Race Driver One: GRID — Codemasters New Direction

The announcement of Codemaster’s Race Driver One serves notice that console racing is officially “casual” and “street”.

There have been a few games that have had commercial success without turning into some sort Gran Turismo or Project Gotham Racing clone. Racing titles whether they are as arcade as Test Drive Unlimited or Forza sim-like, have been offering the same ideas and game modes in a vastly different packages. The equation, which has been extremely successful is to take production cars, race them on free roam maps, city tracks, or real racing tracks.

The TOCA Race Driver 3 was one of the first games with casual appeal with hardcore gameplay that offered you “real” racing on real tracks but not street racing. What other game has come out that covered almost every major racing style in the world including the more eclectic classes such as go-carts and monster trucks. The final tally had 35 racing styles, 70 different licensed cars, 80 different track variations on roughly 30 different tracks. And it was all done on the PS2 and Xbox.

The early information on Race Driver One, is that it will offer three prongs to their career mode, following a similar classification as Froza, with Asian, US and European lineages. Each spoke will cover the local style and flavor of the region; the Asian region will focus on drift style and night racing; the US will have city racing in San Fran, DC or Detroit; and in Europe you will race on famous Euro tracks.

The feature set looks like a hodge-podge of racing styles and modes from every single racing game ever released. Maybe a better title for it should be Test Drive: Project Burnout Gran Forza.

The shift in direction for Codies shouldn’t be overlooked because they were one of the last developers that was focused on non-street racing but have succumbed to the pressure of a the money a mass appeal street racing title can bring. Even the hugely successful CMR: Dirt was a shift towards the arcade style of racing only. Yes, it did include rally racing, not a style that the masses will flock towards but the style of rally racing shifted towards arcade, mass appeal gameplay. Maybe for a racing discipline as difficult as rally, Dirt was the right blend of mass appeal and close-enough racing.

The departure from the TOCA 3 feature set, in GRID, might show that non-street, real track racing does not have a place on the next-gen consoles or a TOCA 4 was too much of a gamble for Codies. Yet the racing genre might need TOCA 4 more than Grid. We need a game with graphical style of DiRT and GRID, the amount of tracks, cars and racing classes in TOCA 3.

Gran Turismo might look amazing real. Forza might be the ultimate racing simulator. And EA might have the market on arcade racers. But a true TOCA 4 would have been a different flavor in the over-saturated street racing scene.