Taking place across even more locations than before, with more varied gameplay modes including Drift and the “True Feel” system which looks to accommodate both realistic racers and arcade drivers, GRID 2 still features the same amazing gameplay the series has become famous for. GRID 2 will also incorporate a new system for routes changing on the fly, to give races a more dynamic feel.

That’s not including the bevy of multiplayer options for racing against friends and competing against racers for global leaderboard ranks on top of the heavy single player campaign.

GRID 2 is currently available for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The video also showcases some of the better graphical elements added to GRID 2, namely the presence of crowds and other interesting flourishes. Miami looks quite stunning, reflecting Codemasters desire to take the racing to a larger scale.

The draw distance is significantly better, as players can look well beyond the track to see the world they’re competing in.

GRID 2 will feature a ton of new features like LiveRoutes, which gives a more open-world bent to the traditional races, even as Codemasters goes forward with the removal of the cockpit view.

Nonetheless, the cars on display, physics and tracks look incredible. We’ll mark our calendars for when GRID 2 releases on May 28th in North America and May 31st in Europe.

“We perhaps define ‘realism’ slightly differently – we want the game world to have soul and to feel alive – from the garage you work from, the particle effects you kick up on track or the crowds you’re there to entertain. We want a sense of occasion at the race events; a selection of only the most iconic vehicles that we hone tirelessly, a narrative wrapper for the game, which gives the player a singular goal and driving force behind their actions.

“And as you mention, the handling model plays an integral part in achieving this goal of realism and immersion too. The goal of TrueFeel is to ensure the player is always engrossed in the driving action, and that cars are true to character whilst being intuitive enough to get to grips with.

“I think that’s a real differentiator for us – we get the tech specs and we ensure that the base model for that handling is precise to what the manufacturers give us, but when you translate that through a wheel peripheral or game pad, it’s not always going to feel quite right with just numbers and specifications plugged in.

“So we bring in professional consultants who have driven the cars we’re building to give us an acid test – a measure of whether what they’re playing really stands out as the character of the vehicle, and what we can do to improve.”

Earlier, Codemasters stated that only 5 percent gamers utilized the view in Race Driver: GRID and were thus omitting it for the sequel. In regards to games like DriveClub, releasing on launch day for the PlayStation 4, which feature highly detailed cockpits, we quizzed Smith on whether the number of games who utilized it in the previous game hadn’t gone up in the past few years.

“This subject has come up a number of times, and I’d actually point your readers in the direction of a blog post on the Codemasters forums for a detailed response on it. Essentially, we get our telemetry data from across all of our racing titles over the last five years and have a whole range of stats to support this.

It was decided during production that for the game overall, in terms of our resources, and in terms of what we’re bringing to the gamers – all of them, not just a proportion of them, that it was best to do this. Our call to action to gamers is that the improvements we’ve made elsewhere need to be played to be believed; so get the game and play it yourself.

“We are confident you’ll love the driving experience, and see exactly the benefits that this decision has brought.”

GRID 2 releases on May 28th in North America and May 31st in Europe for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

He stated that, “The original game was all about the race, and first and foremost with GRID 2, we had to deliver that experience. With GRID 2, the race returns. Achieving that has taken months of work across the board – the race experience from the ground up has been improved, we almost deconstructed things and asked ‘How can we improve this, how can we immerse the player as a driver?’

“So, fundamentally, the driving has been improved. When the player drives in game now, the physics simulation for the vehicle is running at 1000 hertz. This means that even at the speeds the supercars get up to in the game, we’re sampling the terrain under the vehicle’s wheels quickly enough to then tell the player what to do about it, how to adapt their approach and keep the vehicle under control.

“In addition, we’ve made big advances with our AI, after all, you need opponents to make it a race. So we’ve added to our cache of AI parameters, allowing us to almost pick and mix characteristics for drivers for how they behave on track.

“My favourite improvement with the AI is the dynamic element – if you push them out of their comfort zone, they’ll begin to behave differently to the standard nature; conservative drivers might be driven to make contact with you to secure a podium if you put them in a tight spot. It’s all to play for on the track.

“Beyond purely technical improvements, a big thing for us in order to make sure the game had a solid grounding, and a reason for being was to create a narrative wrapper that informed your racing experience.

“Where GRID saw you go to the USA, Europe and Asia in quite an abstract way, through the floating shelves with event cards in them, GRID 2 fully integrates this into a storyline, a reason for you to be travelling to these locations, as you help entrepreneur Patrick Callahan build a single World Series of Racing.

“We never want any of the race events to just be ticked off like a checkbox – they should each be filled with drama and excitement.”