odemasters has been building momentum as of late in the publishing field with games like Overlord and Clive Barker’s Jericho. The roots of the company, however, lie in car racing—precisely what they having been delivering on with the Colin McRae and TOCA series. Last year, we saw a revamp of the Colin McRae rally series with Dirt, and now the same is being done with TOCA in the form of Grid.
One of the goals with Grid is to breathe some life back into the driving genre. There seems to be an endless supply of two types of racing games: You have your hardcore driving sim that follows the rules so specifically that slowing down for a turn isn’t any more fun on the track as it is driving to the store. On the other hand, you have the blown out of proportion culture sim that seems to put more focus on the lights and glamour than it does on actual racing. “Grid’s all about the race. We’re moving away from some of our competitors. We’re not talking about a huge number of cars and tracks. We’re not talking about pimping your car or modding it. … We feel that some of the more recent games have been designed away from racing. … We want to make it more fun again.” explains Alex Grimbley, Senior Producer for Codemasters Studios.
One of the ways to make sure the player has the pure driving experience is to break the 200-plus car count. Grid isn’t a car collect-a-thon but rather a game with 50 hand-picked elite racing machines that all have a history of being awesome. Cars like the first diesel LeMans winner Audi R10 or the drift legend Nissan Silvia among others put the players into the driver’s seat of some something exciting every race. The same applies to the games tracks, and Codemasters has taken a mixed approach of using both known and unknown licensed tracks and real-world city locations (and real streets) like Detroit or Tokyo. Some of the licensed tracks are purposely lesser known to break the repetitiveness most gamers may be stuck in because they have been driving them in almost every sim game in recent memory.
Like TOCA, the single-player mode plays out almost like a car RPG. Players will start off by picking a region to start in. The USA region specializes in the raw V8 muscle cars in race-bred form like an SRT Viper and features city-based tracks in Washington, Long Beach, Detroit and San Francisco on their real streets. The European region has your Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsches racing on the licensed tracks like LeMans. Japan, the final region, is where you find the small rear-wheeled “dust” cars and will feature street racing and drifting. “We’re keen to point out that we’re not the Vin Diesel “Fast and the Furious” drift,” says Grimbley. “We’re not about that. We see drift as a legitimate racing type.” They even went as far as consulting current D1 drift champs Team Orange to make sure they’re substance, not just style.
After picking a region, it’s pretty much time to race. Players will start out as a rookie driver and will start earning both money and reputation from season to season. At first you will be driving for other teams, and you may even move from job to job as the offers come in. As you build your name, you’ll able to build your own team and even go as far as hiring a teammate to race alongside you. The development team has created 600 different AI characters to hire, all with different attitudes and racing styles. At the end of a season, your team or the team you race for will be invited to drive the 24-hour LeMans (raced in 24 min).
Grid is running on the Ego (previously know as Neon) engine that Dirt did, but with a ton of huge improvements. The crash models have been totally remade, with a load of new parts flying around when you smash into another car. The engine also produces fully realized city environments and can even pack in 40,000 cheering spectators to add an extra touch of realism even if you are flying by them at 180 MPH. One of the coolest features added in is the Flashback. One of the most annoying things about racing (especially those long endurance races) is crashing right before a win or a critical pass. To lift this burden, players will be able to hit the back button and rewind the race a few seconds back like a replay. After figuring out where things went bad, they can jump back in and try to avoid the crash. The balance for this is not yet final, but a feature like this could be a one-time-use-only type of thing.
Racing fans get plenty of love when it comes to gaming. In 2007, we saw the release of almost 30 racing games—a pretty surprising number. The key is weeding through the pack to find the best of the best. Dirt was at the top of that list for a lot of people, and Codemasters is hoping to build on that success with Grid. A June release is expected for Grid, and it will hit Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and a handheld version on DS.