Polyphony Digital headman Kazunori Yamauchi has been chatting at length to IGN about Gran Turismo 5 and its near-mythical cousin, Gran Turismo for the PlayStation Portable.
Yamauchi asserted that production of each game was "moving forward". He waved aside rumours that the PSP version was on the scrap heap: "It hasn’t been knocked off the plans, it’s there."
Going into specifics, Yamauchi revealed that Polyphony Digital had completed the bulk of the work on Gran Turismo 5’s vehicles. "In regards to the car interior and exterior, we’ve reached a target level that we had set for ourselves," he said. "We’ve cleared that now. So the next thing we will be working on will be the ambient surroundings around the car, whether that be the environment or people surrounding the cars."
The developer has only realised a "very small part" of its plans for online play, and is unlikely to do so at present worldwide connection speeds. "There’s a lot of things you can do online that we haven’t even touched yet," Yamauchi commented. "And a lot of that will not only depend on the advancement of the hardware, but on the infrastructure – the internet, connection speeds, things like that – as well."
Expanding on this point, Yamauchi insisted, "we’re really on the starting line for online features. We’re going to need a lot of software improvements, hardware improvements, and infrastructure improvements all around the world."
"What we have to look at is what are we going to do when internet connections are ten thousand times faster than they are now," he said. "What are we going to do to meet those type of advancements?"
We don’t know either, Kazunori old son, but we’d sure appreciate another dose of Gran Turismo in the not-too-distant future.