GT5 producer Kazunori Yamauchi revealed some tasty details about the online portion of the hottest forthcoming game for the PS3 in a recent interview with Weekly Famitsu. As much as i hate on the PS3, i do realize it’s the lack of content that makes me so lovingly refer to it as a “hunk of junk”, but my reasoning is legitimate, right? This is going to be amazing and I can’t wait. Read on for deets. I wonder if I can find someone to buy this for me in October when it launches in Japan.
# PlayStation Home icon on the top menu screen: within the Home universe, there will be something like a “Gran Turismo World” galaxy. You can then enter the top menu of the game from Home, or vice-versa by selecting the respective icons.
# My Page: When the game starts, a My Page screen will also appear. In the final version, Yamauchi hopes to include a friends list as well. There will be several background images for the My Page screen such as Tokyo and other cities, but will also include sceneries of both outdoors and indoors. There is also a weather forecast displayed so that other players will know which geographic location you are in and how the weather is there.
# Chat features: Prologue will include 2 online modes, one which includes the chat features and the other which excludes this feature.
# Number of cars and course selection: about 40 cars and 4 courses with 8 different layouts. There will also be new courses which was briefly shown in the E3 trailer.
# Prologue will not have cars and course downloadables.
# Prologue falls somewhere in between the GT and Arcade mode. Players can earn reward money from each race and purchase new cars. There will be normal cars and tuned cars, but players cannot tune their own cars in this version. The save data from Prologue (such as money earned and cars purchased) can be carried over to Gran Turismo 5.
# 16 cars during races for offline mode. This may drop to 12 cars in online mode.
# Game control features “Normal Mode” based on simulation engine and “Professional Mode” based on actual car behavior and physics.
# Yamauchi hopes to include B-spec mode but it is still not decided at this point.