Gran Turismo Sport comes to PlayStation 4 this November – but it’ll be doing so without one of the franchises’ biggest features.
Fans may be frustrated to learn that dynamic weather and light conditions will not be playing a part, so as to improve overall visual quality.
Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi confirmed the news to GTPlanet, where he cleared up a few things regarding Gran Turismo Sport.
On the loss of dynamic weather, he said:
We opted to not have the transitions in the race this time in order to raise the framerate and the quality of the image *during* the race. So the user will be able to set that before they enter the race. So you’ll still be able to have night races, morning, races at dawn, dusk, and so on.
Considering Gran Turismo Sport aims to improve the series from a technical standpoint first and foremost, this sacrifice is perhaps understandable.
However, dynamic lighting and weather lend themselves to a far more more realistic and… well, dynamic racing experience – something Gran Turismo has always strived for.
Still, no one can argue that a dodgy framerate and sub par visuals take away from the experience too, so Yamauchi is very much stuck between a rock and a hard place until we get to a point where you could implement one feature without compromising the other.
Gran Turismo Sport will shift the focus of Polyphony’s long running series towards online competitive racing, taking more than a little inspiration from the world of motorsport in the process.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.