Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Update Available Now! And Includes NEW CARS!!

Greetings, Taku. I gave Kyle Shubel a letter at PAX that I wanted him to give to you but I’m not sure if he ever did, so here are the contents of said letter…

First, a little bit about myself. I’ve loved the Gran Turismo franchise since the first game hit store shelves. I actually purchased it (and GT2) without having owned an original Playstation–I loved both games but I couldn’t afford the system at the time. I then purchased a PS2 just for GT3 and it was the only game I owned for the first year. In early 2005 I was able to track down a copy of Gran Turismo 4: Toyota Prius Edition on eBay, and later that spring I bought the full version of GT4. I then camped out for 37 hours for a PS3 on launch day and I downloaded the GT5 Prologue demo from the Japanese PSN store last October. So as you can tell, I’m a diehard fan of the GT series.

But I unfortunately have a major problem with GT4, GTHD, and GT5 Prologue. As you’re surely aware, the third-person chase camera in those games was radically different from the one that was used in the first three games. Sadly, this change has frustrated a lot of people. The old camera from GT1-GT3 used to let the car rotate quite a bit before it would start moving laterally, but the camera used in the most recent games is rigidly fixed to the vehicle, which greatly exaggerates its motion. I personally think this change has completely ruined the third-person perspective because it makes the car almost impossible to catch if a slide starts to occur (and they do frequently occur).

I’m guessing you communicate with Mr. Yamauchi on a regular basis and I was hoping you could ask him to please put a setting in the options menu to “loosely” or “rigidly” affix the chase cam to the car. I know I’m not alone in my contempt for the recent camera change so you’d potentially be making millions of fans happy if you could convince the guys at Polyphony Digital to go back to their roots. I’ve thought about starting an online petition but I’d rather not have to go that far.

I hope I’m not asking too much, though if you’d like to talk about this further, my contact information is below. As someone who finished the first three Gran Turismo games to 100% completion, I was incredibly disappointed to find that my preferred camera perspective was changed in GT4. To this day I still haven’t finished it (I stopped around 35%) because I find the new perspective almost unplayable. I also haven’t purchased GT5 Prologue for the same reason and I fear I won’t be able to purchase the final version of Gran Turismo 5 if this “problem” isn’t fixed. I’m sure Kazunori-san has his reasons for changing it, but I really can’t think it would be too hard to add a “loose” or “rigid” option like I mentioned above. Polyphony Digital has always been good to their fans so hopefully something can be done before Gran Turismo 5 hits store shelves.

Thanks for reading this,
Luke Longnecker
PSN: mclaren777
mclaren777@gmail.com