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Games and Sports

Will Gran Turismo 4 Miss XMas?

When I received my weekly update from gamesindustry.biz today, I was a bit disappointed to read that there are rumors that Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation 2 may miss a Christmas 2004 release date in the United States. In the games industry, missing the biggest shopping season of the year is usually a sign that something catastrophic has happened in the development process. This tends to be supported by the observation that games that get pushed out the door in order to meet the holidays or a movie release date (cough!Matrix!cough!!), tend to be full of bugs.

Without any other information, I can only speculate that further delays in Gran Turismo 4 are due to performance issues related to online network play. Why? Because network play is the biggest thing to be added to the next iteration of the series and easily the most complex. Players have come to expect a lot of what is arguably the greatest driving game ever. If the framerate drops to 20fps when you hook up with your buddies to race online, that will be big trouble! High resolution graphics, detailed models, and online play may not get along too well on the PS2. If that is the case, Polyphony’s engineers may be madly rebuilding and tweaking the car models even as we speak in order to get acceptable performance. Don’t be too surprised if the maximum number of players able to race online drops from 6 to 4. The upcoming NASCAR 2005 from EA only supports 4 online players on Xbox and PS2 and the car models and environments probably are not nearly as complex as Gran Turismo is reported to be. The Xbox can probably support more online players, but they likely develop from a shared code base which means having to meet the lowest common denominator. That is, the PS2 may not have the horses to support more than 4 online racers.

I might further speculate that development of Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation Portable (PSP) due out in Japan next Spring, could be interfering as well. It has been reported that GT for PSP will be nearly a straight port of the PS2 version. Assuming the same team is working on both versions, the need to port to the PSP may place constraints on available solutions to other development problems. The bottom line is that it all takes more time, and the feature set may be reduced in order to get the thing out.

This is of course all speculative and could be completely wrong. It doesn’t really matter though because whenever it comes out GT4 will be a huge hit and it will be good. It has to be.

When I received my weekly update from gamesindustry.biz today, I was a bit disappointed to read that there are rumors that Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation 2 may miss a Christmas 2004 release date in the United States. In the games industry, missing the biggest shopping season of the year is usually a sign that something catastrophic has happened in the development process. This tends to be supported by the observation that games that get pushed out the door in order to meet the holidays or a movie release date (cough!Matrix!cough!!), tend to be full of bugs.

Without any other information, I can only speculate that further delays in Gran Turismo 4 are due to performance issues related to online network play. Why? Because network play is the biggest thing to be added to the next iteration of the series and easily the most complex. Players have come to expect a lot of what is arguably the greatest driving game ever. If the framerate drops to 20fps when you hook up with your buddies to race online, that will be big trouble! High resolution graphics, detailed models, and online play may not get along too well on the PS2. If that is the case, Polyphony’s engineers may be madly rebuilding and tweaking the car models even as we speak in order to get acceptable performance. Don’t be too surprised if the maximum number of players able to race online drops from 6 to 4. The upcoming NASCAR 2005 from EA only supports 4 online players on Xbox and PS2 and the car models and environments probably are not nearly as complex as Gran Turismo is reported to be. The Xbox can probably support more online players, but they likely develop from a shared code base which means having to meet the lowest common denominator. That is, the PS2 may not have the horses to support more than 4 online racers.

I might further speculate that development of Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation Portable (PSP) due out in Japan next Spring, could be interfering as well. It has been reported that GT for PSP will be nearly a straight port of the PS2 version. Assuming the same team is working on both versions, the need to port to the PSP may place constraints on available solutions to other development problems. The bottom line is that it all takes more time, and the feature set may be reduced in order to get the thing out.

This is of course all speculative and could be completely wrong. It doesn’t really matter though because whenever it comes out GT4 will be a huge hit and it will be good. It has to be.