While at the Goodwood Festival of Speed today, Polyphony Digital CEO and Gran Turismo series Producer Kazunori Yamauchi held a Reddit AMA, where he talked about Gran Turismo and even revealed that he’s recently been enjoying games like Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies.
When asked about the removal of certain tracks from Gran Turismo 6 (Midfield Raceway, Seattle, Red Rock Valley, Smokey Mountain, Thaiti Maze, Grand Canyon, El Capitan, etc), Yamauchi talked about how he would have liked to see them in the game:
I’d like to have a lot of those tracks back in the game as well, but I guess you can say that even our production teams ride certain trends when they’re working. One of those is that we started out with all fantasy tracks when we first created Gran Turismo. But once the teams started researching methods of creating real tracks, that became the focus of their work, and less work was done on those fantasy tracks.
Though I think real, existing tracks are important, I also think that fully designed tracks are also very interesting and have their own place so I think that’s something to look for in [Gran Turismo 7].
The “lackluster” photo mode in Gran Turismo 6 (when compared to previous iterations) was then brought up, with someone asking if it might be improved through an update, and what the future holds for photo mode in Gran Turismo 7:
Gran Turismo actually really reflects my personal interests – cars, photography, and video/film. So photo mode is something that’s very important to me. So obviously I’m not pleased with the current rendition.
And I know how good it was in GT4, but it just so happened that the architecture of the PS3 wasn’t really suited for this feature. But in PS4, I’m going to try to make sure that there’s a photo mode that can satisfy any connoisseur of photography and you can really look forward to that – because as a photographer, I’m really not satisfied with what we have yet.
Jumping way ahead in the future, Yamauchi was asked what he would imagine Gran Turismo 10 as:
So regarding the next generation – PS4 – and beyond, there’s always ongoing research going forward at Polyphony Digital and Sony. There might be some technologies that may change the world and until recently I was thinking that video games might reach a saturation point but I found out that there’s much more to come and much more to look forward to in terms of technology of the future — not that I can discuss any details right now.
Someone then wanted to know Yamauchi’s thoughts on what distinguishes Gran Turismo from every other racing series out there:
That’s actually a really hard question to answer. First off, the game is being created by a car lover by myself. The second thing is that it’s rare for the same game to be worked on by the same team for over 20 years now. That’s one of the main reasons why we’ve been able to keep the feel of Gran Turismo the same throughout the franchise series.
As for Gran Turismo 6, Yamauchi revealed that the beta version of the track maker “is already working and in my hands now. When we can deliver it to users is still up in the air.” Also, for sound improvements to Gran Turismo 6, “the major update to the sound will be coming in GT7, so don’t expect anything on that front from the July update.”
