Now that you can create your own races, and earn cash, and miles, you have complete freedom to have the single player expereince you want. The curated stuff may only take 50 hours, but you could easily sink another 600h into your own races. You have the freedom to create any race, on any track, with any car, against the opponents of your choosing, set the difficulty, set the laps, it is all up to you. You don't have to stick to the limited number of events they define anymore. That is what makes this GTS awesome.

Arcade mode, time trials, and drifting all hold wieght  instead of being an after thought. I never touched these modes in previous GT games, because they did nothing to progress my game, now I can run laps for an hour, and earn 1000's of milage points towards upgrading my cars. Or I can set up a 200 lap endurance race and earn a couple 100K in cash, 1000's of milage points, and expereince.

They detracted from the looks of the game for sure. You are racing with a beautiful render of a Ferrari and then you see a clearly lower polygon representation of another car with fake headlights and even low res textures. I know they had more premium content, but at least on other racers you wouldn't have to see last gen graphics invading your game. Previous GT entries had tons of cars and didn't had to resort to this tactics.

I am not saying it should give me breakthrough visuals, but using PS2 cars was basically pathetic. It would be way more honorable to release it with less cars instead of trying to cover up their mess up.

I can assure you that I know what an average is. Average in the context of evaluating a game means that it just delivered the minimum to be acceptable, it's not the same as a statiscal average. In our society, when you evaluate something "average" has the same meaning of mediocre (that actually represented something that was average, but now it has a bad conotation). The older GT games had 90+ scores, because they were quite good. GT5 has PS2 cars and navigational issues on menus, so it got high 80s. GT6 is just a GT6 with slightly better visuals and less content, so it scores on low 80s. GTS has even less content, so it seems fine to score on the high 70s, unless the online portion is a real breakthrough adition. I'm seeing quite a bit of consistence on these scores.

It's like hiring an employee. If he described himself as "average", would you hire him? Possibly no if the given job was at least decent. GT got scores like that because it was evaluated as a GT game, not as a Forza game or any other. If Mario, Zelda or Uncharted games had such a drop in quality, critics would be harsh even if they remained better than most games, because they would notice a decrease in quality.

DLCs are not relevant to the scores because they are just promisses. I disagree GTS has more content than most games, it seems pretty much barebones. This time using GT5/6 content won't be an issue because PS3 models were actually created with way more detail than would be possible to show on the PS3 (and even on PS4), so they can be used. But saying that only makes it even less excusable to not have a real GT game. I really, really, don't know what Polyphony is doing. If they were not behind such an important franchise and had the hystorical value they have for gaming, I do believe Sony would already have closed the studio and created a new western one to develop GT. Their Japanese studios seem to struggle a lot to create AAA games.

I don't expect a GT game to be average. I expect it to be the pinnacle of videogame racing games, an almost flawless product polished to almost reach perfection. PS2 cars, removing important content or simply not shipping a career mode are not acceptable.

Edit: If they do as you said, just use the great assets they have and do a full game with all content, it will be well received. 90+ for sure, as soon as it doesn't release after the PS5.

Are you trying to get me depresses? Hahahahahahah. I hope that this is just PR talk to justify paying 60 bucks for a Prologue, but I think even in this case this will backfire. Is it that hard to make a good old GT game?

Sony, please, hire more people and make some changes in Polyphony management. You are killing the franchise with freaking fire.

Nope they didn't detract from the game. Would be very uncommon for you to be doing your championship race with premium cars and be hold several  minutes behind a standard car for it to impact you in any relevant way. And several gamers preffered to have the option to race on 1000+ cars even if more than 600 were standard (that they could ignore) than to only have 400 cars, because taking away wouldn't really help any.

It was absolutely impossible to do a race without seeing any. You actually ended up having to drive several yourself because you needed these cars. They wouldn't have got half of the criticism if they decreased the amount of cars. Or, you know, actually bothered in creating new models. They even went as far as repeating the mistake with GT6,

Do you really want to compare the devolpment aspects of PS1 or PS2 era to PS3? 1st putting a car from a PS1 game on PS2 would really look completely out of place, 2nd making a model for a car on PS2 took a lot less time than on PS3 so there were less need to vamp a model from PS1.

Studios are larger now. Every game has to deal with the hurdles of developing more complex games, but I'm not seeing them resorting to last gen visuals.

