Let’s play good news, bad news. First the good news – you can finally rejoice, Gran Turismo Sport has a ship date of November 15th. This means the PS4 is finally getting a very in-depth racer in what’s sure to be a gorgeous game with no shortage of cars, tracks, and customizable options. Now on to the bad news. Because of its ship date, the Gran Turismo Sport beta has been canceled, a move that flirts with disaster. Let me explain.

First, game creator Kazunori Yamaguchi:

 That’s something that I’m very, very sorry about. In order to do a beta test we have to make a gold master of the beta test code, and for us, it actually takes as much effort as to finish the real master code of the actual game. 

Yamaguchi is absolutely right in one respect. Unknown to most is that putting together is actually a very difficult task and not as simple as just releasing a track or two with some cars, seeing how code stretches across the entirety of the game. In order for Yamaguchi and the team to create a beta, they’d have to spend considerable time aside from the game and take a chunk of it out, ensure that all the code is working properly and release that online with tools in the back end to ensure they’re able to capture meaningful data from testers.

 Considering the release timing that we announced, we decided that we just don’t have enough time to do two gold masters for the game. By omitting that it saves us about three months of time. 

However this is where things get a bit worrisome for me. Polyphony Digital is not known for their robust understanding of online games. After all, they are a studio that was born in the era of single player game and the majority of their team is cultivated in a culture that doesn’t value multiplayer as much. That’s not to say the past few entries haven’t had an online component but they’re certainly far from elegant or robust.

The polar opposite of Polyphony might be Evolution Studios, the team responsible for MotorStorm and DriveClub. While all MotorStorm games enjoyed some form of online gameplay, it wasn’t till DriveClub that we really saw what the studio could deliver. Even then, DriveClub was delayed by a year and still suffered months of bugs after the game’s release. What do the two games share in common? An extensive internal beta with no public beta.

For Gran Turismo Sport to skip out on a public beta on a title that’s guaranteed to be far more grand than DriveClub is almost inviting trouble. Sure there will be plenty of internal betas but the data you can gather once your game is on millions of PS4s is significantly more helpful for ironing out glitches and servers than just internal data that’s likely limited to a few hundred machines. Obviously I want things to go well but I truly hope that as that ship date nears, if the team is unsure about the game’s online component or any other for that matter, that they take the same road Naughty Dog did and simply delay the game. After all, we’ve had the genius that is Uncharted 4 for nearly two weeks now and the only thing that’s not brought up is two delays the game faced because of how polished the end result has been.

Discuss:

Do you think it’s a mistake for Polyphony Digital to skip out on a Gran Turismo Sport beta?

[Via VideoGamer]