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GT5 update confirmed for Saturday

Yamauchi – online in a "critical state".

An update for gargantuan simulation racer Gran Turismo 5 will be released on Saturday 27th November, creator Kazunori Yamauchi has confirmed to Eurogamer in a new interview.

"We received a lot of demands for having more regulations placed on the online play. We're going to perform an update on the 27th that will include things like max power restrictions and weight restrictions," Yamauchi said.

"It's like a living creature, dynamically growing as we speak."

According to Yamauchi, the update will "refine the usability of the game to make it a better experience.

"I think it's going to be hard to find an end to that process," he admitted.

This morning it emerged that Sony has had to limit some areas of Gran Turismo 5 while it works out a way to ease the online congestion currently crippling the game.

The high demand coupled with GT5's constant communication with the internet is causing all sorts of problems that spill over even into single-player races.

Sony's temporary solution? Disable your PS3 internet connection.

"Yesterday the online service was kind of in a critical state," Yamauchi said.

"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."

Yamauchi also responded to criticism of the online feature set, revealing to Eurogamer, "Online updates are planned of course for leaderboards and matchmaking - [they're] all planned in the process of evolution."

The Polyphony Digital boss pledged that his team would be "upgrading every week, every month" to improve the game, which took five years to develop.

Oli reviewed Gran Turismo 5 for Eurogamer, awarding it 9/10.