Should Sony cancel the Gran Turismo Sport beta in order to speed up the time table to ensure a 2016 release date? It's actually a redundant question because the beta has already been cancelled. The report came from Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi during an interview with racing sim gaming site GT Planet.
"If we do a beta, that would delay our development by three months," said Kazunori. "Producing a gold master is really difficult; it’s a lot of work."
We're not a fan of delays and especially not if it's three months. Had Polyphony decided to launch a public beta, then the Gran Turismo Sport release date would have been pushed back from mid-November to February 2017. On the other hand, beta testing has become a more and more important part of the development process, particularly for video games that are heavily online-centric, which is no doubt the case for Gran Turismo Sport. What's more, Kazunori reveals the extent that Gran Turismo Sport has been revamped, including an in-house gaming engine and rendering engine.
"We actually went about and made our own original gaming engine and rendering engine for it, and everything is built in-house," revealed Kazunori. "Everything in terms of system design is easy for us to optimize and make the quality better." Hopefully, the team will have time to create a new sound engine as well.
Finally, Kazunori has hinted that Gran Turismo Sport is also likely to receive future DLC updates, namely new Gran Turismo Vision GT concept cars that will be purpose-made for the current gen PlayStation 4.
"So in terms of where those [new] VGT cars will appear, we won’t be releasing them on GT6, just because of [the] workload it would create. At the same time, it would definitely be better to have the players experience those cars in the high-quality environment that’s going to be in the new title."
Kazunori definitely sounds optimistic about the upcoming Gran Turismo Sport title for PS4, both in terms of release date as well as the quality of the final product. The Gran Turismo franchise isn't known for many bugs or glitches, but given that this is the first GT title of a new console, should there be a Gran Turismo Sport public beta after all to iron out the kinks? Or is Kazunori right about making a 2016 release date a priority? Let us know in the comment section below!
Also check out our comparison between Gran Turismo Sport's new Tokyo Expressway track versus the real-life stretch of road.
