THE THIN RED RACING LINE
GT Sport is a gear shift away from eSport dominance. Find out why this is the only racer your PS4 needs this year
Size doesn’t matter. Or at least that’s the view of Mr Gran Turismo, Kazunori Yamauchi, when it comes to GT Sport, the first Gran Turismo on PlayStation 4. While PlayStation 3’s Gran Turismo 6 crammed a staggering 1,197 cars into its garage, GT Sport has a more humble 140 speedsters to push to their limits. Numbers don’t mean a thing to GT Sport, though. After all, this isn’t GT 7, this is Sport.
With that Sport name comes a change in approach, a reaction to the chasing pack, which includes the eSports favourite Project Cars. GT Sport puts racing, and online competition in particular, above bumper-to-bumper colour-coded versions of Nissan’s Skyline GT-R cruising around Tokyo Expressway. This latest entry in Sony’s flagship racing series is about depth and competition. It’s about taking a smaller selection of cars and fine-tuning them, tweaking and tinkering under the hood to edge seconds off your lap times.
Ticking a box marked ‘put Project Cars in its place’, Sony has managed to get its online racing competitions – Nations Cup and Manufacturer Fan Cup – certified by the FIA. This is a first for a racing game, making GT Sport’s online tournaments the only current eSports events accredited to the real-life racing body. Naturally, the finals of both championships will be broadcast live online to a baying crowd.
THE SKYLINE’S THE LIMIT
To get more from the game you’re going to need to embrace your inner car geek and start tinkering. It was noticeable that the best players in the recent closed Beta were those who embraced the game’s incredible number of tuning options – settings that go far beyond fiddling with brake assist and steering sliders, and stretch to adjusting camber and ride height, weight distribution, power ratio, traction control, and countless tyre types. As you mess with the vehicle’s settings in an attempt to pick milliseconds off your lap times, fun little graphs (you never thought you’d read those words in OPM, eh?) show how your alterations will affect the car’s behaviour. The ‘sport’ aspect affects everything, bleeding into every piston and pipe of this new Gran Turismo.
If studying stats and charts or reading a Haynes manual before bed isn’t your thing, then GT Sport comes with a handy choice of Sport and Arcade modes. Arcade is the slightly more simcade racing experience with enough driving assists – steering sensitivity, stability management, ghost car, and driving markers – to get you through the first bend without exploding into a plume of dust and engine smoke.
Choosing Arcade may be more accessible, an instant hit of fun, but it won’t help online, which is where GT Sport will excel. No, we’re afraid you’re going to have to burn your training wheels and fully embrace Sport mode.
Sport is the name and nature of this GT, and to experience its purest racing fun you’ll need to put in some practice. Luckily, on the track it’s not as daunting as you might believe. While you’re twitching the sticks to remain on course, behind the scenes physics calculations are whirring away faster than any Lotus Evora could ever match. You press play on a Gran Turismo game knowing you’ll be in for a hard time, but here real-life accuracy doesn’t mean spinning uncontrolled doughnuts at the first bend on Brands Hatch, it means replicating the experience of real-life driving on your PS4.
GT Sport doesn’t feel as complex, or as painful, as pulling off the grid in Project Cars, for example. The goal of GT Sport, even on its toughest settings, is to make you feel in control, not in a fight with the game’s physics. You’re not simply manipulating numbers on a maths calculation, you’re handling a powerful race car, and it’s responding to decisions you’d expect to make in real life in a lifelike way. If you know the basics of racing lines and brake timing then you’ll be able to race in GT Sport – you may not win, but you’ll get around the circuit in one piece (after some practice).
CLOSE THE GAP
To be accessible and realistic is always the challenge for any competition-focused racing game, and arguably more so for Gran Turismo – it’s Sony’s premier racing brand, after all. It’s a game that needs to be playable out of the box for everyone. But it also needs to offer enough scope for purists so Sony can close the gap
on Project Cars. GT Sport needs to have enough depth, a broad learning curve, to appeal to serious racers and Sunday-game drivers who are counting the laps before they can admire the replays.
One way this is achieved is through GT Sport’s new online matchmaking system, which uses two categories to judge racers by: Driver and Sportsmanship. The former essentially tallies your qualifying and race results to judge how fast you are. The latter is more interesting; your overall Sportsmanship rating is derived from how you behave. You’ll earn points by meeting particular rules of the road – for example, avoiding colliding with other cars, paying attention to race flags, and staying on the track. Combining the categories should result in some even racing experiences; eSports racers on the rise don’t want to be slammed off the track by a newcomer fumbling through the gears and drooling over the game’s stunning visuals.
RACE DAY
As the 20 cars line up on the grid, and the lights turn green, any pre-race fiddling is pushed aside by the sheer beauty of the game. There’s always been an air of posturing about the Gran Turismo series; if you wanted to show your friends what a PlayStation console could do when flexing its graphical muscle, you wheeled out Gran Turismo. This PS4 outing is no different. Enable HDR and take to Big Willow with the sun casting through dust clouds at a smooth 1080p/60fps and even Jeremy Clarkson would shed a joyous tear, just a small one. If you want to chest-beat about the power of PS4, or better still PS4 Pro and PS VR, then boot up GT Sport and hit the feelings.
PHOTO FINISH
Developer Polyphony Digital knows this too; that’s why it’s gone to incredible lengths to make sure every car model is perfect to the tiniest detail, and why it’s one of the few racing games still loaded with real-world, diverse licenses (see ‘A License To Remember’). It’s also a reason why the Photoscape mode exists. Love your new, finely tuned car? Well, in GT Sport’s Photoscapes feature you can treat that shiny hunk of aluminium the way only a car lover knows how, by placing it in one of 1,000 locations, setting the mood lighting, and taking some lovely snaps. Your car photos can be shared online for the world to admire – just don’t get upset if people criticise the love of your life, or, worse, descend into the seedy world of car revenge porn.
While there’s no longer thousands of cars to choose from, the depth of options and choice, and the pursuit of competitive eSports purism, filters into all aspects of GT Sport – from online racing to Photoscape playtime.
Numbers, you see, don’t matter to GT Sport. What does is depth and detail, and this Gran Turismo has it by the mile.
“YOUR SPORTSMANSHIP RATING IS DERIVED FROM HOW YOU BEHAVE.”