A major part of any racing game is challenging your friends (and hapless strangers,) cruising past them and watching in the wing-mirror as they weep at the side of the road at the intensity of your driving skills. Grid 2 is hoping to capture that via Codemasters’ ‘RaceNet’ system – one of those ever-so-popular additional social hub things that can issue weekly challenges and the like to prospective players.
The multiplayer modes are listed as: Race (Including LiveRoutes), Endurance, Drift, Touge, Checkpoint, Face Off and Time Attack. Global Challenge events, it is noted, also includes Overtake and Power Lap. All modes can be played online with up to 12 players, or two player split-screen (it’s not clear whether you can combine local and online racing at this point.)
Grouping of players will be subject to some mysterious ‘anti-griefing technology’ which, by the sounds of it, is a measure of how often you enjoy running into people. Those who love it will be put together is crash-happy packs, while those who avoid collisions will also be grouped up.
RaceNet will be offering you three different ‘rivals’ systems, described as Weekly, Social and Custom rivals. The former is automatically selected from a group of players similar to you in skill, the Social ones can be chosen from friends and players previously raced against and Custom is, as it suggests, a filter for selecting rivals based on geographic location and event type.
As well as all that, ‘Global Challenge’ is summarised as follows: “Players can compete against Rivals even when those Rivals are offline and earn XP, in-game Cash and RaceNet Followers(see below) as they compete in up to nine weekly Global Challenges selected from across Grid 2’s wide range of game modes and locations.”
You can see some images relating to the multiplayer side of things, below. We’ll have a preview of Grid 2 up early next month.
