Codemasters reveals reason behind old-gen Grid: Autosport

We sat down in Berlin with Grid: Autosport's chief games designer, James Nicholls, and found out what's new in the next entry into the Grid series, and discussed the reasoning behind bringing the game to Xbox 360 and PS3 instead of the new-gen consoles.

"We're using, as I say, the same Ego technology we've built for current-gen, to build this game," Nicholls told us, "so we're not planning on bringing that technology onto next-gen. We do have teams within Codemasters already working on that new Ego technology and new next-gen experiences."

Nicholls continued: "What we've tended to do at Codemasters is we always release games when we're ready to do them... when we do them we do them properly. We don't want to just take a current-gen experience and kind of up-res it and put it onto next-gen consoles. We really want to do a genuine next-gen game when we do it. So we're quite happy that this game's coming out on the right platforms, where we feel our fans are; you know millions of people still have Xboxes and PlayStation 3s, and we don't want to sort of leave those guys out in the cold."

He concluded: "The PC version, the version we were playing yesterday, is running on a gaming spec laptop, so it's not a top-end gaming rig. It's still able to perform and look really, really beautiful. So it's a very optimised engine now, as a result of making many, many games over and over and over with it. So we're in a good position to make that crop of consoles supported, and then we'll build proper next-gen racing games in the future."

If you want to know more about Grid: Autosport, you can read our hands-on impressions of the game after we took it out for a spin last week.