GT5 patch coming this weekend

Sony’s recently released Gran Turismo 5 will receive a patch this weekend that will add some key extra functionality to the online aspects of the title – and address some of the issues that have clouded the launch.

We received a lot of demands for having more regulations placed on the online play,” series creator Kazunori Yamauchi told Eurogamer. We’re going to perform an update on [Saturday November] 27th that will include things like max power restrictions and weight restrictions.

It’s like a living creature, dynamically growing as we speak. I think it’s going to be hard to find an end to that process.

Online updates are planned of course for leaderboards and matchmaking – [they’re] all planned in the process of evolution.”

Sony was forced to temporarily shut down some of the game’s online components after the sheer numbers of people trying to log into the servers were causing disruption to all players – even those not playing online.

The game taps into the servers frequently during the single player mode. Problems accessing the data was causing the game to hang for up to several minutes at a time, normally when trying to navigate the menus.

[On Wednesday] the online service was kind of in a critical state,” Yamauchi admitted. The data centre was set up to handle 500,000 connections but the number of connections we received greatly exceeded that amount and there was a high chance of experiencing problems as a result.

The design of the GT game really integrates the online and offline parts. So the problems online actually affected the offline play as well. Right now we’ve changed the number of simultaneous connections that are possible to one million, doubling the number, and we’re trying to gauge what will happen, but we don’t know at this point in time.”