[quote name='panzerfaust']That's where Sony dropped the ball more than anything this gen. Not releasing continuations of your biggest franchises until years after you launch your console? MS had DoA, PGR, and a Splinter Cell at or near launch. Halo 3 came soon afterwards.
We got Gran Turismo last winter 0_o. And for what? What the hell we're they working on that whole time? Forza has admittedly less content but they are making the 4th damn Forza right now. GT5 is great but what are 360 fans going to care by now? It's not nearly great enough to call the wait worth it.
GT sold like Pokemon last gen.[/QUOTE]
I'll tell you exactly why it took forever to release GT5. It was because development of the game would naturally take MUCH longer on PS3 compared to PS1/PS2. This is a story I share with many which I came across years ago.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/12/kazunori-yamauchi-dishes-more-gran-turismo-5-details.ars
Gran Turismo 5 has been a long time coming for Western fans of the series. While Japan has been enjoying a taste of the title for a while now thanks to the release of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, we must continue to sit and wait. Many have come to question just what is taking Polyphony Digital so long, and a recent interview Polyphony's Kazunori Yamauchi divulges some key details about the process of making the game, as well as a few new tidbits of information about the game itself.
There's no question that the level of quality and attention to detail in the painstaking recreations of real cars that Gran Turismo is known for must take a lot of work, but Yamauchi was quick to explain just how much work is really necessary. "In GT and GT2, both for PS1, a designer spent a day to model a car. In GT3 and GT4, for PS2, the same worker spent a month modeling the same car due to the increased amount of polygons. In GT5 for PS3, they require six months to do the same job," Yamauchi explained.
With regards to car damage, Yamauchi noted that the original promise of realistic and full car damage has been slightly compromised. Some cars will suffer from damage, and some won't, as allowed by the respective manufacturers. He also noted that should you suffer from the "ultrarealistic simulation" of a high-speed crash, you would "lose your car," perhaps hinting that totaling a car would remove it from your garage.
However, the team does see a light at the end of the tunnel. Yamauchi confirmed that the team was shooting for a release in December 2008. He also noted that Prologue should be viewed as not only a hearty sample of the full game, but also a beta test of sorts meant to allow feedback on the engine.
You can check out the fully-translated interview in warcrow's post on our forums. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue will be hitting the Western world early next year, exclusively for the PlayStation 3.
So when you look at the time frame when releasing GT games, it pretty much goes (going by Japan dates):
GT1 - 1997
GT2 - 1999
GT3 - 2001 (early))
GT4P -2003
GT4 - 2004
GT5P - 2007
GT PSP - 2009
GT5 - 2010
I mean, there was Tourist Trophy and some other spin offs out there. Regardless, the amount of cars and content was able to greatly expand because it only took a day to design/model a car on PS1. On PS2, it took around a month, which sort of explains why GT3 didn't have anywhere near as much as GT2, but GT4 had a good amount of content (but took a while to get out in order to model the cars with PS2 graphics). Long development time even caused GT4's online portion to be scrapped. After GT4, they were slowly making a PSP GT game, re-used GT4 assets on Tourist Trophy (released in 2005 I think), and starting GT HD. But since they felt GT5 PS3 should be their priority (they could mostly only focus on one game), that's what they started to work on (with a little GT PSP on the side).
However, modeling a car on PS3 took SIX months to do (because of higher resolution graphics, higher polygon count, designing inside/outside of a car), compared to just 1 month on PS2. That's pretty much 6X the amount of development time if you want to have the same content as GT4 (along with online play and prettier looking courses). While PD themselves are a large team, they only have so many employees who can design cars (there are not a lot of high end graphic programmers out there in Japan to do HD console games). So lets say that 25 people at PD were in charge of just car designing/modeling, that's pretty much 4 years of development right for just premium cars. And there's still more time needed for physics of the car. Oh course they have other employees designing courses, working with online features, ones who re-use the 800 or so PS2 cars increasing their resolution (just so GT5 would have a high car count), and other things. GT5 Prologue was what you could call a mid-development cycle of GT5 showcasing what was currently finished (just like GT4P which was Japan/EU only). A lot of GT5's inconsistencies in car design (with some looking beyond good, some looking PS2 level) had to do with not enough development time/people/money to make every 1000+ car premium.
I guarantee that Sony Computer Entertainment themselves would have loved to get out GT5 early on in the generation. If GT HD never even started and GT PSP was never made (dividing some of the development), it probably could have come out a year earlier. But outside of that, with the amount of content they wanted to put in GT5, along with the increased time needed to model cars, it was pretty much impossible to get the game out quickly. If they wanted to get a GT game out quickly, they would have either had to re-use GT4 cars making them "HD" (like up-scaling the cars), or have a GT game will a very low car/content count.
So some may wonder why it doesn't take other racing games like Forza, NFS Shift, PGR, etc, so long to come out? Big difference is they don't try to model a car as accurate as possible from inside to outside (GT5 cars look beyond ridiculous in graphical detail, the premium cars). Kaz himself is a perfectionist when it comes to car detail, so he wants them to look 100% authentic.
Kaz has stated that now GT5 has been released, releasing a GT6 will take MUCH less time. They no longer have to create a brand new graphic engine, and they already have 200+ PS3 modeled cars they can re-use. And if people wonder why SCEJ's output has been MUCH lower on consoles this gen compared to other gens? I honestly wouldn't be surprised if some devs had to come in to help with GT5 development due to being massive scale.
Forza and GT are both great games. I preferred GT, but when Forza came around, I became quite mixed. Forza 2 had mediocre graphics IMO, but gameplay was still great. GT5P had awesome controls which made GT my favorite sim series again. Forza 3 was excellent, but I still give a small edge to GT5 (mostly because I love its in-cockpit view reality, awesome weather effects, track creation tools, and better overall graphics for premium cars/tracks).
, I hope it stays exclusive on the PS3. That way and most importantly we get it faster because porting it for same release date will delay it even further. 
ing hot.[/QUOTE]
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