Gran Turismo 5 online
What it does, what it doesn't do, and what Polyphony must do to fix it.
Before we get to the business end of things, let's talk about two of GT5's ancillary online features, both of which are strictly for car nerds only. Gran Turismo TV offers pin-sharp HD video content for download; it's currently all free, although videos will be sold in future. As a long-time classic car buff, I enjoyed watching the beautiful films of historic racing and concourse competitions, and footage of Yamauchi poring over a six-wheeled Tyrrell F1 car. But Sony will have to come up with superb content if it wants this to make money as a pay-per-view service.
The Museum, meanwhile, offers a collection of "cards" – annotated photos – about the history of several important car manufacturers. These are unlocked at random as a reward for logging into GT5's online servers. It's pure collectible fluff, and would probably be of more interest to enthusiasts if the photos were reproduced larger on screen.
If you want to race others online and aren't using a private Lounge, you'll need to use the Open Lounge, which appears on a sidebar of your homepage – with a conspicuously empty space beneath it, for more features, perhaps. Hopefully, this is where we'll eventually find time trial leaderboards. To sim racers, lap times are just as if not more important than race performance, so their omission leaves a gaping hole indeed.
Yamauchi told us this week that leaderboards are "in the process of evolution" and planned for a future update, along with a matchmaking system. These changes can't come soon enough.
The absence of matchmaking when you arrive in the Open Lounge is a stark and unwelcome reminder of what online gaming used to be like. There's no ranking system in place, and no quick match option either. You're simply presented with a randomly-ordered list of all the rooms currently active, and you pick one. The list can be filtered, but there aren't enough options available for this. Each room generates a string of 20 digits which can be input to jump straight to it, an excruciating longhand version of an "invite" option, but better than manually browsing for it.
You can see the latency of the room and its "race quality" in this list; race quality dictates how much information is being sent and received in order to fit the speed of players' connections, and thus the smoothness of the race. Inadvisably perhaps, this is actually a manual setting.
Either way, they're not a reliable indication of the quality of the experience. Even high-quality, low-latency races can be glitchy on the track, but menu responsiveness is by far the bigger problem. It's not at all uncommon to find yourself stuck in the "lounge" area of a room and unable either to join the race or quit. On one occasion, I found myself trapped for 15 minutes in a purgatorial Free Run phase with no-one able to start the race proper.
Four times in the course of one evening's play, I ended up having to use the PS3 XMB to quit a frozen game and reboot. I'm not sure the blame for this can be laid at the door either of server congestion or poorly optimised netcode; it has to be both, working together in awful tandem to ruin the online GT5 experience.
Not that it would be fully satisfying even if it were perfectly smooth. When selecting your room, you can also see which track is currently being used and the race type: Normal, in which you choose your car, and Shuffle, in which the game selects it for you. But many other important parameters can't be seen and it's up to the owner of the room to advertise them in a text field. Since most don't bother, and since rooms change ownership and their tags end up being inaccurate, you end up taking pot luck. Absentee hosts are also quite common, and there's no way to deal with them.