Gran Turismo Sport Beta: New Chase Camera is a game changer

With Gran Turismo Sport surpassing its sixth week of beta testing, you can be pretty confident that Polyphony Digital has gained sufficient feedback in order to develop their first PS4 title to satisfy the needs of the highly demanding racing game market. To prove beta testing is actually leading to productive developments, PD released a hefty update last week labelled v1.05 weighing in at a smidge under 10GB. Despite its size, new content was not the focus of the update but rather features to improve the quality of gameplay which involved making changes to the lighting, enhancing audio effects, altering the layout of the HUD and even modifying the physics engine.

Those are only some of the changes made to PD's latest project but one change which really caught my attention was a new option in the settings menu which allows the player to change the characteristics of the chase camera. Now this is a big deal for me as I primarily play racing games using the third person view and I have found Gran Turismo to be lacklusture in this area since GT4 due to the series using a static camera fixed to the rear of the car. While this is advantageous for being able to see further down the track sooner after a sharp corner, the camera setup kills the sense of speed.

As you can see from the video above, players can go back to the free-flowing style of the view used in the first three Gran Turismo games with the new camera options. With the static camera turned off, you can see the car moving frantically around the track as it reaches high speed, creating a much better sense of speed and makes the game feel more alive. The best part about having this option is that it doesn’t alienate fans of the static camera as the slider can be set to zero to keep the fixed camera style.

Gran Turismo Sport is expected to hit the shelves later this year and I’m looking forward to it more than ever now that the chase camera view has been given a substantial update. If you want to experience what is widely acknowledged as the next generation of virtual racing, GT Sport should definitely be on your wish list too!