Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

GAME Features

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
GRID chief designer Falph Fulton chats to STACK about life in the fast lane.

Race Driver GRID boasts a pedigree of quality racing titles from UK based Codemasters. STACK caught up with its Chief Game Designer Falph Fulton, to chat about life in the fast lane.

The series is 11 years old now. What new features have you included in GRID?

Falph Fulton: Where to start, really? With GRID we build on our core strengths but it is a new game in the series, a fresh start for us and for fans. GRID has a new global outlook that takes in Europe, the U.S. and Japan, includes a select line-up of only the world’s most spectacular racing cars and the best damage engine in gaming. We’ve also got incredible AI, 12 player multiplayer and drift racing done properly in a video game for the first time. GRID is the first Race Driver game in this generation and the EGO Engine allows us to push the game into areas that it simply wouldn’t have been able to before.

What engine does it run on? Is it the same engine that you used on Colin McRae: DiRT?

Falph Fulton: The engine we used on Colin McRae DiRT was called NEON. We now use the EGO engine which is a new version of that engine. The EGO Engine itself is a continuously evolving and growing multi-platform project that has already had over three years of development from our Central Technology team. For GRID, the main changes have been to include features which DiRT didn’t have - night racing, a 24 hour day-to-night cycle for Le Mans, 20 car grids - and there have been numerous changes to our lighting and shader systems which means that GRID is at the cutting edge of racing visuals. We’ve completely rewritten our damage and deformation system and implemented a crowd system so we can populate each track with up to 40,000 fully modelled, animated spectators.

Car racing is a very competitive gaming genre. What makes GRID stand out from the pack?

Falph Fulton: When you look at a lot of racing games on the market they seem to focus on everything other than the actual race experience – for some it’s a huge car line up, for others it’s all about customising cars, or it’s about some street culture associated with it. For us, we put the race at the very centre of the game – we have amazing AI, stunning damage, crowds of 40,000, incredible circuits and it all feeds into creating this intense, aggressive, wheel-to-wheel race experience. Of course we also have a host of new content and features, too, including doing drift properly for the first time, which I don’t think any game has done yet, and a huge variety of environments and races for players to experience.

Can you elaborate on the car damage system in GRID?

Falph Fulton: Well the headline feature is that we’re able to do twice as much damage, in real time, as we were able to do in DiRT, which was received very well by gamers and critics alike. So our damage model really is at the forefront of what can be achieved in this current generation of games. We include it not just because it looks incredible and it’s fun to see a car take damage but because it’s a hugely important part of racing and as such, should be a vital part of a racing game – it just doesn’t make sense to us not to try to make this as realistic as possible. So after DiRT, we had some really clear ideas about how we wanted cars to damage in GRID so we started again, and the results are amazing. You can play back a crash in slow motion using the game’s instant replay system and watch the car buckle in an impact from any angle.
All debris which comes off cars during a race is persistent so the remnants of an accident can become a hazard to be avoided. For the most part we’re talking about small pieces of carbon fibre which have physical properties but probably won’t damage your car too much, but occasionally you’ll see somebody’s bumper thrown up by a car ahead and that could really hurt.

How many cars do you have lined up for the game? Do you have any unique vehicles on offer?

Falph Fulton: We decided at the beginning that if you or I could purchase a car and drive it in real life, we didn’t want it in the game. Our car line up is exclusively limited to thoroughbred racing cars – current, classic, circuit and drift – and all are high performance and unique in their own way. We have over 45 cars in the game, because we’ve gone for quality over quantity. There’s enough to offer real variety but not so many that you end up with hundreds of cars people never play or don’t care about. If you want to race around tracks in family saloons you could pick up from a showroom, this game isn’t for you. But if you want to jump into a race-spec Lamborghini, or a Koenigsegg CCGT or an Aston Martin DBR9, and authentically engineered drift cars like the Team Orange Nissan Silvia D1 Spec S15 then it doesn’t get any better.

How many tracks feature in the game?

Falph Fulton: We have over 90 tracks built around 15 hugely varied environments – from classic European circuits like Spa and Circuit de la Sarthe, to street circuits around major US cities, and temporary racetracks built around Tokyo and Yokohama in Japan.

What do you have in store for the multiplayer?

Falph Fulton: We have 12 player online play with a host of leaderboards that track the best racers in the world for each event. We also have new ranking system that awards points for various achievements in the game as you progress from Junior Rookie to Legend.

Are you planning future downloadable content?

Falph Fulton: Absolutely. We will continue to support Race Driver: GRID after launch and we have plenty of ideas of where we want to go with it. We can’t reveal anything yet though!