Gran Turismo 4: Engines Offline

It's easy to revel in the extraordinary depth and variety of experiences in Gran Turismo 4, but as much as you'll like what it does offer, you may still wish that you could take a break from the isolated pursuit of driving perfection and pit your driving wits against others over PS2 Online. In most cases, when a game comes in for review, it seems harsh to complain about the lack of multiplayer options to complement an already satisfying whole. But the fact that we've all had the carrot dangled in front of our helmeted faces over successive years can't be smoothed over - even by the opportunity to print photos of our cars or play as mechanic to an AI driver when we tire of judging our own braking distances.

Fortunately, Gran Turismo 4 will go online according to Sony and developer Polyphony Digital, but we don't know when, to what degree, or how much we'll be expected to pay to get it to do so. We're going to be speaking to the creator himself, Kazunori Yamauchi, later this week, so you can be sure we'll ask, but in the meantime we thought we'd seize upon the game's midweek launch to take the opportunity to recap what was promised over the game's several years of development - and what we still have to look forward to when Sony and Polyphony settle on a decent manner of letting us get our hands on it all.

Back at E3 2003, Yamauchi-san was surprisingly downbeat about the game's online racing options given that it was still considered one of its defining characteristics. Downstairs on the show floor, six-player multiplayer LAN games were shown off on a trio of tracks, but there were definite issues that led to graphical glitches and other problems. The fact that Yamauchi-san said this was "due to latency and cannot be eliminated 100 per cent" worried a lot of people, particularly when Project Gotham Racing 2 emerged to much acclaim later in the year and proved these things could be eliminated sufficiently - at least on Xbox.

Yamauchi-san said his "greatest concern... in terms of taking the game online" was that "the images the players see will no longer be the standard of Gran Turismo" - clearly upset by the idea of having to sacrifice visual quality for the sake of networked gaming. Voice chat was already out on the basis that the PS2 couldn't do that and maintain 30 frames per second. "Being the perfectionist that I am, this will always be a problem in my mind, and I will have to continue examining it," he said of the problems related to latency and graphical compromise. "Because it's Gran Turismo and because of the quality we've had, once we take the online step, we're afraid it won't be the Gran Turismo that we all know. That's not the way we would like to move forward," he said, summing up his concerns at the time.

It almost sounded like the online aspect was an unwanted inconvenience - particularly when he made it clear what he was enthusiastic about. "My main area of interest is not actually the racing element of online, for instance, where people will compete against each other online. My main interest is to find a setting where players can come to share knowledge of cars - just car talk. Car talk is endless: you can talk about tyres; you can talk about oil, car parks, modification..." A virtual showroom for cars was later mooted. At the end of E3 2003, it sounded like the online mode wasn't going well, having seemingly been borne out of the team's desire to create a serious centralised meeting point for car enthusiasts, rather than a simple racing pick-up ala Gotham, but you had to admire the chaps at Polyphony for having a vision that went beyond simply "adding an online mode".

By E3 next year, Polyphony's figurehead was more upbeat, declaring, "the latency has been taken care of," and admitting that it had been holding the game up. Talk started to emerge of the game using the PlayStation 2 HDD, suggesting that downloadable content might be possible in the US and Japan. Then there was word of regular Sony sponsored tournaments, the ability to set up player tournaments and compete on a multiplayer ranking list, and it sounded like GT4 suddenly had the potential to be all things to all men who love motors - to whatever degree. We were excited again.

Then in September the online mode was dropped completely and without much explanation. And although Polyphony Digital stated in conciliatory tones that an online-enabled GT game delivering all that had been promised was provisionally scheduled to ship on PS2 in 2005, there's been little talk of it since. When Yamauchi-san popped up again in November to comment, he said: "We hope to do it in the near future. For the Korean version of the game, we haven't even decided if we'll release a standalone version or Online version." As GT4 finally rolls into shops four months after the proposed pre-Christmas launch date that accompanied its Tokyo Game Show appearance, a lot of unanswered questions remain. Hopefully we'll hear the answers very soon, because the fact we still miss GT4's online mode is a reflection of how much we enjoy the game, and how much we wanted to swap tips about drive chains and rocket around Nurburgring Nordschleife by Polyphony's rules. Hopefully we'll still get the chance.

Gran Turismo 4 is out now and reviewed elsewhere on the site.