Well, I don't know what to say...but this is going to be a serious and long post from me. Here's to the slim chance of keeping this game alive for as long as possible.
Note that I've never played the first GRID.
I'm fully aware this is old news, but it's been a little over a year and a half since Codemasters made an announcement that they would remove interior views from GRID 2, to the displeasure of a lot of people; not just those who enjoyed the first game, but to racing simulator enthusiasts (throughout this post, I'll use iRacing as an example) in general. After the announcement, several, if not all, iRacing fans who heard the announcement made a promise to themselves to refuse to even so much as rent the game for a few hours...
because CM took out the interior view. Then again, I should have expected that kind of reaction from that kind of crowd.
It's now a month and a half or so into 2014. The promise to not even touch GRID 2 thanks to the lack of interior view is still held true by a marginal group of people. The rest of people that have heard about it would rather play another game, have stopped caring, have forgotten about it completely, or have given in to peer or personal pressure and bought the game despite everything they said earlier. I'm not one of them; I honestly don't care about interior views unless I'm playing something like iRacing or Assetto Corsa.
Between August 8, 2012 and May 28, 2013, I never posted anywhere on any thread on the internet talking about GRID 2, anywhere on the internet saying anything along the lines of "No cockpit view, no sale," except drawn out to essay length and be completely serious about it. On the other hand, there were a lot of people that did post that, and I'd like to ask them: What is it like to know that only a small number of people (small being about 1 or 2 million) who's ever played a racing game honestly use only the interior view? They may refuse to believe this at first, but the fact of the matter is that the silent majority doesn't care for it as much as another person might think they do. I'm one of those guys that just uses it on and off so I guess I care about it to an extent. But, not to the degree where I'd have unnatural levels of contempt for a game that was originally supposed to have it, but later took it out during development...like GRID 2.
I want to support good game developers, or those with great potential, and we have seen some good racing games from CM, even if they're not entirely sim-like. Again, even though I've never had the chance to play it, Race Driver GRID had more than a few good things said about it.
The Late Summer of 2012 was far too early for me to judge the game based on a piece of news I wasn't entirely sure about; and the game didn't have an exact release date yet. Instead, I felt it would be smarter of me to wait until release date, and not give an opinion on GRID 2 until I bought it shortly after release date and played it for a few hours.
I'm one guy that can say he bought GRID 2. I did not buy it because it was a game made by CM, or because it was trying to be iRacing (although it failed spectacularly), or because of the hype that critics and review sites gave it. I didn't even buy it BECAUSE interiors were removed at all. I only bought it because at the time, it hit an interest point in my brain and to me, that's all that matters when buying anything. So I'd imagine that the lack of cockpit view must have struck a huge disinterest point in the iRacing fans and the like; to them, it would rate at about a 5 to a -10/10, depending on the person. Also, I know of one video on Youtube that called GRID 2 the "Worst Racing Game Ever Made".
I'm not going to let you watch it, but to that, I simply have to say that GRID 2 has far from "earned" the right to be called the worst racing game ever made. If you believe it has earned that right, then I'll guess that you've never heard of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing...but that's purely my opinion and I digress.
The in-car cockpit view is meant to be a form of immersion; it's a sub-category of what casual gamers call first person mode. And first-person views in any game are meant to immerse you into the situation you're in. So in iRacing, interior view is meant to immerse you into driving whichever car you decide on, which can be enhanced through the use of a steering wheel controller and a multi-television setup, if you have the money, room space, and PC power.
If you were spending a lot of time playing iRacing, then I'd imagine you'd have to be fairly used to the interior view and that feeling of immersion that it can give you. And I'll say that if iRacing didn't have interior views at all, it would have gotten the same reaction that GRID 2 did (and for very good reason, too). The difference between both games is, iRacing is meant to simulate driving a car around a track like you would in real life. GRID 2 isn't meant to work the same way as iRacing does. Yes, the physics aren't great when it compared to other games, but it doesn't have the worst physics engine ever. Yes, that guy that talks to you can get annoying (you know, the one in Single Player), but there is a way to turn him off. Yes, cockpit view isn't there unlike a lot of other games. but neither does Grand Theft Auto V (well, I don't see anyone complaining about that...and why would you want to, when you could just run around, kill people, and be a massive troll
). But to me, GRID 2 is not the greatest
or the worst, but a decent, even if ridiculously controversial, racing game and it rates at a 7/10 in my book right now.
However, interior view is not one of the reasons I'm going to shelf this game one of these days. The main reasons are that it doesn't connect with me as much as it used to, I think online has gotten worse since the last time I played it, and I'd rather play Gran Turismo 6, which I think has an even worse community of online players (the "Worst You've Dealt With Online" thread has gone into some deep details and can provide some good laughs as well)...but whatever.
I will try to play this game again one day as I haven't given up on it completely (I remember almost completely destroying multiplayer in my prime). Then again, there are people that have already given up on GRID 2, and even CM, a year and a half ago for reasons already explained above. And even with the rise of Grand Theft Auto V, GT6 and a few other games, I can safely say that GRID 2's Online Community seems to have died down, and I'm most likely not alone in what I'm saying.
But enough talk about other games. I'll call it as I see it; 95% of people that played Race Driver GRID didn't use cockpit view. So where, how or why did CM pull those numbers out of their 🤬? Well, it may seem like that, but it's a lot harder to explain than it really is. What happened behind the scenes was, Race Driver GRID had collected data from its online servers as everyone was playing, including whether or not they had the view locked to the interior view. Out of all of them, CM found that only 5% of those people were using the "Lock to Head Cam" option, which forces you into the interior view and prevents you from switching views at all. So, based on that collected information, CM decided to make an announcement in which interior views, even as an optional view, would be removed. It would appear that some of those 5%, most of them in the iRacing crowd, that did lock the view to interior weren't happy/got mad with that announcement. They took great pleasure and pride in complaining about it as well as promising themselves to not even play the demo in a few cases. But as with almost every game, GRID 2 is not without its fans, the same going for iRacing. That backlash against the removal of interior view still remains on the internet even to this day, but it seems to have died down. And even if cockpit view was in GRID 2, I could probably imagine it not being very good considering a fan-made mod that put in cockpit view that quickly got removed.
I do not speak the truth. I do not speak false information. I simply speak what is my opinion alone, and I'm just being honest. Buy GRID 2 if you want; you're not wasting anyone's time. If you want my advice, I would give it a rental if you just want to try this game. But if you're just there for cockpit view and nothing more, you'll be pretty disappointed and never want to touch this game again.
I know that there are several people on the internet that can and will disagree with this. I'd like to meet them.
So do you agree (👍) or disagree (👎) ?
P.S.
How do you get over the limited wheel animation in most sims? Doesn't it throw you off around sharp bends?
It very rarely can, if you're not being careful.