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Despite being the latest publisher to brave the wrath of the ferocious online games community, Codemasters is sticking by its guns.
It was revealed yesterday that the Britsoft studio is cutting the in-car view option from freshly announced racer Grid 2.
So what, you may say? Well, in-car is for real men. And real men are the ones who are the best at MOANING LOUDLY on the internet. And they’ve been conditioned to believe that LOUD MOANING reaps rewards.
Earlier this year BioWare had the bare faced nerve to release Mass Effect 3 with an ending that didn’t detail every single curiosity and unanswered question posed by the franchise’s huge fanbase.
So ferocious was the backlash against BioWare‘s use of craft and subtlety in its ending that the studio actually backtracked, eventually releasing a brand new ending that it hoped would quell the flames of hate.
It didn’t, obviously, but the intent was there.
But Codemasters isn’t giving any indication that it is planning a similar handbrake turn.
It boils down to the fact that the in-car view takes around one third of every car’s budget (processing, not financial),” a Codemasters spokesperson told MCV.
So the decision was to invest that back into each car to create something valuable for all players and that would make a noticeable difference to the game across the board. There’s still bonnet cam for that driving seat viewpoint of course."
Senior brand manager Edd Newby-Robson added: We’ve been taking our time talking to our consumers. We really think one of our strengths is understanding what our punters want and what our gamers want and melding that beautifully with the creativity, innovation and experience of our studio.
We spoke to about 4,000 gamers. The first survey was done three years ago and then we did it again at the end of last year. We get so much integral information, both from this, but also from the games themselves.
We use our telemetry from our games to understand how people play them. There was key bits of information that came out of those surveys and also telemetry and some of those would be how our gamers play our games. 85 per cent of them use one of two camera options – bonnet cam and chasing cam, which is quite interesting because we spend a lot of time doing several different cameras in a lot of our games but it turns out that, I think 75 per cent of people use chase, and ten per cent use bonnet, and the remainder do the others. So it’s a huge, huge amount of people that play it in that way.
We think that means Grid 2 at retail will appeal to a broader consumer than just the hard-core racing fan. That’s not to say that it won’t appeal to the hardcore and our trusted Grid followers that have been with us all these years.”
Indeed, the in-car can be a pain for devs. Gran Turismo 5 only included an in-car view for around a fifth of its cars upon release and only recently added universal support.
Grid 2 is scheduled for a release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2013.
09/08/12 15:54: Updated to include comments from Edd Newby-Robson sourced from an interview with MCV on August 7th 2012
