Games

Grid Autosport: Codemaster’s “unfinished business”

How a racing giant ditched next-gen to make the sequel fans demanded in 12 months flat.

By Ben Sillis

9 min readPublished on 08/02/2016 · 10:09 AM UTC

Grid Autosport: Codemaster's "unfinished business"
© Codemasters

It’s rare that game developers admit the failings of their previous games. Either the PR manager doesn’t want to send out that “message”, or more likely the studio has simply gone under as a result of today’s cut throat games industry. It’s refreshing then to find developers openly admitting where they went wrong.

“We had an opportunity,” explains Codemasters’ senior executive producer Clive Moody. He’s talking to Red Bull about the upcoming Grid Autosport, and why the racer is headed to Xbox 360 and PS3 instead of the much more advanced PS4 and Xbox One, and just 12 months after the release of its predecessor.

“We came off the back of Grid 2 which was well received in some quarters, less well received with some of our more core, traditional audience. From a personal point of view, it was just like some unfinished business if you like. We really did want to wrap that up.”

Unfinished business is right. Grid Autosport, the sequel to last year’s Grid 2 driving game, isn’t a quick cash in – it’s the game the British studio has been trying to make for its fans all along. Grid 2 was by no means a commercial failure, but it caused friction with its passionate community of hardcore racing fans. And when they’re as vocal as they are, that can be a problem. Though Codemasters was adamant last year that only a small percentage of drivers used the cockpit camera – which it dropped for Grid 2 – it received a lot of feedback, and couldn’t work every request in through DLC and patches.

“We were listening to what our community liked and didn’t like about Grid 2,” says chief game designer James Nicholls. “We fixed certain things we could realistically fix, through patches and so on. But it also meant we had this huge long list, almost a shopping list of things the community wanted us to do.”

That meant a game using the same engine, and the same platforms – and with the team ready to go, a rapid fire sequel made more sense, Nicholls insists.

“We did feel we could address an awful lot of that by doing another Grid title straight away. We had the team, we had the tech ready to go. It was either do that or take a much longer period of time.”

“We had a choice: we’ve got really mature technology, a great team that’s already in place,” says Moody. “It was a case of did we disband some of that team and focus on getting our next generation technology together – and that work is ongoing – or go out there and have a last hurrah if you like on what is now the last generation of consoles.”

The result is Grid Autosport, a victory lap of sorts for the series that began with TOCA Touring Car Championship all the way back in 1997. The team – totalling 200 people, including freelancers and external designers – have sought to right any of the perceived wrongs inflicted in Grid 2, bringing back that cockpit cam, adding more vehicles and fixing the handling, one of the most dramatic changes to Grid 2. And they did it all in less than 12 months. Even for a studio used to turning out annual F1 games like clockwork, it’s a remarkable feat.

“It really has been turned around since Grid 2,” Nicholls says. “We patched Grid 2, some of the people needed a rest, and while that was going on we were designing the next one. Straight away, we started spinning up the prototypes – we absolutely went for it after that, the team has just clicked into gear. The production’s flown by, but in a really good way.”

In that time though the Grid team have managed to work in some substantial changes and additions. This time around there are more than 100 courses in over 20 locations, and more than 80 cars (With classics like the Aston Martin N24 V12 Zagato, Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3, McLaren 12C GT3, Audi R8 LMS Ultra, Shelby Cobra “Daytona” Coupe and Ford GT40 MK1 on the roster, to name just a handful) on the disc, as well as several new game modes.

“I would say the key things were the missing motorsport content, things like touring cars,” Nicholls says. “We definitely made sure we addressed that balance. We got a lot of feedback about removing the cockpit cam, so we very quickly moved to make sure that we addressed that.

“The main thing though was the handling. We changed the handling in Grid 2 for good reasons but I think it really upset some of those core racing fans. We’ve made sure we’ve nailed the handling in Grid Autosport and once we’d got it up and running we got people in to make sure of that.”

Grid has never been a racing sim in the same way Gran Turismo is. It’s naturalistic, not realistic, in the same way that movie scripts aren’t filled with people umming and ahhing every second word. Nor is it an arcade racer where collisions are minor issues, but Grid 2 felt that way to some because of its all-important handling. So how did Codemasters go about making sure they had it right this time?

