Gran Turismo 6: The empire strikes back

The end of 2013 has been a pretty special time for console racers. A couple of weeks ago, the Xbox One arrived on shelves with the flawed-but-compelling Forza Motorsport 5. Now PS3 owners have their turn in the spotlight with Gran Turismo 6, the latest installment of Polyphony Digital’s legendary franchise. Going into this review, I was eager to find out if the underwhelming GT5 was the start of a terminal decline or if creator Kazunori Yamauchi and his team knocked it out of the park.

A brief history of Gran Turismo

The GT series of games spans three console generations and more than a decade and a half of time. The original Gran Turismo on the original PlayStation blew my mind in 1997, setting a new standard for what gamers could expect from a racing game. Mario Kart was fun and Codemasters’ TOCA Touring Cars had its moments, but GT was more than a game; it was a digital expression of love for the automobile. Contemporary rivals like Ridge Racer didn’t feature real cars, and even ones that did, like Need for Speed II, felt more like driving the idea of a car than a simulation of one.
GT came packed with 140 virtual representations that behaved like their real counterparts (as much as that was possible with that generation's hardware) and introduced a generation across the world to cult Japanese performance cars like the Subaru Impreza WRX and Nissan Skyline GT-R. Progress through the game involved a series of license tests, some of which could be maddeningly difficult, but the effect on one’s nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmentum area was hard to overstate. How else to explain all those late nights spent trying to thread cars between slalom cones like a lab animal repeatedly pushing a lever to gain a reward? Not to mention the odd broken controller, rendered nonfunctional after a frustration-induced meeting with the wall.

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GT2 followed in 2000, packed onto two CDs, one of which had a scratch-and-sniff coating (burnt rubber, if I recall correctly). Reflecting the first game’s global success, GT2 expanded the first game’s stable of primarily Japanese and American cars to include European marques like Alfa Romeo, BMW, Peugeot, and TVR. Particular favorites included the Ford Ka, which I happened to own at the time, and Renault’s absolutely bonkers Espace F1.
A mere 18 months later, GT3 A-Spec arrived, this time on the PS2. Despite being much smaller in scope, with only 180 cars, it looked and sounded spectacular for the time and featured a new, much more realistic physics model (sound familiar to anyone)? In particular I still remember being stunned at the sunlight streaming through the trees on Trial Mountain. Fast-forward four years to GT4. Former Ars Games Editor Ben Kuchera thought it was probably the best car game of its time, but cracks were starting to appear, and by then a significant rival had appeared on the scene in Forza.
What followed from there reminds me of what happens when a successful band retreats into the studio with a bag of drugs large enough to rival their egos, emerging after too long a pause with an introspective, self-absorbed mess of an album. A couple of teasers had whetted our appetites—2006’s GT HD and 2007’s GT: Prologue—but it would be a full six years between GT4 and the mess of Gran Turismo 5.
Yes, the PS3 was notoriously difficult to develop for, at least at first. But when your development team keeps going back to re-render the Nurburgring because the graffiti had changed, well, it might be time for an intervention. Four out of five cars in GT5 were ported over from GT4, and they looked terrible. The AI had deteriorated with successive games and could now be called artificial but not really intelligent in any sense. The game’s UI was beyond frustrating. Despite this, it still looked better than Forza Motorsport 3, and I gave it the nod when it came to how the cars handled. Patches and an update arrived, but once Forza Motorsport 4 pulled up to the grid, my PS3 sat gathering dust.

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The team at Polyphony Digital was going to need to pull the stops out with GT6 to win me back, and I’m happy to tell you that as far as I’m concerned, that’s just what it has done.

Drivers, start your engines

Despite the fact that Sony’s gaming headlines are dominated by the new PS4 console, GT6 is a PS3 game. Given the inflexibility associated with being a launch title and Polyphony Digital’s tortured relationship with deadlines, this decision makes a lot of sense. It also makes direct comparisons with Forza Motorsport 5 somewhat difficult, a fact that works in both games' favor in some ways.

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The first thing you’ll notice on the home screen is the redesigned UI: It’s clean, it’s intuitive, and it’s fast. Almost everything lives on this page: your cars; online, arcade, and career modes; the car dealerships; tuning and customization; some special races; and photo mode. It’s a simple, snappy left-to-right scroll that's very welcome.