Not more or less honorable, would be a different choice that you preffered, but myself wouldn't preffer. Again you could completely ignore them. Tell me how many hours have a standard car invaded your view during your playtime? From over 600h of GT5 I can't even remember an ugly car in front of me for long enough to register. Most os the career and endurance I would be in first place in less than 1 lap and on challenges and licenses the cars are all statically defined.

I used the GT40 extensively and it was a standard car. Some of the Turismo class Toyotas were also standard cars. As much as I avoided, I would say that easily 1/4 of my GT time was driving standard cars, so I had to look at them 100% of the time. Probably around 85% of the races had at least one.

Stop trying to create an excuse for a lame way to try to look that they have more cars than they actually do. It's immersion breaking to see a car straight from GT4, even for a few seconds. You can't say a game is polished with such events.

Nope you pretend you know what average is and then give a definition that is an assumption of what is average. Most things and people are average and mediocre. If you had said GT5 was an average racer that would be one thing (that I disagree) but would justify its grade being close to the average among racers, but it being a good racer, good simulator, but average GT would put its grade along the mean of GTs, simple as that. Go there and pick other simulators and tell me with a straight face they are better than GT 5 and GT6 by the amount the grades suggest, because when looking at the bloated review system we have, bellow 90 is almost considered bad. And GT5 and GT 6 are very far away from being bad.

Are you trying to nitpick the meaning of average just to justify your defense of Polyphony? GT5 has a good score. It's lower than the previous games because it is inferior to them. GT6 is lower because it is a pointless sequel that has less content than GT5. This is actually quite consistent.

Don't try to twist things to make it lookw like "average" or "mediocre" should be the baseline of GT.

Most of employees in any company are average joes. So your point is quite out there. And sure GT being evaluate as a GT game make as much sense as saying no grades are comparable. If an inferior racer get a better grade than GT because it isn't a GT does it even make sense? The games must be either evaluated among their genres or among all available games, not against what someone thinks that game should be or evaluated solely against its predecessors.

A game has to improve and evolve on its predecessors. GT5 kind of failed in doing that, GT6 totally failed to do that and GTS seems to be an overpriced prologue. The scores just reflect the quality going down. It's not the reviewers fault, it's either Sony, Polyphony, or both.

Sony closing PD would be moronic, there is no other company (besides the maker of MK) that makes a racer that have even close enough sales to anything PD have put. And I'm certain that if PD had put PS3 cars on GTS there would be complains, you would probably be one of them. You may say PS3 models were good enough, but then when compared to GTS models they would look worse and would be invading your view. GTS is a different type of game than GT1-6 that were simulators with a car collection touch. GTS is a e-sport game. How many e-sport games have over 100 characters for you to choose and dominate?

Of course it would be moronic. But if they keep killing the franchise and it reflects on sales, you can bet they will change some things. If it doesn't solve the problem, they will just put the franchise in other hands. Moronic is to let a huge franchise die slowly or fade into mediocrity.

Let me explain you something about modern 3D modelling. When they created the PS3 models, they had dozens of millions of polygons and extremely detailed textures, lightining maps and such. No console or PC could render them on realtime in the game. So you downscale them to use in the game, as much as necessary. So the models they have now are still leagues above even what a Titan XP could render at 60 fps, or 30, or 5. So, they just downscale it less. They don't have to throw any model on the trash bin.

I also get that GTS is an e-sport game. But the franchise is on a delicate moment, they really, really had to deliver a real GT7. Or at least treated this one as a spin-off or prologue.

GTS besides VR is above average, it plays perfectly it just have a different philosophy and less content for SP than the others, you are comparing different beasts based on what you liked on the previous.

I could bet and win that they could make it in less than 6 months with a very small team without diverting talentes from GTS, perhaps even hire Sumo Digital to do the porting of content - suck the 400-600 premium models from GT5-6, suck the career mode, pack the GTS models and DLC content - launch it as GT7 and get below 85. I would certainly like it more like this than what GTS is because I'm not a MP player, but PD would face heavy criticism anyway.

As I said, the PS3 models are fine because they are ridiculously better than what you saw on PS3. But you are severely underestimating the amount of work such a game demands. 6 months would be just the QA, buddy. That's why I'm pissed, GT7 is a good 2 years away.

I just want these guys to do the freaking game. It's beyond me why they haven't figured out that they are killing the franchise. It doesn't help when the fanbase keeps saying that they are doing a good job.