GRID AUTOSPORT THE BIG GAME
DAMAGE CONTROL
GRID AUTOSPORT has 83 cars confirmed at the moment from a number of brands. But as with any licensing agreement, the manufacturers control how their products are represented in the game. “Licensing is a really dark art. Different people want different things from the representations of brands in the game,” says James Nicholls, the title’s chief designer. “For individual cars we worked
directly with the manufacturers, we showed them what we were doing with their vehicles, how they’d look, how the damage works. It hasn’t held us back.
checking that they’d be happy with us using it. As we set up to talk to them we found out that they were fans of the TOCA series and obviously enjoyed their racing,” explains Nicholls. “The team was more than happy
to give us feedback and it just went from there – how individual cars should handle and behave, but also incidentals like how audio was relayed to you as you started to break traction. Details like that were invaluable to us. We were able to take that to another level past what we were hitting.” As such it should not come as a surprise that Grid Autosport takes a very detailed approach to racing, but Nicholls says that the game is not a ‘true’ simulation. “It is certainly more of a simulation than Grid 2. You’ve got a very deep physics engine which we tune back to the point where it’s an easy game to pick up and play,” says Nicholls. “But there’s much more depth in the actual driving model than we’ve done
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“Some manufacturers
won’t want a particular thing to happen to their car. One company didn’t want doors to open when you’re driving, for example. Those are the kind of details that we cater for. “The damage model is essential to Grid. It underpins what it’s like to race. The cars are breakable, but you need to be able to bring them home at the end of the race. It’s not just a case of cruising them around and bouncing them. It’s really important for us to keep pushing. It’s worth the effort we put in to those licensing relationships.”
in previous Grid games. But we’d never call it a simulation title – it just has a deep and authentic handling model in this game. “There are a lot of driving simulators out on the market right now but there are very few games that actually do racing. That sets us apart from basically everybody else. What we are trying to do is make you feel like a racing driver.” Nicholls concludes: “It’s
about the competition between drivers, it’s about racing for teams. It’s much more focused on that side of things rather than making individual cars look nice and shiny. It’s not a driving game, it’s very much a racing game and I’d definitely emphasis the word ‘game’ here. It’s a video game about being a racing driver.”
April 11th 2014
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