Enlarge / The new UI is clean and intuitive.

You only have the option of buying a single car at first: a Honda Fit. Fear not, though—once you’ve spent the requisite credits on this little grocery getter, every other car in the game becomes available to buy, as long as you’ve got the requisite credits. That means there's no more need to repeatedly check to see if the model you need to complete a series has shown up in the now-defunct used car dealership.
And are there a lot of cars! Over 1,200 now, all of which have been rendered to the same standard as GT5’s premium cars. That detail only applies to the exteriors, though; the majority still have the same generic cockpit views as GT5’s standard cars after the title update. This would annoy me more if I didn't generally play the game using the behind-the-bumper camera, which I still think provides the best experience. I’m prepared to accept that some people will disagree.

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 In true GT fashion, that 1,200 car lineup does include quite a few that will seem almost identical to all but the most committed otaku. There are 34 different varieties of Honda (and Acura) NSX and 27 different S2000s, for example, despite the fact that neither car changed very much over their model lives. But there are some gems in there: Gordon Murray’s Light Car Company Rocket joins his iconic McLaren F1, Elon Musk’s Model S is present (which should make Senior Reviews Editor and Chief Tesla Fan Lee Hutchinson very happy), and of course my beloved Ford Ka is there. The tuning restrictions that previously afflicted the ported cars no longer apply either, but the somewhat irritating paint system carries over from GT5, and custom liveries in the vein of Forza are still left to our wish lists.

Making a career of it

Career mode follows the traditional format, with escalating difficulty in each license level. In addition to earning credits, you’re awarded stars for finishing in the top three, one for bronze, two for silver, three for gold. Earning a certain percentage of stars in each license level unlocks the special missions, one-make races, license tests, and eventually the next level.
Taking to the track reveals a lot of the under-the-hood updates that Polyphony Digital has been working on over the past couple years in conjunction with tire company Yokohama and suspension maker KW. The behavior of your car—and especially its tires—now feels more accurate. The DualShock 3 controller is too uncomfortable to hold for extended periods and slightly too twitchy for my tastes, (this can be dialed down in the settings) but with a steering wheel it’s a joy. And being a PS3 game, if your wheel worked with GT5, it’ll work with GT6.
One notable addition this time around is a blind spot indicator (similar in concept to Corvette Racing’s extremely clever collision avoidance system), which uses yellow or red triangles on the screen to let you know when a car is coming up behind or on either side of you. GT6 also features much better AI opponents. They might not be as unpredictable as Turn 10’s Drivatars, but they don’t just circulate on a racing line, oblivious to everything else around them. If you pass an AI car but don’t disappear off into the distance, you can expect them to try to retake the position, but they’ll also screw up from time to time, just like a real competitor.

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The majority of career mode is spent in traditional races, but to keep things interesting there are also special missions (overtaking a certain number of cars on a particular stretch of a particular track, for example) and coffee breaks, where you have to knock over a certain number of cones or drive as far as possible on a single gallon of fuel. And of course, there are the ever-present license tests. GT5 broke with tradition and made them optional, but GT6 has reverted to form, and you’ll need to complete them before moving on, but there aren’t that many and they don’t appear to be fiendishly difficult. Certainly, in the (many) hours I’ve spent with GT6, I’ve yet to come across anything as maddening as the various Top Gear challenges that GT5 set.
While most of the challenges live within each license level, two special sets reside in their own special place on the home screen. The first of these is the hill climb route (a point-to point challenge) outside Earl March’s home, Goodwood House, known to the motoring world as the home of the annual Festival of Speed. These are quite good fun, and they're probably the only chance most of us will ever have of trying to set a time up the hill.
The other set of challenges, however, are literally out of this world, putting you at the controls of Boeing’s Lunar Roving Vehicle, the electric car that NASA sent to the moon with Apollos 15-17. Barreling along the Hadley Rille in low gravity and near silence is a hoot, and you can get quite a lot of vacuum (I’d say "get a lot of air," but it’s the moon) with a good run-up and a steep rise.

