Codemasters recently put up teaser website, which we (along with everyone else, practically) assumed was hinting at a new GRiD game. And indeed, it was. Codemasters have announced Grid Autosport, the third game in the racing installment, and have announced that it will be out for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC June 27th in Europe and June 24th in the US. Yes, you read that right. It will not be coming out for the current gen systems, i.e., PS4 and Xbox One.
And why is that, you might ask? Well, of course you would. It almost seems obvious that most major new releases would be coming out for the Xbox One and the PS4. But the development team working on Autosport says it already has an optimised engine that works perfectly fine for the Xbox 360 and the PS3, which is what they want for their game at this moment in time. The team did not want to “force” an Xbox One and PS4 release on the game.
“One of the unique things for us is we’ve got our own internal Ego technology,” lead designer James Nicholls told IGN. “We built this one off the the same heritage of all the previous games have been built to this point. That means we’ve already got a ready-made engine that’s highly optimised for the current-gen hardware, but also PC can really benefit from that. If we moved that particular engine onto next-gen, it’s almost a port job and you’re not really doing a next-gen game. We’re building something that’s forced onto those consoles, that’s not naturally built for them.”
However, Nicholls says that Codemasters is building towards the future. “What we’ve traditionally done at Codemasters is we’ve always released games that have been built for that new hardware in mind,” he said. “So the engines we’re building internally for the new version of Ego of next-gen and the games that are built on that are taking that platform extensions, those new things into account. For our game it didn’t feel right to force a game out.”
Stay tuned for more coverage.