It's not often that you attend a press event with people like Christopher Tudor, director of the new GRID to be released on 11 October 2019. Christopher is in fact a man who exposes his passion and dedication to work without filters, and he was literally excited to talk to the press about Grid and everything the Codemasters team is doing with this new chapter of the series.
Grid is in fact a project that puts fun at the base of everything, making it support the three pillars that support the foundations of the game: accessibility and choices, progression and rewards, stories. Before analyzing these pillars, however, let's start from an important premise: Grid is not a racing arcade nor a simulator, as it places itself in the middle to be able to satisfy the widest range of racing game enthusiasts.
There was therefore a lot of study work for mediate to all the characteristics that identify arcade and simulation games in order to offer a compromise that would guarantee the right satisfaction to every type of player. In this way, the driving model has not been sacrificed, and users will be able to juggle the game options to find the one that best suits their needs. For geeks, the options that can be worked on are damage, transmission, clutch, abs, traction and stability. Working closely with professional drivers and esports champions, the result, according to their words, is that it really is the perfect compromise between the two.
So let's go back to the three pillars of the game and let's start by analyzing the first one: accessibility and choices. To meet even the most casual players, in Grid you don't have to think about what to do and how to do it: you simply choose a circuit and start playing. The user does not need to think about having to end the career mode, which is present, or start tutorials to learn how to run. The player does not even have to worry about arriving first, the important thing is to complete the race and get his well-deserved experience points and money to spend to unlock the various game contents. Users are therefore left with the possibility to choose whether to focus on achieving the best possible result, whether to continue at higher difficulty levels, whether to focus only on a specific type of racing (Touring, Stock, Tuner, GT, Fernando Alonso or Invitational) and so on.
Career is dictated by the Grid World Series, a series of tracks that must be unlocked by completing races of various events to reach the final Showdown. There are over 100 events available and more will be introduced via free DLC over time after the game's release.
We then come to the second pillar of the game, which is the progression and the rewards. As we said before, by competing you get experience points and credits. Experience points increase not only according to the positioning in the races, but also based on parameters such as speed, technique and recklessness
The game includes 100 experience levels which, once reached, can be reset and converted into prestige, for a total of 5 prestige. The higher the level, the more prestigious we get and the greater the rewards that can be purchased, from cars to liveries with which to customize cars. It will also be possible to customize your Gamertag within the game with badges, medals and flags, so as to make yourself recognizable and express yourself as drivers, especially in online games.
Finally, we come to the stories: in this context we do not mean the narrative, but the episodes that are created during the races. Indeed, among Grid's objectives there is the will to replicate the unpredictability of the motorsport world in a completely innovative way. To do this, almost 400 AI have been created that characterize the opponents in a unique and never repetitive way. There will therefore be riders who are good in the corners, aggressive ones, incapable ones and so on, in order to never make the races monotonous and make sure that something unpredictable always happens on the track. In order to achieve this ambitious task, the Nemesis System, a name that recalls in part what was seen in The Lord of the Rings: The Shadow of War. In practice, if you play dirty with your opponents (using them as a bank in the corners, for example) they will recognize you as enemies and will be particularly aggressive towards you and will try to hinder you during the race.
Added to this is the rivalry system: in the event of a podium, the riders who arrived before and after you will identify you as opponents and will compete mainly against you, compared to the other riders on the track. We can assure you, the effects of all these elements in play are felt and make racing incredibly unique and unpredictable, like never seen in a racing game.
In our trial hour, we really enjoyed playing Grid. We are happy that Codemasters has created a racing title that can make all types of players happy. The approach is incredible, just start the game and jump right into the racing experience to get the most out of the title, whether you are a novice or veteran driver. The title will be available for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. For lovers of the genre, Grid could prove to be the surprise of this 2019.
► GRID is a racing-Sport type game developed and published by Codemasters for PC, PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One, the video game was released on 11/10/2019
GRID is a beautiful game that cannot be missing from your collection: we have decided to evaluate it with a 90%, if you are interested in learning more you can read the GRID review
