Race driver car sim stalls as release date bumps to 2017

Itching to add a FIA-accredited virtual race licence to your resume? The wait for one just became longer.

GRAN Turismo Sport – one of the most anticipated driving simulators to come out this year – won’t come out in November. In a surprise announcement, Kazunori Yamauchi, the chief executive of the game’s developer Polyphony Digital, says it will now delay the sim’s release until 2017.

According to Yamauchi, the game’s architects today “made the difficult decision to delay the release” of the game because it had become bogged down by the project’s complexity.

The delay also means that budding sim racers will have to put off their chance to gain FIA accreditation as a virtual pilot via two officially sanctioned virtual race series.

“From the start, the title has been one of our most ambitious undertakings, using the latest technologies, such as physics-based rendering and sound simulations, and Scapes photo mode,” he said in an announcement posted to the Sony PlayStation blog.

“In combining these features with a new Sport mode, we are offering a competitive gaming experience to truly reinvent what it means to be a racing game. We’ve been excited and humbled by the response each time we’ve shared new gameplay with everyone.

“However, as we approach our planned release date in November, we realise we need more time to perfect GT Sport, to which we’ve already dedicated so much effort to since announcing the title, and do not want to compromise the experience,” Yamauchi said.

“While we cannot confirm a new release date at this time, we are more committed than ever to making GT Sport the best Gran Turismo game to date.”

However, while the game is delayed, the hype isn’t. Polyphony Digital said it would continue to promote the driving simulator at games events worldwide.

The game’s maker had planned to start rolling out a beta of the game ahead of a full launch in the next month, and had even rolled out a slick-looking trailer to promote the game.