The elements of a ‘serious fun’ racing game.
Codemasters is bringing Grid back to the race track. It’s been five years since the last entry in the series, Grid Autosport, but 2019 is the year when TOCA racing makes its comeback. While it has been away, Codemasters has been thinking about how it can reinvent what Grid is, and double down on the elements that make it unique in the racing game sphere.
In an exclusive interview with IGN, game director Chris Smith tells us the five most important features that Grid is introducing or refining, and how its dedication to telling motorsport stories means it’s a racing game for every kind of player.
You can form rivalries on the track
While your connection to your car is important in Grid, equally vital are your relationships with other drivers. On the track you can form rivalries and even gain a nemesis (or five), adding a sense of dramatic flair to the proceedings.
“Rivals are essentially the cars that finish above you, or just behind you if finish first,” explains game director Chris Smith. “Rivals are there for us to give you an idea of the previous race, how you did and who your biggest competitor is. If you beat your rival you’re improving.”
While rivals are a natural part of polite, sportsmanlike competition, a Nemesis is created when the rules of racing are thrown out the window. “If I frustrate or annoy drivers a lot, they enter what we call the Nemesis state,” says Smith. “A Nemesis doesn’t like you anymore. Polite racing has gone, they will try to take your racing line into a corner and break and block you. They may trade some paint with you.”
When a driver becomes your nemesis, their AI enters a heightened state: “They get an improvement to their skill to try and catch you up,” reveals Smith. “They’ve got better because they are just absolutely going to overtake and beat you.”
Not everyone on the track is an enemy, though. In Grid you are part of a motorsport team, and one teammate will be racing alongside you. A loyalty statistic determines how well they’ll work with you, meaning some teammates can be more agreeable than others.
“You can pick a driver who’s super loyal to you, and no matter what you order him to do, he will absolutely respond,” says Smith. Or, if you’re looking for a little more drama, you can select a racer who hates you. “The engineer will even sometimes say ‘He’s turned his radio off, I don’t think he’s listening to you anymore’,” adds Smith.
There are 400 unique AI drivers
All drivers – teammates, rivals, nemesis, and regular competitors – have AI personalities that help make a race feel more than just a smoothly-moving parade.
“We have 400 AI drivers,” reveals Smith. “They all have a driving skill level, which dictates how they take corners, how they exit corners, when they break, and when they don’t break. They have an aggression level, which determines how aggressively they take the corners, how fair play they are, and how they react to your collisions and your driving maneuvers.”
In addition to Codemaster’s 400 bespoke drivers, it also has an AI based on one of motorsport’s most famous faces: Fernando Alonso. The F1 champion will act as a showdown boss in his own series, acting as gatekeeper between you and the Grid World Series finals.
Every driver can make a disastrous mistake
Motorsport is a dangerous activity, and it seems that Codemasters is going to lengths to ensure the dangerous excitement of high-speed racing is well represented. Grid may not be a Burnout game, but that doesn’t mean that sparks won’t fly during a race. “Every driver is fallible,” says Smith. “Some will make more mistakes than others.”
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The AI choreographer causes spin outs, collisions, and even flipping.
The game’s AI choreographer assesses driver behaviour and causes spin outs, colliding with other cars, and even flipping based on the mistakes a driver makes. And while these may not involve eruptions of fire, smoke, and bodywork debris as in Criterion’s beloved series, they do add some drama to Grid’s racetracks.
“On top of that we have damage,” says Smith. “Nothing starts pristine in motor racing. We start your cars with knocks, scrapes, bangs, paint missing. And as you go through the race, this continues, as does damage, as does dirt. Bonnets will loosen and fly off. Boots will fly open and then slam shut and rattle. You’ll see doors swing open.”
There is a core ‘Grid spirit’ for car handling
“When we approached Grid we started with the handling,” explains Smith. “It’s really important to us that we produce a handling system that feels more in line with the original Grid.”
To achieve that, Codemasters has created what it calls a ‘consistent core experience’. “What we really didn’t want was for the player to have to relearn handling for each car class,” says Smith. “We wanted a core Grid spirit handling that is at the base, that feels familiar when you pick up any new car.”
Codemasters has then layered elements on top of that core handling model to make each car feel unique. “When you play you’re going to see that when you’re on a street corner in a muscle car, it’s much more car-to-car, rubbing is racing. Whereas when you get to the GT class it’s more polite, it’s more of a true motorsport feeling of getting the corners right and making sure you keep your racing line.”
You choose exactly what you want to play
Racing games often fall into two camps: arcade or simulation. Depending on the player, racing games can feel too intimidating or far too easy. Codemasters wants Grid to be different, and so is offering a plethora of options to allow players to decide exactly what kind of experience they want from the game.
“The main thing here is you’ve paid your money for this game, and I want you to enjoy it the way you want to enjoy it. That’s important to me,” says Smith.
Naturally, difficulty is a major part of Grid’s accessibility options. “Out of the box we turn the assists on, we choose your tuning, and we put it to the average difficulty,” says Smith. “If you’re a sim hardcore player, you can put the difficulty up to up to the maximum. You can also turn off all the assists in the game. So you can make it as hard and as challenging as you like. On the flip side, if you would like a more laid back racing experience, you can bring down the difficulty and enjoy it the way you want to enjoy it.”
“We want everyone to have fun with Grid,” he says. “Whether you’re a casual arcade player or you’re a serious sim player. If everyone has fun with good motor racing stories, we’ll have succeeded.”
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
