It's nearly here: Gran Turismo Sport will be the first Gran Turismo for the PS4 generation. That's okay. The wait has been bearable. For four years. I totally haven't been sweating it. Like, at all.
If you want, we could talk about how Gran Turismo Sport will only have 150 cars in it—the lowest car count since the Gran Turismo series launched in 1997. And a lot lower than Gran Turismo 6 from 2013 and it's 1,226 cars. At 28 tracks, it's also got the lowest track count since Gran Turismo 2 in 1999. On paper, these numbers don't look great. We're well into the age of DLC and season passes, however, and though there's no paid DLC confirmed, I would make a very easy bet that it's involved somehow. You don't go from 1,226 cars down to 150 (at launch) and not have a plan for monetizing the inclusion of a lot more cars. Do you? Do you?
Either way, up on the screen, I'm having a harder time holding a grudge.
This video opens with a shot of the inside corner on the Interlagos Circuit, and then the shots pan out from there. Racing games epitomize "where the rubber meets the road," so Gran Turismo Sport would love for you to meet the road first. The imperfections, the road dust, the pock marks, the light granularity, all of it. Then the video wants to show you the stands with all their brutalist industrial steel angles, like it's the deck of an aircraft carrier stretched out for cars. Then there's the huge, not-all-that-pretty tracts of land and warehouse-style buildings that make up the middle of this enormous track. Then, because this is the Interlagos Circuit, the density of Sao Paolo, Brazil, packs itself together in the background.
You can tell this is all rendered in-game, because the crowd in the stadium is dense but moves with the stiff herky-jerkiness of a game that's a racing game, not a look-at-the-crowd game. I can't speak for the micro shots of the grass and roads, but it doesn't look like much if any touching up was done to the video.
Expect more tracks to be showcased over the next two weeks.
Gran Turismo Sport is a PS4 exclusive and launches October 17.
