James, our Chief Designer (his forum account is WIP) has magic'd up some words, of which you’ll find them below.
//Enter James
Hi all,
We’re really flat out at the moment trying to close the game, so apologies for being a bit quiet in the last week. However, we couldn’t help notice the corner cutting thread, and wanted to give some more information on this, because I understand why it’s a concern.
We’ve made a lot of changes since GRID2, and only some of those were present in the announce code builds (from which the recent YouTube gameplay footage was taken). That announce code is 2-3 months old now, and the game has advanced a great deal since then.
We’re still balancing it now, but here’s a list of changes that have occurred:
- You now need to have all 4 wheels across the white line to incur a penalty. We’ve fixed this since the announce build was created
- You only incur a penalty if you’ve gained an advantage for going off track. If you re-join the track no better off than driving at full speed on the driving line, you won’t get a penalty.
- The penalty is proportionate to the amount of advantage gained, so tiny, accidental cuts of the white lines will only slow you down a little before you get up to full power
- The off track surfaces are much more realistic than they were in GRID2, where you could pretty much hold full speed even off road. In Autosport, you’ve got a realistic amount of grip and slowdown on grass, gravel etc, which makes it pretty tricky to drive off road and gain an advantage
- In multiplayer, we ghost players who have incurred a penalty, so they can’t block you
You may also have noticed that we apply penalties in a smoother, less jarring way than GRID2.
Hope this is useful and interesting information, and I’m sure you’ll get to see this in action as and when we’re doing live streams further down the line.
//End James, Loore service resumed
