, National B, we faced seemingly exponentially more races and noticeably harder racing. We expect to spend a lot of time working up through the National A, International B, International A, and Super categories. Our only gripe in this area was that the game forces you to buy a 2010 Honda Fit RS as your first car, instead of leaving you to chose from a list of Novice-eligible rides. We didn’t spend any time in Online mode, mostly because it wasn’t very populated during our pre-release review. Even so, based on our experience with GT5, it should prove nearly as engrossing as Career mode.
First Drive: 2015 Nissan GT-R / GT-R NISMO
Feature: Hyping Hypercars—2014 Ferrari LaFerrari vs. 2014 McLaren P1, Lamborghini Veneno
First Drive: 2013 Pagani Huayra
For all its simulator-quality game dynamics, immersive racing experience, and impressive car and track stats, GT6 feels slightly disappointing. The incremental improvements in gameplay and detail quality are nice, but the downgraded Arcade mode and lack of a Big Step Forward feature offset those gains in our book, leaving GT6 feeling much like GT5. Rumor has it that the next Gran Turismo game, GT7, could arrive as soon as one year from now, optimized for PlayStation 4; playing GT6, one gets the sense that it’s a placeholder for that title. If you must have the most realistic driving sim out there, GT6 is it, but if not for our zeal for armchair racing between now and GT7’s release, we’d wait for GT7.