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Goodwood and the Moon aren’t the only new real-world locations. Spa-Francorchamps (which arrived in GT5 through DLC) is also present and is joined by Australia’s Bathurst, California’s Willow Springs, Spain’s Ascari Race Resort, and the UK’s Silverstone. My favorite among the new arrivals is Brands Hatch, located near London, because it was the first place I ever drove on a racetrack, and I’ve been missing it ever since TOCA Race Driver 2. Apricot Hill, a much-missed favorite from GT2 reappears, and there’s also a new indoor kart track that looks fantastic.
Many of the tracks feature variable weather and day-to-night (or vice versa) transitions. The changing light conditions highlight just how well Polyphony Digital has lit the game, adding a lot to the realism. When racing at night, the stars above Goodwood, Le Mans, and the Nurburgring are apparently modeled correctly based on the longitude, latitude, and the date of their 2013 races. I haven't checked this against my own star charts or anything, but it sounds like the sort of thing you'd best appreciate during a replay in any case.
Night races in GT6 do a great job of simulating some aspects of really racing at night; your car’s lights are never bright enough, and finding braking points or apices can be more a matter of timing and rhythm than anything else. Likewise, racing in the rain (or even snow) requires you to drive within limits unless you want to spend the whole time bouncing off crash barriers and plowing through gravel traps.

Not perfect, but close

If all of this sounds rather glowing, that’s because there's honestly little I don’t like about GT6. Don't get me wrong—it's not perfect. The dynamics of how your car handles are much improved, but collisions are still the same; cars don't suffer any damage so there's little punishment for bouncing off the AI. It makes the game more accessible to casual gamers, but if extremely mistake-intolerant PC racing sims are what get you going, GT6 will seem very arcade-like.
The tracks look spectacular—especially the newest ones—but the frame rate occasionally drops a little, and I've seen the screen tear more than once, usually on the same corner of a particular track. The sound remains a series bugbear. Cars like the Honda NSX-R should be symphonies of air being sucked into, blown up, and blown out of a complex instrument of finely crafted pieces of metal moving against each other at 8,000 beats per minute. Instead, the cars sound like hairdryers. V6, V12, tiny four-pot: it doesn't matter, they all just drone.

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The lackluster sound is a shame because it's an aspect of the new Forza that I enjoy so much. I don't think the fault can be attributed to the aging hardware, either. I imagine Polyphony Digital is conducting a few more field trips to point lots of microphones at lots of different cars (maybe even 27 different Honda S2000s) running at different engine speeds. Whether we see this as DLC or in a couple of years on the PS4 remains to be seen.
I'm writing this before any of the online aspects of the game have been turned on, but Sony promises a much-expanded community experience based on the last couple years of feedback. Some components will arrive in a day-one update, others in the coming months. Vision GT is another feature that should help the game's longevity. So far, almost thirty car companies and design houses, from Alfa Romeo to Zagato to Nike, are designing and building actual concept cars to celebrate the franchise's 15th birthday, and the virtual versions will appear on your PS3 at the same time that the designers unveil the real things. Mercedes was first out the door, debuting the AMG Vision Gran Turismo at the LA Auto Show last month.
New user-created tracks will be possible when the course maker returns in a future update, too. What's more, there's the tantalizing promise of being able to import GPS data of real roads, collected via a mobile app. You'll theoretically be able to run the GT GPS app while cruising a favorite driving road and have it recreated on your PS3. If it lives up to expectations, it sounds like a genius idea, especially if we'll be able to share the tracks with each other. Beyond that, some car owners will be able to use data pulled from their own vehicles onto those roads. If anyone out there does this, please let me know. I'd love to see the results.
But all those are planned for the future, and I can only really review the game I have in front of me. And what a game it is. The PS3 might be yesterday's machine now that the PS4 is in stores, but you'd never know it visually thanks to the clever use of lighting, a traditional strongpoint for Polyphony Digital. The gameplay is accessible, with the UI doing its very best to get out of your way and make quick gaming sessions a much better experience than GT5. The physics that control how your suspension and tires work are life-like, even if there's still some work to do with collisions and the audio. The addition of new real-world tracks, changing day-night cycles, and variable weather is very welcome, and there are an awful lot of cars to drive. Good work, Yamauchi-san.

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