Gran Turismo 5 online
What it does, what it doesn't do, and what Polyphony must do to fix it.
Race selected, you arrive in the Lounge screen where you can tinker and chat. GT5's support of text chat is rare and welcome for a console game, although voice chat via the PlayStation Eye camera is somewhat bizarre – you can eavesdrop on players moving furniture and arguing with their children. If a race is currently under way, there's a good spectator mode with all the features of GT5's excellent replays. You can pick a car from your Garage and adjust your tuning and driving options here, but unfortunately you still can't view the parameters the host has chosen for the room.
If that host is you, the options available are a mixed bag of interesting, novel inclusions and silly oversights. You can either have total control over the track selection or put it up to public vote, but even in the latter case you still have to pick one from the vast available list: there's no shuffle option to keep the racing pace up.
Shuffle race – which assigns cars randomly, but offers faster cars to players who placed lower in the previous race – is a great idea, but it's currently unpopular. That could be because, no matter where the room owner sets the "Shuffle ratio" for the quality of cars, they all seem to come from the lower end of the performance scale.
I like the concept of Free Run, too – a period where players can try test laps together as the room fills out, and which can even be used for grid qualifying – but its implementation is botched. You can't set a time limit for it, and any player can end it and start the race, which means it's never used properly. The host should be given partial control over automatic limits here.
More satisfying options are the tense "false start check", with which it's possible to jump the starting lights and end up penalised, and the choice to set the grid order by fastest first, slowest first or a reverse grid based on the previous race result. An optional boost for slower cars is another thoughtful inclusion.
The real problem in the room settings is the regulations. Tyre restrictions and toggles for the various driving aids are all present and correct, but the only car restriction options are for racing karts, Ferrari F1 cars (only available at obscene expense in GT Mode) or to manually piece together a permissible selection from your personal favourites and the recommended cars in the Garage.
Other than that, it's a free-for-all, so most Normal Race rooms end up with a ridiculous melange of hardware, from superminis to racing cars, in totally unbalanced competition. Thankfully, this will be the first thing about GT5 online to be fixed; Polyphony promises weight and power restrictions will be added this weekend. They won't function as well as Forza's brilliant performance grading system, but they'll do.
It's not top of our fix list for GT5 online – that would be network performance, then leaderboards, then matchmaking. (Some kind of reward for playing the online game, prize money at least, would be nice, but that is a distant pipe-dream.) However, it's a start, and Yamauchi is at least talking the talk as far as listening to players and making improvements is concerned.
Knowing his perfectionism, it's possible that the GT overlord is privately very unhappy about the state of the online game. Indeed, some will have you believe that Polyphony was so dissatisfied with online that it wanted to ship Gran Turismo 5 without it, but that Sony effectively held a gun to the developer's head.
Should it have been allowed to? Maybe – or maybe not. There's nothing like the baying of a dissatisfied community to focus a developer's mind. Polyphony has consistently underperformed in this area, from the cancellation of GT4's online mode to GT5 Prologue's disappointing offering, and perhaps the only way for it to learn is on the job.
Like the offline game, some strange choices have been made in how Gran Turismo 5 online has been put together. But, like the offline game, that doesn't mean it's without potential. It's just that almost none of that potential is realised in the current compromised and broken experience, and it's going to take a lot of work to set that right.