Big news for Playstation 3 racing fans, Gran Turismo 6 has been officially announced for the holiday season! About a month ago, a pre-order was caught on Newegg but Sony and Developer Polyphony Digital have remained mum up until today. Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi dropped the news at the United Kingdom’s Silverstone circuit (one of the tracks featured in the new title).
The new game will feature improved graphics using a new, flexible rendering engine that features “adaptive tessellation”. As usual Polyphony is aiming for the ultimate in realistic auto handling, so they’re also developing a new physics and suspension engine with Yokohama and KW Automotive. The total amount of cars available in Gran Turismo 6 will be near 1200, 100 more than Gran Turismo 5’s final garage . According to Gamespot, “Gran Turismo 6 will focus on more customisable vehicles than in previous games, and Polyphony Digital is aiming at an extensive post-launch DLC plan to extend the life of the game.”
According to IGN, Yamauchi hinted at an eventual PS4 version saying, “We actually do have a PlayStation 4 version in mind, but for this holiday season, we thought it would be best for users to release on PS3 for now. I thought the best scenario would be to have the game come out, then to have new scenarios, new DLC and other updates. Once the players have thoroughly played out the system, if the PlayStation 4 version came out naturally, as part of that process, I think that would be the best scenario.” Unfortunately he wouldn’t go into any details about when the next-gen version would release.
If the visuals of the “concept movie” released on the Gran Turismo Youtube page today are any indicator, this game is going to look great. Savvy developers are getting surprising results out of the aging PS3, so who knows! For now we’ll have to wait and see.