“The one size fits all handling model in Grid 2... fans felt it was too drifty in nature,” Nicholls explains. “We did that for a reason, it fitted the product, but if we were going to go back to more authentic racing, it needed the more realistic model we had before. We wanted to go to the sim end of the spectrum without it becoming a simulator, and make sure we had something that was a bit deeper, so that players could turn off all the assists to get a really nice deep driving model.”

Fixing it meant bringing in consultants – professional drivers, journalists – to fine tune everything about it, even the sound. “We got things set up, a whole range of different cars. We got those tested really early on. The feedback we were getting was that as you approach the point of breaking traction you didn’t really get a lot of warning. What we then did was worked into the audio a bit more, the force feedback in the pads and wheels, to create this lovely feeling of pushing the car to its very limits, to be just on that edge.”

Then there are the new gameplay modes. Perhaps most intriguing is the new Endurance Mode, which requires you to keep an eye on your tyres – throw your car around too much on the bends and they could wear out, or worse, blow. It’s not just another number gauge to keep an eye on though – as Nicholls explains, it forces you to drive in an entirely different way.

“We’re not trying to simulate real life, so we don’t have to make you stay awake for 24 hours and swap the car with two other drivers. We just want to make you concentrate and drive in a smooth and consistent way. Race drivers have to think long term, it’s about being controlling throughout the race. For example, if you’re in a slightly slower car it might be to your advantage just to hold back, as you’ll have the stronger grip in the last stages of the race. It’s a different way of thinking and driving.”

Don’t worry though if you don’t want to bother driving cautiously – tyre degradation is unique to Endurance. You don’t have to play the new qualifying session mode either, but it certainly lends a more authentic feel to proceedings for race day purists. You don’t just start on the grid, you have to earn your spot on it.

“Part of what we’ve gone for is the race weekend vibe. The thing that’s really nice in qualifying is that it’s allowed us to push the level of difficulty a bit harder and emphasise the difference between the quality of the teams as well. So if you’re somebody who is racing for an entry level team and you qualify in eighth, you’ve done really well.”

That means the team have been able to emphasise the difference between the quality of cars more too. Moody explains the level of detail that goes into researching and modelling each of the vehicles.

“A lot of it is about race set-up rather than just raw numbers, and it can make a massive difference to how a car behaves, so there’s that element that comes into it which is where our car handling guys come into their own. These are a bunch of designers that will day in, day out sit setting up these cars, playing with all the parameters we’ve got, and we’ve got 100 different parameters in our physics model, from how the suspension reacts right down to how the tyre modelling works.”

Despite the rapid turnaround of Grid Autosport, and the trend towards annualisation in blockbuster game series, Moody says that we shouldn’t expect another sequel next summer. Grid isn’t going the way of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed.

“I wouldn't say that necessarily – the main thing is the opportunity presented itself. It’s about the fact we had the team and the tech ready to go, there was a brief window we felt we could do another game and address fan feedback, so that was the reason we decided to go again with another Grid title. Everything was in the right place. But it’s not part of a bigger strategy to annualise the Grid games.”

If anything, now that Codemasters has – hopefully – finished business on Xbox 360 and PS3, it really is time to move on. It may take a while, Moody says, but it is happening.

“I don’t think it’s any trade secret that next gen is knocking on the door pretty hard, and that’s something we’ll be looking at and making sure our next-generation of technology is the best that’s out there, in terms of an engine built specfically to make racers on.”

Moody ends the interview with a tantalising hint: we shouldn’t just expect racers. “That’s what we do and what we do best. Having said that, without mentioning any specific projects, we are looking at some other interesting gaming concepts, there’s a couple of ideas, we’ll perhaps see how those pan out in the future.”

Codemasters hasn’t always made serious racing games (Remember Micro Machines?), or driving games exclusively. Perhaps another Operation Flashpoint is being worked on somewhere – let’s just hope business is finished this time round, because we can’t wait to find out what he means.

Grid Autosport hits stores on June 24 in the US, and June 27 in Europe on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.